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The Mental Health Forecast explores cutting-edge developments shaping the future of mental healthcare. Each episode features conversations with researchers and innovators about emerging therapies, technologies, and approaches to emotional wellbeing. From AI-powered therapy tools to advances in neuroscience, we examine how these changes might transform mental health treatment. Join us as we investigate what's on the horizon and discover how tomorrow's solutions could help address today's mental health challenges.
Arjun Nanda (00:01)
All right. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Mental Health Forecast where I interview awesome people that are doing incredible things at the cutting edge of mental health innovation. My name is Dr. Arjun Nanda and I'm your host. Today we're joined by Karan Patil, the founder of Empath, an AI-powered therapy and journaling platform. Karan's background is somewhat unconventional as he started his career as an engineer
and then pivoted into studying management in grad school, then focused on building virtual reality products for his PhD. And now he's building in the therapy space. Speaking with Karan, it's very clear that he's always just trying to do the right thing that makes the most sense to do at each step. And right now, that's using technology to enhance the therapy experience. Enjoy.
Arjun Nanda (01:00)
what's you to the point of creating Empath and the journey to actually start
Karan (01:07)
So I was sort of thinking about this, right? Like what are we gonna talk about? I was reflecting on my own sort of journey from when I moved to this country actually, because that's where I feel like I call it like my psychological birth, right? Before I moved to this country, I almost feel like I did not have an internal monologue. And I think it's partly because the sort
sort of group of Indians that I come from, I think everyone just lived in a bubble. You you lived in like your gated community, like a building in Mumbai, you had your friends in the building, and then you went to school in the car and came back from school in the car, right? You weren't really exposed to the India and the issues that India actually has, right?
So it was a very sort of comfortable life. And then at 19 years of age, I moved to this country in Arizona out of all places, right? And with no family, with no friends. And I feel like that's where I first realized there's like an internal monologue inside me, right? There's something inside this sort of experience that I can reflect on. So there's like this distinction between the birth,
of the psychological birth or before and after that. And that's where writing became really helpful for me because I realized, okay, if I write down what I'm thinking, right, it almost is sort of like data collection in a sense, right? I can collect data about my thoughts and then that lets me observe patterns or, know, themes in my own thoughts and that'll help me understand myself a little better.
It's almost like to observe your own thoughts, need distance between you and yourself. But that usually just comes through with distance in time, right? So you let go of some time and then reflect back on it. But
I think that's what people do with the therapist. You're sort of outsourcing the observation of your thoughts, right? You're speaking your mind, you're expressing yourself, and the therapist sort of is outsourced as the person who's observing you now, who helps you find patterns and identify these themes.
Sorry for that, like sort of a ramble, but that's sort of my disparate thoughts on how I came in to this, how I came to think about therapy and the psychological life and how Empath sort of tries to do that, but as a product for, know, journaling and how that can be used in therapy.
Arjun Nanda (03:49)
Right. So the concept or idea of journaling was something that started after this transition. I mean, a large transition right from India over here. And tell me a little bit about that. mean, what led you to actually start journaling of all things?
I mean, you were in a new country, a new city, you know, community. I'm not sure like what led you to actually doing journaling of all things.
Karan (04:24)
I'm not quite sure I remember exactly, but and I don't even know what to attribute this sort of psychological birth to, this, like, why this internal monologue started because so many things happened together, right? I moved to a new country. I was not around family and friends and like general sort of experiences in college, right? So I don't know what to attribute that sort of thing, the beginning of that internal monologue to, but that happened. And at that
I did not have anyone I could talk to without a filter. I feel like anyone we talk to, even if it's the closest people to us, there is a certain filter that we talk through. When I talk to my mother, there's things I'm going to keep out of the conversation. If it's my girlfriend, I'm still going to talk to her openly. It's not like I'm actively hiding things from her, but there's a constraint to that conversation.
And I feel like what writing does for me is that's one single place where I can actually think freely without any sort of constraints, right? Without any sort of limitations to what I can and cannot think. Why that happened? I'm not sure. Like, why did I start writing? There wasn't anything that triggered me or at least I don't remember, you know, it being suggested to me. So I'm not sure.
Arjun Nanda (05:49)
think that's a that's a really good way to put it and I've in my experiences with journaling, I was a little bit younger in my 20s was that you know, there's filters with people, but there's even filters with oneself and by getting it out on paper, you can actually identify some of those filters like I'm struggling to write this down or I feel this conflict as I'm writing this down. And the journaling actually lets
battle with that at least on your
Karan (06:23)
100 % and you find things about yourself and this is this was what was like enlightening to me in some sense, right? Like I mean, I'm fine with being open about it. Like I found out this like they call it vritti in Sanskrit, right? Like this tendency that you that governs your life sort of in some sense. I found out how much I was I used to seek approval from people around me, right?
And without that sort of, I don't think I would have realized that about myself if I wasn't sort of documenting my thoughts somewhere. Yeah. And that led to actually realizing there's, I don't seek approval from everyone. There's only a certain group of people that I seek approval from. And then a layer deeper was, there's these people that I value that I seek approval from.
And then there's that gem hidden behind that, right? Like those are my values. Okay, now I know what I value and what I don't value. yeah, Writing can take you sort of layers deeper. This is not something that happened within , like I started writing tonight and I realized this, what my values are, right? But it kept happening as, I was persistent with like keeping, keeping reflecting on my thoughts and asking questions on why I was writing, why I was thinking, why I
feeling what I was doing.
Arjun Nanda (07:46)
good. So then tell me a little bit about how we got from there, from going from the journaling and to where we're at now with building Empath. What does that journey look like for you?
Karan (08:04)
It makes sense now when I look back, but it's sort of like a weird path, right? So this was happening in my personal life where I was like journaling and I was sort of using that to understand myself. In school, I was actually building a VR application for construction safety training, right?
And that got me into taking a lot of psychology courses or in the psych department, just because even though I was building a VR app and it was for construction, my research was understanding behavior, like how do these construction people, professionals behave in VR, right? So to make sense of my observations, I had to take psychology courses. And that's where I came across this course called Perception. I don't remember what the course was actually, but.
the concept of perception, cognition, action. And I of looking at construction through that lens of, there's perception that happens on the construction site. You collect data about what's happening. You think about what's happening. You plan about how the construction is going to go through. That's a cognition piece. And then you act upon it. That's the actual construction process.
slowly through my conversations with my peers who are now psychology students, I realized there's this perception, cognition, action cycle happening when I'm doing my journaling as well. Basically, the perception piece is me documenting my thoughts. You can call it perception, you can call it data capture, whatever that is. The cognition is reflecting back on it.
thinking about, asking yourself why you made these observations or whatever that is. And then the action piece is sort of acting on it, Like implementing those insights or whatever wisdom you've gained into like back into the real world. So that's where sort of the, hopefully this is making sense, but that's where sort of my journaling came in touch with the research I was doing.
And when I put it in this perception cognition action cycle, it now immediately made sense in therapy as well. Because just like it was being used in construction, where you collect data, give it to the expert, which is the construction project manager, project engineer, and then they act on it, it applies to therapy as well. You collect the data, you go to the expert. Just now the expert is the therapist, and the subject is not a construction site. The subject is the client's life experience.
the action piece, which is implementation of whatever therapeutic model that the therapist chooses to use. And we can talk about why as empaths, are staying out of action. We are just taking care of the perception piece of it and handing it over to the therapist to then act on it however they choose to. Yeah.
Arjun Nanda (10:58)
Right.
So maybe this is probably a good time to talk about what Empath is, just so that we tell the audience what it is and what you're hoping to do with it.
Karan (11:13)
So before I building a single line of code or the product, I spoke to a lot of therapists. psychotherapy is so rich and so nuanced that two therapists won't agree on standards of outcome. And there's so much like.
richness in some sense in psychotherapy, right? But one thing I found that was sort of a safe claim to make was good psychotherapy starts with listening and understanding your client, right? So I think what Empath is trying to do is just helping therapists better understand their clients. And there's tech solutions, AI solutions at all intervals of therapy, Like at discovery where clients can find therapists.
at the administration level where you can pay for therapy, you can schedule therapy. where Empath comes in is actually after the session ends and before the beginning of the next session to sort of increase the therapist's scope of understanding a client. For example, right now, if the client walks into the therapy session, they don't see their therapist until two weeks later.
On part of the therapist, now they only have a narrow one hour window of time to understand and listen to their client. And from the client side as well, I almost have to make it like a machine. have to schedule a time to be expressive and open about my thoughts. I have to be expressive at 1 PM on Tuesdays. So that's sort of the problem we found. So what Empath is trying to do is from the client side, it's helping the client to capture
their rich lived experience throughout the week, right? Through journaling, through collecting data about their health, right? Through collecting data about their moods and how they're feeling. And then on the therapist side, we are giving all of this data to the therapist to right before the session so that now they have a better understanding of the client's experience when they walk in, right? And it's not to say that, you skip the catch up and directly move on to therapy as if it's like
mechanic process. It's just that the therapist is more aware of the client. That's what Empath is trying to do.
Arjun Nanda (13:33)
Mm hmm. That's a, it's a very, it's an ambitious goal, you know, to be able to collect all of this sort of information and, and, be able to provide it to the therapist. But I think ultimately the right goal, you know, to, because you're exactly right, you know, in between these sessions, we don't really know what's going on with, with the client or with the patient until they come in again, the next week or unless we get like a call from someone else.
So it's having that information is very valuable. this is, mean, this is, people are looking at collecting this sort of information in many other sort of medical fields. But, you know, from a therapy standpoint, it makes total sense. So.
Karan (14:26)
And the thing is, we're
already collecting this, sorry.
Arjun Nanda (14:31)
Now go ahead.
Karan (14:32)
we are already collecting this sort of data, right? If the goal is to understand someone, like Instagram already probably knows me much better than my friend I made like two weeks ago, It's just that this understanding of me and the predictions that you can make based off of that is being used to market things to me or.
to sell things to me on my feed. But if we now just take the same data, the same understanding, protect it in HIPAA compliance and privacy security considerations, and then instead of a marketing agency, we give it to the therapist. Now the therapist is going to be able to use that for my own mental health. that's sort of a take on, it's not new for us to just collect this amount of data. We're already giving that amount of
who we are to these social media apps.
Arjun Nanda (15:28)
Right. So what data is Empath going to be collecting from people?
Karan (15:35)
Right now, it's just combining, it's collecting your physical data, what's the word, physiological data, right? Like if you wear a whoop band, if you wear an Apple watch, if you wear a Fitbit, it'll try to collect how much you're sleeping, how much you're walking around, how much you're working out. And the point is not accuracy in data, right? Like even with the whoop, which I think is the most accurate.
It's not exactly accurate with my sleep. So the point is not accuracy, but the delta between weeks. So it's consistently inconsistent in some way. So we collect health data. for the psychological data, we are starting with journaling as our entry point into understanding or documenting or collecting the client's thoughts. So we are starting with. And journaling is sort of a just.
using a word for the lack of a better word, but we've tried to make it frictionless, right? Because journaling sounds like journaling my, it's not archiving your day. It's more like expressing your feelings in the moment of when you're feeling it, right? And we've made the app in a certain way. it's not like you have to type on your phone or you have to do traditional journaling. You can do all of that, but also just make a phone call and talk about your, how you're feeling, right?
And we do the, we transcribe it and save it as journal. The point being capturing that feeling in the moment that it's felt, right. And, and almost acting like delivery drivers for those feelings and thoughts to pick it up and drop it to the therapist. As opposed to, guess, unboxing YouTubers who open the box and review what the feelings are. Right. And that goes back to, are staying away from the action piece. We are just delivery drivers.
of capturing these moments, capturing these thoughts and delivering it to the therapist. That's all we do because that's what we can do reliably at this point.
Arjun Nanda (17:34)
Right. You know, the comment about, you know, not necessarily looking for accuracy, but about the Delta between the average, think is, you know, I think we generally feel that a lot, you know, as therapists or psychiatrists or mental health clinicians is that, you know, that is often how we're doing things, you know, when we meet with a patient once a week or once a month, you know, we're
we're taking very subjective information and then making decisions based on that data. And that data is not necessarily the highest quality, right? It's entirely subjective. Most of us are not doing measurement -based care. It's like, was the last month or how was the last couple of weeks or how have you been sleeping? This stuff is not, there's no actual broad data to this. So,
even if accuracy is not the focus here, it's still a hell of a lot more accurate than what the current system has, which is very subjective information. So you mentioned that the entry point here is journaling. Where would you like it to go or what do you think would be?
the next step as Empath starts to grow.
Karan (18:59)
So what I meant by entry point is like journaling is a very active thing you do, right? Like you choose to journal. But I think going ahead, there could be a situation where if the goal is capturing your thoughts in the moment, there could be a continuously capturing.
either a hardware product or either like these wearables that are coming out right like on Twitter there's tab there's like there's too many now that I can remember right this friend I think it's not tab anymore but
Arjun Nanda (19:28)
Yeah.
Karan (19:32)
These products that are eventually going to come out where people are going to record their, how they're communicating their thoughts, their conversations throughout the day. And I think what I meant by an entry point is right now it's active, but eventually it may be where
a continuously capturing process, right? So that increases the scope of and the opportunity to find real underlying psychological patterns. But there's of course, like, there's a gap of hesitancy in something that's continuously capturing our data. I don't think we are there yet, you know, but I think we'll eventually get there.
Arjun Nanda (20:16)
Yeah. Yeah. I think continuously capturing data, I think for many people, they have gotten the ick from that, or especially in the Facebook days. I imagine that there's a lot of hesitancy there, but I think that we're not far from us feeling very comfortable with our data just constantly being captured and sent to whatever sources we approve of.
Karan (20:46)
Right. And again, going back to that piece about we're giving away this data already, right? Even if we are not aware of it, it's maybe later it becomes a choice of who you give it to, right? Do you give it to someone who's going to try and use that to sell you more things or do you choose to give it to your therapist? Right. Yeah.
Arjun Nanda (21:08)
Yeah, like if I could see, you know, that one of my patients Amazon activity has like skyrocketed in the last month. And then it's totally dropped off. would make me, that would be very interesting information for me or, you know, their sleep data or whatever. This sort of stuff would be helpful for me to know about a little bit about what's going on with this person's life.
Karan (21:36)
Absolutely, five hours may not be a lot of sleep, but if someone actually goes from five hours to sleeping eight hours, it may not be a positive indication, right? It may be an indication of like too many white blood cells, right? Like what are you protecting yourself against?
Arjun Nanda (21:57)
Yeah, so there's a lot to think about with regards to the future, where this stuff is headed.
Karan (22:03)
Yeah, absolutely.
I actually have a question for you. that, is that fine? Can I reverse this a little bit? So I've been, I've been thinking about, like AI chatbots in therapy have been like discussion like for, I think for the past year, right?
Arjun Nanda (22:08)
Yeah, go for
Karan (22:21)
What I don't understand is there's this trade -off, like people usually have egg sides on the trade -off between the purity of therapy and then the accessibility of it. Because usually the argument is like there's 50 to 60, I don't remember what the statistic is, but like a big number of people that don't have access to mental health care.
And if you have an AI chatbot, it may not be as pure in quality, but it gives access to those people. But my question is, how do you take a position on either side of this trade -off? Because is it obvious that an hallucinating, probably risky AI chatbot is better than no?
care, like just is any type of care really better than no care is what I'm trying to say. I don't feel like I've found a lot of research or, you know, just like positions that come from like a very, from a common ground. It just feels like two different positions talking about their own pros and cons in a way.
Arjun Nanda (23:28)
Yeah. I mean, my stance here is that it's like everything else, it's a nuanced topic. think anyone that says it's good or it's bad, think it's not really diving too deep really into actually arguing for these different domains. think that AI chat bots certainly will have a role in mental health care.
and at whatever level that may be. I personally think that psychotherapy is a rather invasive process and is an invasive intervention, right? There is a lot of change that's required. And right now in the way that we approach mental health care,
therapy is the first line intervention for a lot of things that we deal with. And many people don't want to go to therapy. They don't want to sit down and address or dive deeply into some of the problems that they're struggling with. They would just want to feel better. And the way that I see this is that
that AI chatbots provide a step prior to entering therapy, where you take something manualized like cognitive behavioral therapy, and you can apply it to the masses really to allow people to sort of troubleshoot things on their own. And it doesn't necessitate
individual therapy, because frankly, people are not, it's tough to scale, it's tough to scale therapy, it's tough to scale a therapeutic alliance with someone, you need to have an in -person contact to do that. And someone that you get along with. that is going to be the core of deep, long lasting, meaningful change, certainly. You need...
work some of these things out with someone and build on some of these relational problems that you might have. But for the majority of people, things like manualized CBT is good enough. And I think that this at least offers an opportunity to provide this for a lot more people than what we're doing right now, because we simply don't have enough people. We don't have enough manpower for everyone to get a therapist.
you know, I myself am not currently in therapy. I don't think right now that I, that I need to have therapy, but I could, but there are certainly problems that I'm dealing with. mean, this is a part of human nature. and I, and it may be helpful for me to be able to bounce ideas off of, off a chat bot to try to identify some of
cognitive distortions that I might have as an example, if we're looking at the CBT model. that's, but one downside I think to that as being the, you know, a potential model here is that people will start to conflate that AI chatbots with real therapy and
if that becomes like the first line, people may not access a higher level of care as in individual psychotherapy. And it can denigrate what real therapy is, which frankly is what a lot of people think CBT is doing to things like psychodynamic psychotherapy, which are two totally different types of therapy. But they fall under this massive umbrella of therapy and now people don't really know what therapy is.
So yeah, I think that there are different roles for these things. In between sessions, I think it could be helpful if we're looking at something like passive, like what we're hoping to do with Empath. Doing an in -person session with your therapist once a week and then during these in -between times,
you're having conversation with your mother and you say, and something comes up and it says, hey, like, didn't you, isn't this something that you mentioned with your therapist? The way that you're talking with her is very similar to like what you mentioned before. And it's, it provides a sort of active response to you. I think that would be excellent. I don't know if that, if that makes sense technologically, but I think it would be very helpful, know, sort of an angel on your shoulder.
So yeah, I think there's plenty of use cases and I don't think that it's all bad, but I also would not want to conflate AI chatbots for real therapy because you almost by definition need someone sitting across from you who is spending their time and energy
empathy to try to understand you and you need to feel that connection. That's part of the theoretical relationship and that's a part of meaningful change. yeah, those are my sort of thoughts on this.
Karan (29:25)
No, that makes sense. that's sort of because it's so like rapidly developing that sort of why maybe it's a less ambitious position, but Empath takes a position on.
building on what we know for sure, is, okay, listening is a good start to therapy, right? And then developing the next steps of what Empath evolves into with evolving technology with therapist as opposed to like building it right now and then leaving it lose out in the world, right? The interesting thing about chatbots is,
I was watching this documentary like in college, this was like maybe seven or eight years ago. And they were talking about Eliza, which was an AI chatbot in 1963 or 53, I don't remember. And all it did was it just responded with whatever the user said with a question mark,
And people were really engaging in it. And the professor at MIT, think, who built it was surprised by how engrossed people were getting with that chatbot. So I'm also wondering if this novelty of considering the AI chatbot to be actually giving you attention and energy will wear off as we become more comfortable with.
AI chatbots in general, know, just like we probably are not going to be as engrossed with Eliza in 2024. So yeah, it's an interesting evolution that's happening here and I'm quite excited to see where it goes.
Arjun Nanda (30:59)
Yeah. And I think, Similarly, the concern about hallucinations are only going to get lower from here, right? mean, certainly hallucinations can do some damage, as can therapists, frankly. So if it's hallucinating and it's doing it at scale, that's obviously a problem. But with improved technology,
I imagine that hallucinations will also reduce a lot. GPT -4 .0 or whatever forum sucks when it comes to therapy, but I think that it'll get better. The main thing is that the chatbot needs to be able to recognize when someone is bullshitting.
Right? It needs to be able to read between the lines and understand the core of what someone is actually trying to say. and needs to be able to call out what the person is saying for it to really try to approach therapy as much as possible for it to try to get to that, to that line. needs to be able to understand, it needs to able to see like the, the sum is greater than, than the parts, which right now it cannot, it only will give, it will only give you feedback on what you, what exactly you've said.
So I'm sure it'll happen in the next couple of generations, but we're not close to there yet.
Karan (32:25)
Yeah.
There's also this interesting piece about not interesting, but I may be naive in saying this, isn't and I'm isn't free choice come into play at some certain point, like a person can go out and select a horrible therapist who's maybe not even a therapist, right? He's like a coach with whatever that it's a wide array of like who poses to be a therapist. So there is a certain amount of free choice that comes into play.
So yeah, that's an intro because there's more I'm trying to say is risk already prevails in, you know, when someone goes out to seek therapy.
Arjun Nanda (33:05)
Yeah, absolutely. Very, very often, mean, a common thing is, is transference, know, people, clients will, will enter into a therapeutic relationship, putting the therapist in a certain role in their mind, you know, someone like their father or like their mother, and they'll try to reenact these sort of things. And that's actually where you can get a lot of, it's an opportunity for change, right? Cause then you can change that dynamic.
but you can't do that with a chat bot. think that's the pro and that's the con, right? I mean, it's entirely neutral. If you're trying to project your girlfriend onto it, like in the movie, Her, right? That's exactly what happened, right? He was projecting his past relationship right onto, I'm forgetting her name, in Her, Samantha. He re -ran the entire relationship.
with Samantha as he did with his prior relationship. So, I mean, amazing movie. dude, yeah, you need to watch the movie. It's so good. Yeah, it's a great movie. yeah, mean, there's so much there. But okay, so I wanted to know now about some of the change that you have.
Karan (34:09)
I need to check out this movie. I haven't. Okay. Okay.
Arjun Nanda (34:30)
experienced recently, right? So, you you tweeted out that thing that you've been sort of reflecting on things and you're maybe approaching things differently. So, yeah, I mean, tell me a little bit about that. How's that been for
Karan (34:49)
The central theme to this goes back to observation, like with the journaling that was observation of my thoughts. And more recently, I went for this 10 -day Vipassana session, which basically was a practice to become aware of your body.
And there's so much that the Indian philosophy has to say about awareness of mind and body. And that's something I was deeply interested in ever since the psychological birth I was talking of. went on this, there's always been this content hero I'm following for a certain amount of time. And it progressed from people like Alan Watts to J. Krishnamurthy. And I wasn't really understanding what they were saying at a certain point, but it slowly
started to make sense and all of it was also central to this piece of observing your thoughts and body, observing your mind and body in some sense. With journaling, observation of thought was easier for me. I did not really know what observing your body really meant, right? Like what it actually meant to find this distance between you and your body. And that's what Vipassana actually helped with because the idea with Vipassana is
you become aware of your bodily sensations. And that's the only way to actually become aware of your body. This is an interesting sort of tangent, I guess, with John Vervecky has this. Have you seen his lecture series on YouTube? It's about, okay, John Vervecky is a cognitive scientist out of University of Toronto, right?
Arjun Nanda (36:27)
No I haven't.
Karan (36:35)
And he has these four types of knowing that he calls it. And at the highest level is propositional knowing, which is knowing of facts and concepts psychologically. But there's also deeper types of knowing, as he calls it. And that's experiential type of knowing and participatory type of knowing.
And I think that's what Vipassana also says. What they're basically saying is awareness of the body cannot come through reading literature about becoming aware of the body. It has to be an experiential understanding of actually experiencing your bodily sensations as an object to the observer. And then you can sort of start to realize what being separate from the body is.
Arjun Nanda (37:05)
Right.
Karan (37:22)
And that's been my like the latest upgrade in my in this in this sort of journey and observation that I've made is from going from observing the thoughts, my thoughts through journaling to now also becoming aware of my body as a as an observer that's separate from both the mind and body. Does that make sense? Because I'm still trying to make sense of it, right? So it's kind of half baked at the moment in how I'm articulating it.
Arjun Nanda (37:50)
Yeah.
So.
I mean, a lot of it comes down to...
know, first being aware, I mean, this is is sounds very similar to mindfulness and the whole idea of mindfulness of separation from, from some from one's thoughts in order to able to understand it better. I mean, the core of mindfulness also is not just observation, but, but acceptance of these thoughts. So I mean, what
What is your, do you feel like you accept the things that you are observing or are you trying to change the way that, the things that you observe?
Karan (38:30)
I don't, acceptance is, don't know. I don't know if I'll call it acceptance yet. Okay. So let's keep acceptance to the side for a moment. think it's more like, realizing it's. I'm, I sort of look at it with a, what's the word nihilistic sort of a sense where it doesn't really matter. So more than acceptance, it's sort of an acceptance of the meta that this is, this is not permanent, right?
These thoughts that are coming to me are not permanent because there's so many of them, right? And I can choose which to pay attention to. And these bodily sensations at the same time are also not permanent because they're coming and going out of existence. And where these thoughts and bodies, bodily sensations meet, right? Like when I think of a particular thing, there's a reaction that my body has to that.
there's a connection between that as well. And that's sort of impermanent or not. That's not permanent with the awareness that's looking at it. So more than acceptance, I think it's the realization that it does not matter, as not negative as it may, it can be. So it does not matter. Sounds a little negative, but I don't mean that in a sense that it does not matter that, so you shouldn't do anything about it.
It's almost like it doesn't matter. So why not do something more or why not do it at all? You know, if it doesn't matter.
Arjun Nanda (39:59)
I think there's a certain power that comes with meaninglessness or when something doesn't matter, it empowers you to sort of do whatever you want. Is that sort of where you're coming from now? Do you feel more empowered with that sort of thought process or?
Karan (40:28)
Yes,
that's, yes, I think that's better put than what I was trying to say. Yeah. So if I connect to connect it to the startup, I think all I can do is put in my best effort. Right. And as long as I do that, I'm pretty fine with where it goes. Like I don't want to come off as less ambitious or anything like that, but I've sort of accepted the fate of wherever this goes as long as I'm putting my best effort. Right. So it's sort of acceptance of.
Arjun Nanda (40:30)
observation.
Karan (40:57)
trusting the effort that you put in, in some sense. And of course, like this does not apply in the day to day, right? When I'm talking to my co -founders and we're talking to the dev team, we're not saying, hey guys, let's build something and we're fine if it fails. That's not the case, of course, but there's sort of like this meta acceptance of, it's fine. Like it removes the anxiety of the outcome. So you can focus on the effort right now, you know.
Arjun Nanda (41:24)
Yeah. This, I mean, this is a lesson like you were saying before, this is a very experiential lesson. It's tough to, anyone can say this, but feeling it is a very difficult task. And I understand what you're saying. And I feel it to a certain degree in a...
I try to live my life a similar way, but it's a work in progress.
Karan (41:56)
And it's also not like, it's also not something that you just, it's not continuous, right? You keep falling in and out of it, of that acceptance of carelessness or whatever you want to call it. It's not always, I hope it, I wish it was always there with me, that wisdom of knowing this does not matter, but I think you fall in and out of it, which is fine.
Arjun Nanda (42:20)
Yeah. Right.
So, you know, I'm getting the sense, mean, there's a spiritual aspect to this as well. You know, I mean, this is similar to
what dharma is in Hinduism, you know, just about doing one's duty without focus on the result, but on the process. So I'm just curious about your spirituality, how that's impacted you
Yeah, mean, sort of how that's worked for you throughout your life and this journey specifically.
Karan (43:03)
I think I've come at it, come at it or I keep coming at it from like a bottom up perspective where like I've heard what like Dharma is focus on your actions, not on the outcome. I'd heard of this, right?
I'd heard like Sanskrit sayings about this and all of that, but it never really came into, it was never salient to me. And what I mean by it, it's been a bottom up process for me is I've made these realizations and then I remember back to, I'd heard this before.
where it was talked about like in the Bhagavad Gita where it said focus on your actions, not on the outcome. So it's been a very bottom -up process for me in that sense. I was never, there wasn't a very strong spiritual background to my family when I was growing up, right? All of
spirit, I don't know if I'm using the wrong word, but all of the spiritual or all of this metaphysics that came into my life was through this point I mentioned before, right, this psychological birth. When I got interested in these conversations about, okay, so who is this observer that's observing me inside of me, right? And that's where my journey sort of started. And it was not
in the Hindu literature, but it was in these spearheads that were talking, like I mentioned, Like, Jiddu Krishnamurthy has been a very interesting one for me. Osho in Hindi has been a very interesting one for me, right? So yeah, and for me right now, as far as I can see, this spiritual enlightenment ends at a very actually boring point of
what we spoke of before, which is just accepting it is impermanent. is not, nothing is permanent or everything's meaningless in a sense. And that's, I'm careful with limiting it there without sort of glorifying it to...
Arjun Nanda (44:59)
Right.
Karan (45:06)
this spiritual enlightenment that's of far in the distance and feels something that's supernatural in a sense. So I'm being careful with limiting my sort of what spirituality and spiritual enlightenment is to what I can actually see, which is this again boring me. I was saying this to a friend of mine. If you did not see the Taj Mahal before you actually saw it, right, if you only saw pictures with filters on Taj Mahal, you would be
extremely disappointed when you actually visited the Taj Mahal, right, because you saw it and with all these filters on top of it. And I think the spiritual enlightenment has had a lot of put on top of it, glorifying it more than it actually ends up being, right. So I'm just being careful of that is what I'm trying to say.
Arjun Nanda (45:57)
That's very powerful. Yeah, there's a lot of talk about it, about spiritual enlightenment. But you're saying it can be a lot more of a boring process than what people say.
Karan (46:16)
Yeah, and maybe boring is the wrong word, Like boring is maybe an aspect of an unenlightened mind. So maybe boring is the word I'm using right now, but it's not as, it's not the Instagram filter that's on top of it.
Arjun Nanda (46:36)
Right, right.
I, you know, there's a lot of parallels that can be drawn to that and therapy frankly, you know, I think, you know, it's been a lot more, there's been a lot of discussion on, you know, mental health treatment and, you know, I think therapy talk has really infiltrated our culture and there's been a lot of,
I think the pendulum has swung from there being a lot of stigma to mental health conditions to perhaps a different path where everyone is sort of talking about it. And I think there is a sort of glorification
going to therapy or having like some sort of psychiatric diagnosis. I mean, especially among teens from what I'm seeing in my own work as well as online, but it's not all what it's cracked up to be. You know, it's these are, there's a lot of hard work that's involved and the end result is, you know, perhaps some change, but it's
being able to be a little bit more comfortable with your life. yeah, certainly, you know, feeling a little bit better is not probably not akin to a spiritual awakening. But I do see some parallels there with what you're saying. It's sort of ringing a bell.
Karan (48:07)
But when a client comes in, they probably have like an expectation of what life is going to be or what therapy is going to do for them, right? So does the therapist actually have to work on deconstructing it so that now they can come back to like a realistic expectation of what therapy will do for them?
Arjun Nanda (48:27)
Everyone comes in with their own sort of expectations. I think in one of the first few sessions, the point is to try to identify treatment goals, like what you're sort of hoping for and what is reasonably attainable. And I've had people that come in and they
everything in their life to be fixed, especially with regards to relationships with their family or with their friends. then there's others who come in, they have no idea what they want. They're brought in there because someone else told them to come in and they have zero expectations. You're not going to help me. So it really depends on the person. think
this is sort of where that therapeutic relationship comes from is once you build it, then you can actually say, okay, well, here, like, let's see how we can actually help by working on specific goals. But yeah, I mean, some people come with very high expectations and others not so much.
Karan (49:35)
Interesting. kind of thing is very interesting to me. more excited about, it's almost like it's, I used to get excited about courses, new courses I used to take in college. And it's sort of a feeling like that, right? I'm excited about how, what are the things that I discovered in sort of this, in this game of observation, observation of mind and body. So it's exciting. It's been exciting for the last two years, I think.
Arjun Nanda (49:36)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, it's, it's going to be a very interesting road ahead of you, you know, with regards to building this company. And, you know, I think that there will be, that there is a lot of need for, for what you're doing. You know, we all, we always need better information about how we're doing. We need people to get better, to feel better. Anything that we can do in service of that is, is a beautiful thing.
Karan (50:35)
Yeah, and thanks to you. I mean, I said this before, but we really want to build this with therapists. And you've been someone who's given us a lot of very valuable feedback, critical and supportive, but it's been very helpful. So thanks.
Arjun Nanda (50:50)
Yeah. Yeah, man. Absolutely. All right. Well, know, Garen, it's been a real pleasure talking with you, as always. Maybe we can end it here, but, you know, it's, yeah, it's been lovely just having to be able to chat and see where things are going with Empath. And I'm looking forward
seeing where you guys go in the next few months and years.
Karan (51:21)
Thanks for having me on and also for asking me some of these questions because it gave me an opportunity to sort of think of things I hadn't thought of for some time. So this was fun. Thanks for having me.
Arjun Nanda (51:33)
Yeah, man, of course. All right.