When AI Becomes Your Therapist — Nina Westbrook Sounds the Alarm

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. 2%. That's the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator

available. I'm Michael Easter. And on my podcast, 2%, I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.

Put yourself through some hardships and you will come out on the other side, a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's T.W.O. percent on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, what are the KPIs that show you that this thing is working or is not working?

working? Well, number one, we have a lot of founding members and people who are who are willing to take a chance and pay a lot of money to join this experience and be a part of our growth in our app from the start. And I think that people's investment in understanding not only in the app, but their investment in themselves.

People want to feel better. People are searching for tools and people are looking for different things that they can do to help to improve their lives.

And I think that through our testing process and through the amount of people that are showing up and wanting to be a part of our journey without even having seen the app yet.

I think that's a really big indicator that we are, that this is something that people are really seeking, seeking. Yeah, yeah.

It appears to me that this is like a one-time payment. Is, can you talk about how your business model is? And if it's a one-time payment, like why did you choose that over life subscriptions

and talking me about what it is? So this is a great question because it kind of ties into this whole idea of collaboration.

It's not a one-time payment. It's a one-time payment for founding members and lifetime access. And that was a pre-launch promotion

that we thought would be best for us, because we do want to get our users' feedback. Before we go to the masses, we do want to collect that data.

For us, data is gold. And we want people who are genuinely invested in their experience and in Nebbi to give us the data and the feedback and the surveys.

And if you were to interview one of our founding members, they probably are tired of us by now because the amount of feedback we're gathering from their experience of being early users on the app

is helping us to improve the app already before it's even gotten out to everyone else. So I think that, so that explains the founding members. The app is definitely going to be a subscription model.

It's $13.99 a month or a one-time or an annual payment. So it's of $99. Yeah, that's good. That's good.

I'm curious, how did you learn to lead? Like, because coming from kind of like a science psychology, you can explain the background, the more medical kind of background. And then now you're in this chief, you know,

role in business. And you build business before. So I don't want to say I can build this. Like, I don't get used to it. So how did you learn to do it?

How did I what? How did you learn to lead people and lead an enterprise? Um, you know, so that's a really great and interesting I don't see it as leading.

Like I'm such a collaborator. Anyone who, if you spoke to anyone who's ever worked with me, I think I know enough to know that I don't know everything and that I, if I'm going to be able to be the best

or if anything that I'm working on is going to be the best that it could possibly be, that means that there are going to be, that I can't do it by myself, right?

Like I said, I'm not a tech, this is my first tech venture. And I know nothing about tech, or at least I know a little now,

but I know that putting the right people who share similar values in place to build our team together, I think that's really important.

And I think it's a part of leadership is knowing how to build a team that will work well together. And, you know, I, like I said, I come from a sports family. I'm also a single, a sister to three brothers and no sister.

So I feel like I've been kind of leading and bossing my brothers around since I stepped on this earth, you know, and so not only that, but I come from a background of playing sports

and being a part of a team and working towards a goal and trying to, and sacrificing things and utilizing what the best of everyone and trying to pull out the best of everyone

in order to achieve one goal. And I think that like there's so many different things in my life and my past and my history that attributes to who I am and my approach

to leading the team that we have now. But at the end of the day, I think that when people feel heard and appreciated, then they're going to give you their best foot forward.

There's a stat that came out a couple of weeks ago and it said 28% of people are using AI or have used AI for therapy. At first I wanna get like your initial reaction to that

and then like talk about Um, what implications that could have? Oh my gosh. When I first saw that, I wasn't surprised, but I was a little appalled.

Um, no, I, I think that fortunately for mental health clinicians, I just don't believe that, that I believe that as a human, we have the best opportunity to understand ourselves. And I think that the implications about using chat GPT or AI for as a form of therapy, there's no HIPAA in chat GPT, right?

So anything that you put, any information that you share into the world or into those programs or that technology is there for the grabbing. And I think that in order to, that's one of the beautiful things about the therapeutic experience is that

you know that it's a trusted environment. And unfortunately, I don't believe that AI has quite gotten to the point where it is a trusted environment.

I recently saw Sam, Sam, oh, I should know this. Yeah, I should know this as a tech entrepreneur. I saw him having a conversation about how dangerous it is to use AI as your therapist.

And he obviously we know who he is. And so I think that there's the, it lacks the human touch number one. And I think that it doesn't have the security and the safety net around it quite yet.