Q Where was your head at at the I mean, had he just left your corporate job, you were broke, had to make this thing work, otherwise you were on the street, or, I mean, where was your head at?
A Sure. Uh, so the, the couple years before this company, I was doing research at Stanford in a lab they call the Persuasive Technology Lab, where if anybody listening is really interested in, like, the intersection of computer science, behavior design, and kind of, like, computer-human interaction, there's this Lab in the corner of Stanford campus that's put out some really interesting stuff, but I think doesn't get the credit it deserves in terms of, uh, It's impactfulness on the web, but it's all about designing for behavior change, using computers, not humans to trigger that behavior change. Like many years of research has been about human to human persuasion. You know, Cialdini's influence was like the iconic book on this topic, but it was always about human to human. How does a human persuade another human to do something? And so the research I was doing in this lab, uh, was how do you replace one of those humans with a computer and use a computer to trigger behavior change? It's a long story of what we discovered and what came out of it, and that's a whole different topic. Um, the guy who runs the lab, his name is BJ Fogg. He was a mentor to me, continues to be a friend, uh, really interesting dude. But one of the insights that came out of it was that you, you can design for behavior change at scale. So it's not just like one computer convincing one person to do something,…
AI assessment note: “a couple years before this company, I was doing research at Stanford”