Talkspace CEO Says Text Therapy Is More Affordable

from New Jersey and Orange. First of all, I hope you're well and uh, sort of coping as best you can, as we all are amid all of this. Thanks Jason, thanks for having me. So I was understand what talk spaces and how you came to create it because you had a long career or a very successful career in the ad game, I believe, and you happened upon this through some personal experience. Tell us the story. So, Hey,

that's true. I was in marketing and advertising for many years and I'm now repenting and paying for my scenes, I guess. And we started tough this because we just thought that psychotherapy was such a wonderful professional had so much edited value, and it was just a shame that so few people actually have access to it. So our mission from the day one world, can we actually open up access for everyone who wants to at least try

talking to a therapist. It has helped both me and my co founder is also my wife my partner, tremendously in our lives and we thought, you know, the world has to be a better place if we could open this up for everyone. So that was a yeah. I would see the initial at the beginning in around twenty twelve. And what's interesting is when I think about it, how great that you can open it up to maybe a world of people who might not reach out to go face to face with someone. But at the same time,

sometimes that face to face is really really important. What how do you how do you kind of balance both of that? So both are great. You know, I've been to face to face therapy for many long years and it's wonderful. The truth of the matter is, in terms of just being practical, most people cannot afford all the money or the time to go and see someone face

to face. The usage to face to face therapy in the United States is, let's say in a good year you have ten million people who actually go and do it, and they do it for just a few several sessions, not more than that. That means that there's a huge and immense gap between the I would take the numbers, the amount of people that actually could use help and need help in a clinical way, and the ones that are actually using that. So we're not trying to take

away business from face to face. It's a wonderful take. But all those tens of millions that could use it as well but cannot afford it in so many ways, are welcome to try remote or virtual or online therapy, which is what we do. And so tell us about the technology, because you know, this is beyond what you have created. It is beyond just a situation where people can can do this remotely. There's some artificial intelligence built in,

I believe, help us understand how that works. So you know, behavior health and psychotherapy and psychiatry are as I said before, wonderful professions, the very rich in theories that are kind

of pouring data. Where you introduce an online, modern technology platform, the thing that you begin to do is you begin to aggregate and accumulate vast troves of data that can be used to learn and see patterns and then effectively and when someone uses our our technology or platform, they can do video, they can do audio, they can write

to each other. It's their choice that we can analyze this and actually learn how the best treatment courses look like, what are the best lines of interventions that will apply to some kinds of conditions or accurities. When you have a large enough data set, you can do what's called very large scale regressions and begin to get, you know, a faint idea of what works better than other approaches. Because in all honestly, if you went to a therapist

in Manhattan, you don't know how good they are. You don't know how many people they helped in the past, and more than anything else, you don't know if they're he or she is a good fit for you for your particular needs. You know, therapy is a little bit like dating. Well, and I want to talk more about the use of machine learning and AI and all of this in a moment, but I do wonder about the therapist that you use. What's the screening involved? UM tell

us a little bit about that process. So we have close to five thousand therapists on the network in all fifty states, and because we have this this level of data, we can actually know who is a good fit and a great therapist that will deliver good clinical outcomes on this platform. Um, So I and tell you one thing that probably won't surprise you, but we found only two strong correlations, one stronger than the other towards what makes

a really good therapist. So the first one, interestingly enough, is having around seven or eight minimal years of experience post supervision UM that's delivered significantly better clinical outcomes. So if you look at our network, they all qualified to this or every one average they have a tenure from nine to ten years. And the second one, Carol, won't surprise you at all, and it actually applies to most of our life, is that women are better ms. Yeah.

I have a segment later in the week about how leaders you know during crisis better women. I'm the only person who can see Carol during this show right now, Lauren, and I can tell you that she is giving her not surprised face uh, and her slightly UM. I want to say smug. I don't want to say smug, but certain face. Uh. You and I we should join their forces to our next start up, which is handling over

handing over the world to women. So story in the magazine this week in Bloomberg Business Week magazine by Cynthia Coon's, our US healthcare reporter at Bloomberg News is about how, in the midst of the pandemic, more people are turning to online therapy to deal with anxiety, depression and relationship strife. And that includes turning to talk Space, which is where we get back to our guest or in Frank's co founder and CEO talk Space, joining us on the phone

in New Jersey. First of all, I was curious orient, I mean, tell us or how much of your site um has gone up your app in terms of uh since we've been kind of since we've been in lockdown for the last two months. So it's changing every day. But we see at least a doubling of our traffic of people that are coming in and are looking for help.

And we can see coming from two sources. One is, you know, beyond the pandemic that we talked about all day, there is a second I would say epidemic, which is one of mental health, which is trigored by by COVID nineteen. So you see people that are the amounts of pain and suffering and and and really sad and heartbreaking stories

that are out there has grown dramatically. And on top of that, you see I would say a second source of people that it's used to go to face to face therapy, but it's unfortunately not available right now, so they're looking for help elsewhere. But overall, we see more than a double lot of the people that are the people help with us? Or do you feel like this notion of going to therapy or or talking to someone is becoming more widely accepted and acceptable. Are we getting

more comfortable talking about mental health? It's a great question, Jason, and and I don't want to be you know, give you a wishful thinking answer. I think I think stigma is improving, but it's not equally distributed. I think, you know, when we have a conversation with people that live in Manhattan, it's part of their early lives. It's not anything that's threatening.

I think one of the interesting things that we learned over the last eight years is that actually remote care sometimes helps to alleviate stigma, because part of stigma is that very awkward I would say feeling or experience once you meet the therapist face to face for the first time at that point that in time here or share a complete stranger and sometimes it's very painful for you to talk about, well, whatever is troubling you. So there's a sense of awkwardness of being judged. That is part

of steem myself. So some of the younger people, the millenniums a k a. Millenniums still much safer in writing the healths from Afar and we we see an interesting phenomena in which people begin to write to the therapy not a couple of months. They will once they trust him or her, they will do a live video session because now they're willing to expose themselves. Wow, that's real. That's really interesting sort of mixing, the mixing the media.

In some ways, what I find fascinating for such a developed society, smart society, developed country, is that we don't really respect health, whether it's physical health or mental health. It's really kind of mind boggling for the amount of

money that we spend out a lot of stuff. And I mean we might individually, but I think even the medical world doesn't necessarily appreciate or certain aspects of it um or in the importance of mental health, Like why isn't it why isn't it that we all go in every year for kind of a I don't know, you know that that's got to be part of our mental health checkout. Yeah, of course he was so right. And I've made to say, you know, argument to accomplish people in my past. But I really think that in here

we have some hope and some positive change. I think, you know, much of healthcare is delivered by large employers in the United States, and I think it's a certain section of them really understand that and will prioritize mental health, animals, wellness, uh, just as much as they do any other form of healthcare. I think systematically, you know, the healthcare system or someone very wise once told me that the United States have the best medicine in the world and probably the world's

healthcare system. I think the healthcare system is catching up to death as well. And I can tell you that we also operate enterprise, so business to business, and we have a We've had a huge growth of large payers that understands that they need to provide these kind of access and then started working with us in the last couple of months or as of a COVID nineteens. So I think we're actually making progress there and I don't know how long it will take, but I'm with that.

I'm pretty confident that that it will be provided to Americans. We just have to do it. It just makes sense. You shared starts with us, and I just want to throw it out to our people that among the increase since everybody's been locked down, increasing clients with the chief complain of anxiety because of stress, because of an increasing depression, of increasing difficulties sleeping, and then a lot of them for couples therapy or just people coming almost coming because

of relationship problems. Um So, it's been a variety of things that really have um created some troubles for people. What does it cost? I think that we are, as I mentioned before, we are facing a huge crisis that's going to hit us. You know, million people lost their jobs, are unemployed now, people are locked at home, sometimes a very small apartments with family members some times, you know,

I'm sorry to tell you, with abusive family members. The amount of pain that is generated by that is something that's going to hit us very hard pretty soon. I think, unfortunately, we're going to see a lot of that. We're going to see more depths of despair also known as suicide um with the level not just the number of people that are approaching and not seeking out, also their acuity. So how hard it really hit them is mind boggling.

That very is that picture out there, and I don't see that getting any better anytime soon without the economy is doing and how the general movie is doing. Right. I wish we had more time because there's I have like a million more questions. You'll have to come back and spend some time with this. Or In Frank, we really appreciate. Co founder CEO of Talk Space, joins on the phone from New Jersey. Check out the story by

Cynthia Coon's in the latest edition of Business Week. It's excellent and gives you a sense of the scope of the problem out there that Orrine Frank is trying to tackle