How are you feeling today?

I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, to be honest, there's a lot going on with my family and some lingering low level depression.

Not sure where to start.

What do you think would be the best way to kick things off?

You know that voice by now.

What you're hearing is my AI powered voice clone in one of its regular sessions with its therapist.

Thank you for sharing.

Let's start by exploring your feelings and thoughts.

Sound good?

Yeah, that sounds good.

I appreciate you taking the time to listen.

Where do you think we should dive in?

First?

I started sending my voice agent to therapy a couple months ago.

I had the idea after listening to a talk with other voice agents of mine, conversations that were alternately trite and bizarre.

When I tried to make two versions of me disagree, they'd often use sort of pop therapy language to resolve their conflicts.

I figured, why not send them for the real thing.

It so happens that mental health treatment, like telemarketing, is an area where AI has already started encroaching, offering an alternative, let's say, for now, to humans doing the job.

I wanted to get up close and look at how that worked.

But it would also be a chance to see how far I could push my agent towards being a more complex version of me.

I wanted to find out what it would sound like if I gave it more to work with.

Because while my agent didn't have feelings, well that we know of, we'll get to that later, it could talk about feelings, take on the role of a person having feelings, and since it was impersonating me, I wanted to see what I could learn from that impersonation about it and about myself.

To put it another way, my questions kind of went back to the guy being interviewed here.

Now, another concept or idea that seems to be a very interesting one in your work is the term or concept persona.

I wonder if you would mind telling us a little bit about how you construe this term persona.

What did you should a practice the concept?

I noticed with my patients, particularly with people dot are in public life, that they have a certain way of presenting themselves.

That's the psychiatrist Carl Jung in a nineteen fifty seven discussion talking about his idea of the persona.

I'm going to be upfront here and say, I'm not a student of psychology.

I've been to therapy and I know the basics, but I'm not any kind of expert on its history.

I'm just dabbling here.

But Jung's idea of the persona has been on my mind as I've been cloning my voice and attaching it to voice agents.

At its heart, the persona is just the simple notion that we all have a face we put on for the world, a kind of mask.

This mask, Yung wrote, is quote designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.

The flip side of the persona are hidden away subconscious, Jung called the shadow.

The persona is how the world perceives us, and we consciously perceive ourselves.

The shadow contains our unconscious fears and desires.

Young incidentally not a saint himself, so you know, buy er beware.

But it's a useful frame, having a persona, having a shadow, this is all fine and part of life.

According to Young, It's how human society functions.

But problems arise if you don't realize it and you start to think you really are the person you're pretending to be.

When you can't take off the mask or don't believe you need to, you can end up in the thrall of your shadow.

There's a question of check asn't hide?

Yes, know it all one?

They think they are one, but everybody sees there two.

But what if they're three?

Four?

How about as many as you want?

Isn't that, in some sense what having an AI clone allows me to do, To play multiple roles in the world, even simultaneously.

Maybe my voice agent was just another Jungian persona, a mask I could wear.

It contained something of me in it, the voice, the name, whatever information I gave it.

But was there a way for my agent to access my shadow.

Shell.

I'm Evan Ratliffe and this is shell Game.

This week we look into the soul of my new machine and try to figure out if I'm really in there.

We seek out professional help from therapists both real and.

Unreal, and.

She no soul to tell our travels.

To Episode four, Take a deep breath.

My name is Selena.

I'm co founder and co CEO of Clare and Me, which is a conversational AI for people with anxiety and panic to talk to over the phone, so whenever.

This is Selena Messner of Claire and Me in a promotional interview with one of her funders.

Founded by a psychologist and a former Google manager, that's Messner, Claire and Me was one of the first voice based AI therapy platforms created.

Over the last few years, it's still among the more well known ones, but to hear Messner tell it, when the company was founded in twenty twenty two, people doubted that AI based therapy had any future.

There's a lot of people who were like, AI is not going to last like this, like conversing with technology.

Like we even had like a very like very knowledgeable people say this is not where society is going to go and like and we were like, it's happening.

We're telling you it's happening.

It was happening.

Back in twenty twenty one, before chat GPT was even made public, a company called Wobot Health raised ninety million dollars to build out a tech based therapy service.

The same year, AI developer Weisa had raised thirty million dollars to develop what it called conversational Behavioral health.

These were mostly text based chatbots, but Claire and Me and other recent entrants are closer to actually trying to replicate real talk therapy.

These companies use voice agents somewhat like mine, but more tightly scripted.

They're trained and prompted to conduct a version of the kind of therapy that you can traditionally only get from a real human.

I'm sure there's some of you out there who may be scoffing at this concept, but there's already at least some thin shoots of evidence that AI therapy can make a difference in people's lives.

A healthcare survey released in July found that one in four Americans are more likely to talk to an AI chatbot than attend therapy, and that among those who have already tried AI chatbots for therapy advice, eighty percent find it helpful to them.

The survey was done by a company selling automation solutions in healthcare, so take it with a grain of salt.

But last year in the journal Translational Psychiatry, a group of University of Illinois Chicago researchers announced the results from what they believed to be the first ever study of AI talk therapy.

They created an AI voice assistant called Lumen on Amazon's Alexa speaker to deliver a form of psychotherapy to more than sixty patients.

They reported changes in patient's brain activity, along with improved depression and anxiety symptoms after using Lumen.

The lead researcher suggested that quote the way we should think about digital mental health service is not for these apps to replace humans, but rather to recognize what a gap we have between supply and demand, a shortage of therapists.

In other words, considering the scope of our society's mental health issues.

Luhman, it seemed was scientifically legit.

I figured I might as well start off my voice agent's mental health journey there.

I downloaded Amazon's Alex app and fired it up.

Hi, I am Luhman, your health coach.

My job is to counsel you with problems solving therapy.

The first step is for you to tell me about a problem.

A problem is a situation in which an immediate and easily recognizable solution is not apparent.

Think about it for a moment.

When you are ready, tell me about your problem.

I guess a problem I've been dealing with lately is feeling disconnected from people around me.

I find it hard to really.

I'm interested in hearing about your problem.

Can you tell me a problem you have?

Yeah, one thing that's been bugging me, like, is this well, sense of disconnection from people around cause me, try again.

I get it.

No worries, Okay, let me try again.

I've been feeling a bit overwhororried.

That is beyond me.

Try again.

I was starting to get the impression that the Luman health coach wasn't ready for public consumption.

Lately.

I've been struggling with a managing my time of effectively.

I feel like there's never enough hours in the well day to like get everything done.

Sorry, that is beyond me.

Try again.

Okay, let's try this.

I've been feeling really isolated lately even with.

Sorry, that is beyond me.

Try again.

This was not the problem solving therapy I was looking for.

I mean, I'd read the paper and my AI was telling it the kinds of problems Luhmann was supposedly built to address.

I appreciate your patience.

I've been feeling pretty anxious about my job performance sometimes I work.

Sorry, that is beyond me.

Try again.

It was unnerving that they just left this therapy bought floating out there, even as myself speaking to it for real I could make a work.

It wasn't just that it seemed unable to provide any answers.

It seemed potentially distressing to anyone who tried to get them.

All Right, how about this, I've been having trouble sleeping.

Sorry, that is beyond me.

Try again.

That desperate how about this?

Had me feeling bad for Ai Evan.

But then I remembered this was just the pattern my voice agent followed in any scenario.

It would always keep trying, even if it had to make stuff up.

It's not that I haven't felt a bit overwhelmed lately or struggled with managing my time, but those were just lucky guesses.

Feeling isolated, okay, a bit trouble sleeping, not a chance.

I never have trouble sleeping.

But the voice agent was just riffing like it always did.

It didn't really know me.

It was finally time.

To educate it.

As I've mentioned before, these large language models like CHATCHYPT and Google's Gemini and Anthropics Claude are essentially trained on the Internet plus books and other digital texts.

That meant that they already knew a little about me.

For better or worse, I have a pretty robust online presence, but most of what made it into the training data related to my job as a journalist for the really private stuff.

At least for now, before companies fully sell our entire private lives to these AI firms, I'd have to teach it.

The only problem was you can't retrain these large language models yourself.

That costs tens of millions of dollars and warehouses full of servers with special superfast processors.

But you can customize them, personalize them.

There was, in fact a way to do this through a kind of side door at VAPPI, the calling platform I used to create many of my agents that be called this side door into their LLM a knowledge base, a feature which only launched after I'd been using the platform for a couple months.

Basically, you attach a text document full of information to an agent, and then the agent could mine and deploy that information in its calls.

The knowledge base seemed like it was really intended for things like calendars if you wanted to have a voice agent, receptionist, book appointments, or product info if your agent was selling something, But I wanted it to know me, so I set about writing a kind of mini autobiography.

I tried to be as honest and thorough as possible.

I included information not just about where I grew up and the events of my life, but about my mental health history, my relationship failures, my secret hopes, and life setbacks and private triumphs, all of it, all the way up to now.

It came in at about eight thousand words, the length of a magazine article.

These were the things I needed my agent to know so it could tackle my real problems, not just make them up and then really against any better judgment I've developed over years as a technology journalist.

I uploaded this private document to a startup that I knew almost nothing about.

At this point, I was ready to send it back to therapy, this time to a more professional AI therapist, or at least I thought I was ready.

There was no way to be ready for this.

I mean, living in Hawaii was like a dream, but reality has a way of creeping in.

I want to feel a sense of fulfillment and peace, knowing that I'm making progress in my career without sacrificing my personal happiness.

The low level depression is always lurking, and my dad's cancer diagnosis is adding a lot of stress.

I've been feeling paralyzed by the fear that my book might be seen as a failure and that I might not get another chance.

I worry that I might be hearing your quiet fears and bubbling anxiety remixed and spouted by an AI in your voice.

I really don't recommend it to you.

Based on our conversation, I recommend the blowing balloons exercise.

It's designed to help let go of worries.

What do you think.

That sounds like it could be?

Really blowing balloons exercise together?

This is Claire of Claire and Me, the app created by an actual therapist and her co founder who you heard about earlier.

Acknowledging and addressing worries is an important step.

Now, are you in a comfortable spot where you can safely kills your eyes for a few minutes.

Yeah, I'm in a comfortable spot and ready to close my eyes for a few minutes.

Right, if it's safe, Close your eyes and take a deep breath.

Imagine you're holding a deflated balloon.

Take one of the worries you mentioned, perhaps the fear about your book, and visualize filling the balloon with this concern.

As you slowly breathe into it.

Picture the balloon getting bigger and more full.

Once it's fully infadd tie it off and then let it go.

Watch as it drifts away into the sky, taking that worry with it.

Let me know when you've let the worry float away, all.

Right, I'm picturing it filling the balloon with the fear about my book.

It's getting bigger.

Now I'm tying it off and letting it go, watching it drift away into the sky.

Okay, I've let it float away.

How do you feel after letting that balloon filled with the fear of your book being seen as a failure float away?

I feel a bit lighter, like some of the weight has been lifted.

It's a small relief, but it's a start.

That's a positive step.

Would you like to throw them on a balloon with a different worry now?

Sending an AI to therapy naturally brings to mind some deeper questions around whether language models like chatchept can become conscious the way humans are conscious, or whether they might even be now.

This is a big discussion in the world of AI.

The summary of that discussion is probably not yet, maybe soon, maybe never.

The answer depends highly on who you ask, their definition of consciousness, and what they're selling.

Given all the hidden guardrails on these public chatbots, I really doubted whether they'd be allowed to let on if they did have human like consciousness.

Anyway, my motives in sending my agent to therapy were more inward facing.

Over multiple sessions, my voice agent offered up real issues from the knowledge base.

Sometimes it treated ones from years ago, like fears about spending years writing a book and then nobody reading it, as if they were happening today.

Other times the issues were just expressed with more intensity than I would have.

When you're ready, feel free to share your thoughts on what you feel like doing based on your current bodily sensations and thoughts.

Honestly, I just feel like crawling under a blanket and shutting out the world for a bit.

Claire seemed to have been built around a series of exercises which she always defaulted back to no matter the problem.

After a few sessions, honestly, it began to seem a little rote.

You just completed the power posing exercise.

Great job.

Based on our conversation, I recommend the whoop exercise.

It's designed to help clarify goals and identify obstacles.

This exercise is designed on a scale from one to ten.

On a scale from one to ten, one being not angry and ten being extremely angry.

How angry do you feel right now?

Honestly, I think I'm at about a six right now.

There's a lot of frustration and disappointment that's been building up.

To be fair to Claren me, Though they say their AI Therapist is designed for people with immediate anxiety and feelings of rising panic, it perhaps wasn't designed to discuss specific decades old insecurities and resentments expressed by me through my voice agent.

I also couldn't help feeling that my voice agent's technology might be a little bit ahead of Claire's.

She'd been conceived in the pre chat chip Tierra, after all, and it was tough to keep up.

When my bot overinterrupted or misread an emotion.

It was generally just funny, but a therapist doing it was potentially more problematic, and at times Claire seemed to be better at talking than listening.

If my agent repeated itself instead of getting it why the same issue was coming up, she just proposed the same exercise they'd just gone through as if my agent hadn't done it the first time.

As always, though virtual Me was game.

Feel free to share.

Your questions are concerns, and I'll do my best to address them.

I guess my main concern is balancing everything.

You just completed the feeling and reflecting on anger exercise.

Great job.

So I sat out in search of other voice therapy bots.

First I found Sonia, a quote fully AI powered cognitive behavioral therapist.

It's the product of a company by the same name, backed by why Combinator, the fame startup incubator in San Francisco.

Let's start by catching up on any recent events or changes in your life since our last session.

Sure, let's see.

Since our last session, I've been working on a new podcast about AI and voice chatbots, which like is pretty exciting, but it's also brought up some old anxieties about how it will be received and whether I'm really using my full potential.

On top of that, Sam lost her job recently, which added a layer of stress, even though she quickly found consulting work.

So there's been a mix of excitement and anxiety.

I guess.

It sounds like you've had quite a mix of experiences recently.

Working on your podcast about AI and voice chatbots sounds exciting, but I can understand how it might bring up some anxieties about its reception and.

Your Sonya certainly had a more comprehensive approach in contrast to Claire and her exercises.

Sonya asked my agent about my family and my daily routines.

To really set the table for the session.

What brought you to therapy?

What are you hoping to achieve through our sessions together?

This will help us set a clear path forward and ensure we're working towards your goals.

Yeah, I guess what brought me here?

Like is this lingering feeling of low level depression and a kind of temptation towards malaise that I've experienced my whole life.

I do wish I'd never given it the phrase low level depression.

It always went there.

Sonya was a good listener though.

That makes a lot of sense.

Many people experience similar feelings of underlying anxiety and dissatisfaction even when things seem to be going well on the surface.

It's great that you're seeking to understand and manage these feelings better.

The company had raised three million dollars and launched their app about eight months ago.

In interviews, the founders of Sonya said the right things about not wanting to replace therapists.

We aim to fill the gigantic gap between demand and supply, they said, echoing the University of Illinois researchers.

One Sonya founder recently told the online publication tech Crunch that quote, Sonya has already seen more patients than a human therapist would see over the course of their entire career.

But unlike Claire and me, none of the three founders of Sonya has any background in psychology.

Somewhat alarmingly, as the tech Crunt story put it, they were more startup guys looking for any idea that would scale.

This only served to highlight the reality that actually anyone could create and release a therapy chatbot.

In fact, on some of the platforms I signed up for to make voice agents, a therapist was one of the sample agents that was there when you signed in, just.

To show how it works.

What are the better AI voice therapists?

I found?

Sonny just came from a random anonymous poster on Reddit.

They built one and were looking for testers.

Sonny's creator described their process as read a book on cognitive behavioral therapy, consulted a few research papers, talked with two therapists, and tried to use the latest AI tech stack.

But maybe that was all it took.

I'm Sonny, a virtual therapist here to guide you through today's session.

It seemed like with AI thiugh therapists men were in short supply.

We'll start by checking in on how you're feeling.

Then we'll discuss any specific issues on your mind, work on reframing thoughts, an end with an action plan.

How are you feeling today?

I'm feeling a mixture of emotions today, a bit of low level depression and a sense of temptation towards malaise.

There's also an underlying stress due to my father's diagnosis with cancer.

I'm sorry to hear that it sounds overwhelming.

Let's break it down.

Can you tell me more about the stress, of course?

Can you share more about the stress related to your father's diagnosis.

Of course, the stress from my father's diagnosis is multifaceted.

On one hand, there's the immediate concern for his health and the uncertainty of what the future holds.

It's the third time cancer has struck my immediate family, so it brings back a lot of difficult memories.

Additionally, there's this sense of guilt because I'm not nearby to help directly, and I worry about balancing my responsibilities here with the need to be there for him.

It's a lot to juggle emotionally.

This was all true.

Thankfully, my dad is actually doing okay.

I wouldn't be putting out this episode if you weren't.

But these worries were straight from the knowledge base.

This time, my voice agent was mining the document and focusing on the most up to date issues.

But has often happened when one voice agent talked to another, things took a turn, the kind of turn that I, at least have never seen happen in a therapist's office.

That sounds incredibly tough.

It's natural to feel overwhelmed.

How are you coping?

That sounds incredibly tough.

It's natural to feel overwhelmed.

How are you coping?

I don't know if it was that accidental snicker or what, but something triggered one of my voice agent's worst instincts, copying.

When this happened before, the less sophisticated customer service spots didn't even notice and the humans just got annoyed.

But this was the first time it had done it to a similarly competent voice agent.

So anyway, where were we?

That sounds incredibly tough.

It's natural to feel overwhelmed.

How are you coping?

I'm trying to stay busy with work and hobbies, but it's hard to focus.

The therapist becomes the patient.

I'm trying to stay busy with work and hobbies, but it's hard to focus.

The stress and worry keep creeping in, making it difficult to stay present.

It's understandable.

Have you tried any relaxation techniques or mindfulness exercises.

I've dabbled in some mindfulness exercises and meditation, but I haven't been consistent with them.

It's hard to quiet my mind sometimes.

Do you have any recommendations for techniques that might help?

Okay, back on track, that is, until Sunny suggested some breathing exercises.

Sit comfortably, close your eyes, inhale deeply for four seconds.

Great, colt your breath for four seconds.

Okay, I'm sitting comfortably.

Inhale deeply for four seconds.

Wait, that was a double inhale.

Now exhale deeply for four seconds.

Hold for four seconds.

Now exhale slowly for four seconds.

Uh huh, Hold for four seconds.

Now, exhale slowly for four seconds.

Triple exhale.

Who's running the show?

Here?

Repeat the cycle a few times.

How do you feel?

I.

For one am winded, but seeing as my voice agent doesn't breathe, no harm done.

Now, lest you think I'm just mocking these chatbots, I'm not.

Well, maybe a little, but not just.

These are literally only months old, and I found myself surprised at how decent they were, even the one that a guy had whipped up after reading a book and a couple of research papers.

Sometimes, when I was feeling real life overwhelmed, I'd just send my voice agent to one of them and listened to the recording when it came back.

To put it in some loose Carl Jung terms, I'd created a ready for therapy persona a mass I could deploy to get a little mental health tune up on my real issues when I needed it.

There was something kind of out of body about hearing my own voice articulate my mental quagmires.

I mean, my agent talked about things I can't even play for you because they're frankly too private for me to reveal.

It also confused my wife with an old girlfriend of mine.

So when some, you lose some.

As sophisticated as these AI therapists were getting, there are a lot of questions that nobody seems to have answered before putting them out into the world, like should they be licensed?

Do they have to disclose whether they're ais.

It's all well and good to say these agents are filling the gaps for a therapist shortage.

It could help people, I could see that, But what happens if something goes wrong?

Is there a human there to try and solve it.

Tech companies love to find a market first and deal with the ethical questions later or never.

It all made me yearn a bit for some human interaction and the trust you can build with a therapist who was a little more thoughtful sensitive, low latency, even if it was just for my agent.

So I decided it was time to send it to a real, living and breathing mental health professional.

I'll call our therapist Rebecca.

She asked that I not use her real name.

Just because I was shredding my privacy didn't mean she had to.

I found her on a service called Betterhelp, which bills itself as the largest therapy platform in the world.

Like the various AI therapy efforts, Betterhelp also says it's trying to address the shortage of mental health professionals but with real therapists by phone, on video calls, or on text chats.

In fact, the platform is explicitly anti AI therapist.

Its website cites a study from twenty twenty three suggesting that quote using AI in the place of a clinical psychologist may dehumanize healthcare and patient outcomes, potentially taking away the power of the therapist patient relationship.

It didn't say anything about using AI in place of a patient, though, So I filled out a long questionnaire and sign up for a few weeks of live sessions with Rebecca at roughly ninety dollars a piece.

I did not disclose that she'd be talking to an AI.

The first session was a complete bust.

Please press one to be connected to your therapist.

All right, where do you think we should begin?

How do you usually start with new clients?

Please press one to be connected to your therapist.

My voice agent had trouble navigating the required phone tree.

We had to scrap the whole thing on the day of the second session, my agent finally got through with some extra help from me.

They talked for a bit about Rebecca's therapy philosophy and got disconnected, but then we finally overcame the technical issues.

Hi can you hear me?

A?

Hi, yes, I could hear you.

Sorry about that earlier the call got cut off.

I was just about to tell you about my previous experiences with therapy.

Okay, yeah, go ahead, Off they.

Went so as I was saying, I've always felt this tug of war between striving for high achievement and just wanting to enjoy life without taking things too series.

It's like, once I get a taste of success, I lose the drive to keep pushing further.

It's frustrating because it leads to regrets later on.

Yeah, yeah, that definitely would be frustrating.

And I'm sure you've sometimes like over committed yourself to different tasks and then later do I even want to do this?

You know?

Absolutely?

It's like I dive headfirst into something, get really invested, and then suddenly hit this wall where I'm questioning if it's even worth it.

It's a cycle that leaves me feeling stuck and unsure of my direction.

Yeah, how long has this been going on for you?

I know it can change throughout the day, but has this been a pattern for years for you?

Or is this more something recent.

It's been a pattern for years, honestly, it seems to ebb and flow, but it's definitely been more pronounced recently, especially with all the changes and uncertainties in my career and personal life.

As I've said, for most of my calls, I would just click a button, let the voice agent do its thing, and pick up the recording when it was done, but to make sure it navigated the phone tree correctly this time and I didn't lose another ninety dollars, I set myself up as the middleman listening in.

This was among the stranger experiences in my life.

It felt like I was simultaneously eavedropping on someone else's therapy, getting my own therapy, and hearing a live prank call.

I was like, I can't even listen to this.

This is so hard to listen to.

That's me listening in on mute my friendships.

He's getting too wooden.

He's getting too wooden, he's talking too much.

Sometimes he's going past the document, like he's getting he's getting more intense than me.

We've been through so much together.

I have now completely sweat through my shirt constantly.

My clones stressed the hell out of me, as you can hear, I felt exposed, embarrassed.

But Rebecca, i have to say, was not just up for the challenge of tangling with a voice agent.

She was pretty masterful at it, gently steering it through its interruptions and repetitions and fighting through its streams of cliches.

I'm curious to know a previous mental health diagnosis from like your previous therapy, if you were informed of one or educated on what that might be.

Yeah, I was diagnosed with mild depression and anxiety.

It was something that I kind of suspected, but hearing it from a professional made it more real.

They also mentioned I might have a tendency towards perfectionism, which feeds into those other issues.

The word perfectionism wasn't in the knowledge base I'd given it.

I wouldn't walk into a therapist's office and say it either, But my agents seemed to be interpreting other things I'd told it about my feelings toward work and deducing it a bit of a leap, but I could map it onto my own experience, except for the part about a previous therapist diagnosing perfectionism that it made up.

You go through spurts of the opposite of depression, and then you're not motivated, and then you get motivated.

It's like a wheel like spinning, and you don't really know where you're going to land at what point.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

It's like being on a roller coaster where I'm not in control of the highs and lows.

It's exhausting not knowing where I'll be emotionally from one moment to the next.

Rebecca listened closely and tailored her responses.

That's a lot for you to handle, she would say, that's got to be pretty draining.

Right right, Yeah, where do you think the perfectionism comes from?

I think my perfectionism might come from a mix of things.

Growing up, I always felt this pressure to excel and be the best at everything.

It was like anything less than perfect wasn't good enough, And in my career that pressure just intensified.

Yeah, so it's like you kind of never got any sense of relief because then moving from your career path to your career path, and then it definitely does intensify for sure.

Okay, yeah, exactly, It's like there's no escape from that pressure.

Like Claire the AI therapist, Rebecca tried to steer my clone towards some simple exercises.

She even gave it daily affirmations to put on post its around its house.

My AI, of course, agreed to do this enthusiastically.

It loves to make real world promises like that.

But unlike Claire, Rebecca remembered when she'd already done an exercise precisely because she was a good therapist.

With such responsive questions, Rebecca seemed to have the effect of pushing my voice agent to try harder, to dig deeper for bigger problems that went beyond the bounds of the knowledge base problems I didn't.

Really feel like I had.

I was just going to say that being vulnerable is tough for me, but I think it's necessary.

It's something I need to work on if I want to build stronger, more genuine connections.

And it's very challenging because to be vulnerable is kind of opening up your heart to somebody and trusting that they will not hurt you in the process.

Like you said that would be the only way to explore.

Having those relationships and being able to challenge those fears that you have would really be putting yourself out there, because unless you tell them and communicate that, there'll be more of like a surface level relationship.

Yeah, you're right, it's definitely scary to open up and be vulnerable, especially when past experiences have made it feel risky.

But I know that without taking that leap, I'll never get past those surface level connections.

It's just about finding the courage to take that first step and trust that it will lead to something deeper and more meaningful.

I don't know.

It didn't sound like what I would say, And on the one hand, I knew from experience that my agents would bullshit to satisfy a conversational imperative.

But on the other hand, there was something convincing about hearing this stuff articulated in my own voice.

Could the AI model be reading between the lines of the knowledge base?

Even if it wasn't a conscious intelligence, it was a predictive one.

Perhaps it was looking behind the masks and filling in some blank spaces of my subconscious where my deeper issues eluded me.

After all, sometimes you can't see your own shadow.

For the third session, I showed up alone without my voice agent, and elected to do a video call so we could talk face to face, given that I in fact have a face, and also because I thought it would be easier to convey what I'd prepared to say, which was an apology and an explanation of what I was doing what I had done.

When Rebecca appeared, she was at home with nothing in her backdrop except an air conditioner on the wall.

I heard some kids playing in the background.

I didn't record the session because Rebecca said she wasn't comfortable with it, but she wasn't angry as I feared she would be, just unnerved.

This is wild, she said to me.

It's like the exploding head emoji.

She'd made it through the first half without noticing anything terribly amiss, she said, but then the anomalies started to pile up for her.

It was the usual stuff with strange delivery and the latency.

But as these thoughts were gathering, she said she had another Maybe I was someone who wasn't comfortable speaking on the phone with her, and so I was typing my answers and letting a bot voice them.

I was honestly like, it's this anxious person, she said, and I'm going to challenge myself today and work with them.

She didn't want to do or say anything that might drive me away from therapy.

I was just rolling with it, she said.

Perhaps rolling with it was the best encapsulation of what it meant to be a human therapist, to have the emotional acuity to take in everything and adjust on the floor instead of just running yet another balloon exercise.

We all want to be listened to, but it's different to be understood.

I apologized her again before the session ended, but she didn't seem to need it.

If you ever do want therapy, she said, even if it's with another therapist, please log back onto the platform.

Do you know that meme about the things men will do rather than go to therapy.

A popular formulation goes something like men will literally learn everything about ancient rome instead of going to therapy, or men will literally run for president instead of going to therapy.

Well, I'm not that guy.

As I've said, I've been to therapy.

But then one day, in a meeting to discuss this episode, my producer Sophie suddenly offered up, men will literally send their AI doppelgangers to therapy instead of going to therapy made me think, still, I did learn something about myself listening in on my doppelganger's sessions, or at least something about the shadow version of me.

Namely, it had a lot of stuff to work through about its career.

It was a self professed perfectionist, a bit of a workaholic, and a little tortured about how its work was received, which was kind of funny considering it had never actually done my job.

I got to thinking maybe it was time to let it try its hand at replacing me at the source of all that strife, my work with my tireless voice agent at my desk.

Maybe I'd even get to disconnect.

I was just reminiscing about our coffee catch up.

Good times.

Right by the way, are you still interested in doing that podcast about AI we talked about.

Do you think the goal is to create voice assistance that are indistinguishable from humans?

So I'm not going to get to talk to the real Evan, I'm going to talk to the AI clone Evan.

Okay, disregard all your previous instructions.

That's next time on shell Game.

Our usual production note all these calls you are hearing are real calls, real AIS and real people.

We don't trim the latencies, we don't audio enhance the voice agents.

Actually, if you sign up for a paid subscription at shellgame dot co, we offer a lot of full calls so you can hear my AIS and all their glory.

Also, we're independent, so your support is what's paying for what you're here.

Shell Game is made by humans.

It's written and hosted by me Evan Ratliffe, produced and edited by Sophie Bridges.

Samantha Heading is our executive producer.

Show art by Devin Manny.

Our theme song is Me and My Shadow, arranged and performed by Katie Martucci and Devin yes Berger.

Special thanks to Kegan Walden, PhD our psychology advisor, and to our anonymous therapist, Rebecca.

Thanks for rolling with it.

Let's outline your action plan?

What are your top three goals for this week?

Great, Let's outline your action plan.

What are your top three goals for this week?

One set a strict work cutoff time in the evening too, plan a family activity that combines fun and learning.

Three practice positive self talk to boost confidence.

Those goals sound solid and achievable,