On Patrick McGinnis's FOMO Sapiens podcast, Slingshot AI co-founder and president Neil Parikh traced his path from Casper, which he scaled past $500 million in revenue, to building what he calls the first foundation model for therapy. He framed the company around a supply-limited crisis, the country being roughly 50,000 psychologists short, with waits that can exceed a year, and argued that scaling access requires technology because, as he put it, you can't miraculously print millions more people to provide care. Parikh explained Slingshot's approach of learning from real human therapy and using reinforcement learning to discover what actually helps, rather than packaging a single technique like CBT into an app. He distinguished Ash from general chatbots, whose training makes them sycophantic, noting plainly that simply validating people "is not therapy." Looking ahead, Parikh said success could mean inventing "totally new modalities of how to help people that don't even exist today," beyond established therapeutic frameworks.