Thirty minutes on your laptop, and you finish someone's research

Someone in this network needs help, and this one is easy to give.

Deborah Lee needs 120 people to try something for her Columbia research. She has 27. You could be one of the 93 she is missing. It takes thirty minutes on your laptop, and you can enter a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card. It closes on 11 November.

The Somatic AI-Guided Conversation Study
Teachers College, Columbia University. IRB 26-388. Online, laptop only.

What you would actually do

You talk out loud to an AI called Mira for ten to fifteen minutes, about one thing that is currently stressing you, and she walks you through breathwork and body awareness while you do it. A short questionnaire before, a short one after.

You need a laptop with a microphone and somewhere quiet you can speak out loud. A two minute prescreener tells you straight away whether you are eligible, and lets you book a later slot if now is wrong. It is research, not therapy.

Why you might actually want to

You have probably typed something heavy into a chat window at one in the morning. The answer comes back reasonable and it does not touch you, because the thing that is wound up is not in your head. It is in your shoulders and your jaw and your breathing.

This works the other direction. Whether it works at all is the question Deborah is asking, and you would be helping her find out.

Who you would be helping

Deborah Lee is a somatic coach. She runs Creaturae, works with founders and executives, and is finishing her MA in Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia. Mira is trained on her own practice, so the questions it asks you are the questions she would ask you in a room.

You will recognise this part. She spent nine months looking for the right engineer and never found one, so she built Mira herself with Claude. What she needs from you now is not code. It is half an hour.

One thing worth knowing if you build with AI

You get randomly assigned to one of two versions. Same voice, same words, but one shows you a green orb that pulses while she speaks and the other shows you a human-like avatar that responds as you talk. Whether that changes how the half hour lands on you is most of what she is measuring.

Open this on a laptop, not your phone. Every step needs a desktop, and that is the main reason people start it and give up.

And if you run anything with people in it, a newsletter, a Slack, a founder group, a class, you can help her far more in two minutes than in thirty. Paste this wherever your people are. It is already approved under her protocol, so you do not need to ask her first or write anything yourself.

Deborah is happy to answer questions directly at dl3892@tc.columbia.edu.

Stephen
Founder, Propel Earth

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