Artificial Intelligence and Meditating with Nicholas Gray

Nicholas Gray joins the podcast to talk about the Ojai-based startup he's been building the past two years with Vu Dang, that uses their own AI-aided app, FlowAI, to help people maintain the perfect flow state in their meditation. FlowAI uses the cameras on your phone or desktop to watch you as you meditate, monitoring vital signs such as breathing rate, heart rate, facial muscles and more to give you your SaneScore that you can track over months and years to improve the quality of your meditation. Users can also earn tokens through time and meditation quality, which can be redeemed on the platform for extra classes and merchandise. Sanehood's AI is also free, and hopes to remain so. They hope to earn money through donations, grants, upgraded services and products. The project began when Vu Dang, who knew Gray from the Ojai Valley Athletic Club, asked for his help developing the app. Vu Dang is a software engineer who received his master's degree just three years out of high school, and has extensive experience with data analytics. Vu Dang has been meditating since age 9 and also leads vipanassa meditations. Gray works for a defense contractor as an electrical engineer, and is also a committed meditator. The two began working after hours to develop the app, and are just about ready to launch. Their ambitious goal is to sign up one billion people for this meditation tool, and their urgency is driven by the amount of depression and mental health issues that exploded during and after the pandemic. They also expect people to build supportive communities about meditation through the app. Gray talked about how uncannily accurate the AI has been against baseline scores and control groups, and how it is constantly learning and improving as it learns more about the user, and more about the entire community of users. We did not talk about Uighur detention camps, ancient Arabian irrigation technologies or howler monkeys. https://sanehood.com/