Learning experientially | Applied behavioral science with Aline Holzwarth, MBA

(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone. My name is Maya and welcome to PsychMike, the podcast that explores the lives and career paths of industry leaders who use psychology to make an impact in the world. This week, I sat down with Alene Holesworth, who is an applied behavioral scientist, specializing in digital health research and scientifically informed product design. This episode was recorded with a live audience as well. So the second half of the interview is based on the audience Q&A. If you wanna stay in the loop about more events like this because we definitely will be having them, it was super popular and people really seem to enjoy it. So I'd love to do more events like this. Make sure that you sign up for this psychmike newsletter at psychmike.com and you'll get notified when we're doing events like this and you can sign up. Alene received her bachelor's in psychology at Reed College and her MBA at Duke University. She's currently the head of behavioral science at Pattern Health, which is a platform that works to accelerate digital health innovation. She's also principal at Dan Aureli Center for Advanced Hindsight, which is a research center that also works with businesses to implement behavioral science findings in the real world. Alene has over 12 years of experience managing behavioral science programs, projects, and products. And I'm so excited that she was able to share her insights with you. I had a lot of fun interviewing her for many reasons, but perhaps the biggest one is that if you ask her a question, she'll always provide her honest opinion based on years of being immersed in this field. She was so excited to be able to help you as well, the psychmike audience with your career exploration in behavioral science. So this is a super practical episode. And Alene answers questions like, what is applied behavioral science and what are the problems that she is working to solve as a behavioral scientist? How did she figure out that she wanted to do behavioral science and why did she get an MBA? And also, why did she not get a PhD because that was an active decision on her part? We talk about how to start acquiring relevant experiences in this field and how to combat the paradox that I feel like a lot of us face that most jobs require prior experience. Even entry-level jobs seem to require prior experience. So how do you approach that? We also talk about entry-level job titles that you can look for when you're looking for jobs, where to network with behavioral scientists, and so, so much more that I think you'll find so helpful if you're exploring a career in applied behavioral science or behavioral science in general. So I hope you stay tuned and please enjoy this interview with Alene Hozworth. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Maya Metser. I'm the founder of psychmike, which is the podcast that this recording is going to be posted on this Thursday. And psychmike is a podcast that I created to help myself and psychology students everywhere to explore careers after they graduate through interviews with industry leaders just like Alene. And if you were or are a psychology student, you probably relate to the overwhelm that I felt and sometimes confusion about where I could apply my degree after I graduated. I'm still-- I'm still feeling that way. I know. Just for the record. I'm still figuring out what is out there. What do we do with this training? Totally. And if there's one thing I've learned from my guests, it's that that feeling doesn't really go away. But you kind of learn to just roll with the punches a little more. At least that's what I'm getting for my guests. So yeah. It turns out that there are people with psychology backgrounds in pretty much every single field and industry. I cannot think of an industry that doesn't have people with psych backgrounds somehow applying that and making a difference. And psychmike has highlighted professionals in academia, in clinical psychology, in advertising, in behavioral science, in the arts, in law, education, medicine, policy, in the nonprofit space, and so much more. So if you're curious about exploring other options as well, that exists for you on the psychmike podcast. And you can also explore it on psychmike.com. You can go and explore all the episodes that we've published. And we have and will continue to host lots of other events like this. And if you want to stay in the loop, you can sign up by putting your email into www.psychmike.com. OK. So of course, today we will be zeroing in on Alene Holscorth's career. Welcome, Alene. Thank you for being here. It's my pleasure. Very excited. And as you guys probably know, Alene is currently the head of Behavioral Science at Pattern Health. And she is a principal at Dan Aureli's Center for Advanced Hindsight. And her specialty is in digital health research and scientifically informed product design. I'll let her tell you a little bit more about what that all means in just a bit. But I love that today, as I mentioned, we have such a diverse audience with education level spanning from undergraduate level people to people who already have their PhD. And we have a mix of people who are just starting to learn about behavioral science and people who have been in this field and are always looking to learn from people like Alene, or especially from people like Alene. So my questions will try to encompass all of your curiosities as best as I can, and we'll be based on the questions that you sent in in advance. But I encourage you to ask your own questions in the chat as they arise. I believe you're only able to message the hosts. And I did that so that as the questions are getting sent in, they're not distracting us as we go. So I will kick off the interview with some questions for Alene, and then I'll open it up to audience Q&A at the end. But I will ask all the questions. You will not be able to unmute yourself. OK, thank you, everyone, for being here. And without further ado, let's get started. So Alene, Alene, I have a difficult question for you to start. I'm sorry. I'm sorry in advance. What the heck is behavioral science? Oh, what is behavioral science? Yeah, no, that one comes up all the time. It's one of these funny terms that has been used and misused in so many different ways that I feel like no one really knows what it means anymore. And what's the definition? And I was like, I won't go into the whole history and evolution. That's the part and inter-psych where even I start nodding off. But really, behavioral science is psychology. You could say, oh, it's the encompassing of all of the behavioral sciences, so anthropology and economics and behavioral economics and whatever. But without really getting into the weeds on that, I think really, for me, I'll just give you my own personal practical use of behavioral science. To me, I think that as someone who was trained in psychology, I started calling myself a psychologist as I-- after I graduated with my bachelor's degree. And I started to realize that there was this big confusion where psychology just has a branding problem. I would tell people I'm a psychologist, and they would say, oh, yeah, you know, they'd start calling me Freud and think that I'm sitting patients down on a couch and going through talk therapy. But as a research psychologist, I'm not interested at all on the-- I understand that there's a very large following and people who are interested in clinical psychology. That wasn't my personal interest. And it was very confusing for me to be-- for people to have that impression of me. And so as behavioral economics became popularized in the early 2000s, I guess, and behavioral science became a more of a catch-all term for psychology, I really latched on to that as, OK, here's the way I can describe what I do in a way that people will either understand or have questions rather than having these kind of old affiliations in terms of counseling and talk therapy. And there's a place for that. It just wasn't what I'm doing. But what do you actually do as a behavioral scientist? I think it's maybe the more interesting question, right? And we will get into that in just a bit. So but you call yourself an applied behavioral scientist. I do. Not every behavioral scientist calls themselves applied. So what does that piece mean? I think part of it is really the emphasis on real world problems. So you're not answering questions like, what is dreaming? Or how does cognition work? Those more basic science questions that are often more tightly aligned with the academic pursuit and staying within academia, maybe pursuing a doctorate and becoming a professor and teaching and so on. All of that whole path, I really-- I didn't want to align myself with that. I think it's less practical and less interesting for me personally. And I really wanted to solve problems like, how do we combat a vaccine hesitancy? How do we get people to get the COVID-19 vaccine when it comes out? Those were kind of early on in the pandemic questions that were really, really important to me. Or how do we get people to take their medication? How do we get people to exercise all of these health behaviors that people really struggle with and are trying to figure out strategies for reaching their health goals? It was really interesting to me still is to say, what do we know about behavior and how people think and feel and behave in order to create interventions that we can then test and implement in the real world? So part of it is that distinction between basic and applied science in the more traditional way. And the other sort of take on applied behavioral science is not just working with participants who come into a lab and participate in a research study that kind of has a little bit of artifice created around it. I think that something that academia is lacking is data and having access to real world situations and people who are going through real actual problems, that medication that they're unable to take every day is a real thing. So I think the other piece of this applied behavioral science is, well, we're getting out and working with real people who are actually using real products. And that feels more impactful to me. Totally. And I think it's cool because you've kind of dabbled in a lot of different worlds. I know the word interdisciplinary to you. You hold very near and dear to your heart, which is awesome. That said, in the beginning of your career, you kind of started out in this peer-like basic science academic research. And you dabbled in a lot of different research experiences. And we don't have to get too much into those. But I am just curious because we do have a lot of undergraduates and recent graduates in this audience. What did those research experiences teach you about yourself and what you wanted out of your career? Oh, yeah, I mean, I cannot stress enough the importance of dabbling, you know, like try everything out. So I was really fortunate as an undergraduate that I was able to work on actual research projects with professors at Reed College. And so I did some social psychology research. I did some developmental research. I did some rat studies and like surgery and rats brains and just like really expose myself to as much as I possibly could in order to understand what are the things I want to keep, what are the things I want to do more of, and what am I not quite as interested in. And I think that, you know, I learned that there are some very specific fields within psychology that I didn't want to specialize in. And you know, I know we're planning on talking more about the doctorate decision to doctorate or not to doctorate. But I think part of it was that alignment with specialization that I wasn't as excited about. And you mean because academic researchers typically become very, very specialized in their specific line of research and aren't as able to branch out? Not even researchers, but just getting a PhD, you know, spending five to seven years on one research topic was not something that appealed to me at all. I was already working, you know, dabbling in 30 different topics from sustainability to ethics and morality, to health decision-making and so on. And I just, I like to have a little, maybe I'm just a little bit impatient or like, I relate to that. Yeah, but there were some threads just to like think back to the undergraduate shaping. I think there were some things that were common across all of those, all of those specialties that I really loved. And that was the randomized controlled trial, just experimentation in general. I think we've kind of, we've kind of grown since the more traditional RCT, but just testing things and you know, with rigorous methodologies was so attractive to me. And I didn't find that within other fields and just, just the ability to use the experiment to understand things in a better way that tests our intuition. That was, that was so attractive. And go ahead. So you were, so you were interested. So what I'm hearing is you were abutting scientists. You just wanted to do science. And it's cool that you were able to, a scientist, but also, you wanted to be able eventually. I don't know when the applied piece came into the equation for you. After a while, yeah. OK. But it's cool that you felt that you were able to continue being a scientist and continue developing those muscles without continuing into a doctorate path, which, I feel like a lot of psychology students struggle with that and may not know that, that they can, that you've created a scientific career for yourself without calling yourself lean holes worth PhD. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Gross. Don't want it to the PhDs in the two. I know, I know, I know, I'm terrible. It's a tough topic, I think, because if you don't have a PhD, you're really self-conscious about it and always wondering, should I have done-- is that the thing that I should have pursued? And you know, I had this own, my own internal struggle for many years about whether that was the right path for me as well. And then if you do have a PhD, you have a little bit of cognitive dissonance, even if you're fully sold on the value you might also think, well, I went through all of that. It must be worth something. But I think that in general, the whole doctoral question is one of those things that people really overthink and fret about to such an unnecessary degree. In all honesty, at the end of the day, it really isn't that important. I think that there's a variety of different ways to gain credentials and training. And I think one thing about-- there's a little bit of a heuristic around PhDs where someone sees that you have those letters at the end of your name or other letters as well, and MSC, an MBA, even. Yeah, OK, Ms. MBA. Yeah, and then they make assumptions about you. Well, there's lots of other ways of signaling your value and your worth that aren't those letters. It's a bit of a shortcut. And so it's kind of like cheating sometimes where people will give you maybe some respect that you don't deserve without having to learn, oh, what have you actually done? How do you think? So you have worked with a lot of PhD level people, and certainly they've been an important component of your work. What is it that they are able to do that you are not able to do? And perhaps vice versa? Yeah, I just-- I wouldn't really draw a very hard line there. I think that that's like-- I think that's buying into the PhD heuristic. I think there-- it's five to seven years of your life that you spent learning some things in school. You can spend that same amount of time on the job learning also useful things. It's hard. It's hard to make generalizations, I think, totally. We're very tempted to, but I think it's wrong. And I think that some people are much more fortunate than others and have a little boost and more ability to get an advanced degree. And other people who just contribute just as much to society and are just as good at designing experiments and doing data analysis and so on, just because they don't have those letters, I think doesn't mean that they-- you need some trading. I'm not saying-- so just make it pull out of a hat and you're done. You will have to have a very good mentor. You will have to design and run experiments and analyze the data and communicate your results and work with product designers and going back to the interdisciplinary aspect, work with all kinds of people. But people of all different backgrounds bring different value to the table. But if you imagine you're going to start a company and you're like, OK, I'm going to make this company that uses behavioral science to change behavior to get people to whatever run marathons. And you hire 15 behavioral scientists. You wouldn't say, OK, we're good to go. No, you want a wide variety of different backgrounds. You obviously get to need some engineers and some program managers and product managers who are going to need someone with some understanding of business and marketing and how to get your product out there and so on. So I think there's a lot of value in bringing other people to the table. Right, right. And I think, yeah, it's clear. And you've spoken about this on other interviews as well. How many people from different fields and with different expertise that you're able to bring together and work with and communicate in different languages with each other to build something that is ultimately best for the end user, which I think is really cool. So you spent a few years, what? Six years after your undergrad, operating within the field and intersection of industry, academia, and health care without any other letters after your name. But eventually, you decided to get an MBA. What went into that decision? And what was that added benefit of specifically the MBA and the work that you do as a behavioral scientist? Well, I think it kind of goes back to those 15 behavioral scientists and wanting to bring something else to the table. I felt like I had really-- I don't want-- maybe mastered is too much of a word, but really gotten to a place where I had a solid understanding of the science and applying the science. But working with companies, working with people who have these real world problems, I felt like there was still a little bit of a gap between figuring out how to take the science and make it work really in a functional way within an organization. And so I think that part of it was just understanding the language of business and how people talk and figuring out how to translate the things that you understand as a scientist to the types of problems and the types of approaches that people use within business. And I noticed that there weren't really any other behavioral scientists that were getting MBAs. And so I think maybe a part of it. And this is just reflecting in hindsight. I'm not sure I thought about this at the time, but if everyone's running off and getting a PhD and you want to stand out, do you also get a PhD or do you try something different and bring something different to the table? So I think that as a way of differentiating and bringing that other piece in, I thought it would be useful. I'm so glad that I did. I remember I wasn't really sure about the decision at the time and I really waffled between, maybe I really do need to get a PhD. Really many years later, nobody really cares. Nobody cares about your PhD. They don't care about your MBA. So they really see, what have you done? You brought value, how do you think? How are you a critical thinker? And what value can you bring to the particular situation that we have? So I get a lot of questions from people who are wanting to enter the field of behavioral science to become applied behavioral scientists. So they say, what skills do I need to acquire? What, how do I need to look in order to appeal to everyone? And the truth is that organizations that are looking for a behavioral scientist are not so much looking at you. They're looking at the problem that they have and they're looking at how do we solve this problem? OK, maybe a behavioral scientist can help us solve it. But if you come in saying, I'm a behavioral scientist and I have all these degrees and look at my fancy credentials and so on, that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for, OK, how are you as a person going to solve this problem that I have? And so I think the most important part of applying to jobs is looking at what is the job description? What does the company do? What are the problems that they're having? And how can you help them solve those problems? And I think as a behavioral scientist, you're particularly suited to answering those questions. We got a ton of questions in that sort of domain of what are the skills I need to learn? What credentials do I need in order to position myself to be a competitive applicant to these behavioral science jobs? But what-- I mean, you're saying that it matters more how you and your experiences and your expertise are going to help this company solve the problems that they're having. That said, what if you're somebody who's interested in the field, can identify that they love behavioral science? They want to work in it in some way, and they want to get a job. But maybe don't have that much prior experiences. Or yeah, but what kinds of experiences or skills should they be working on acquiring to help them get a sense of what they want to do and also to become competitive? So I'm not going to lie. I think if you have no experience doing behavioral science, it's going to be hard to get a job as a behavioral scientist. I think exposing yourself to your point, how do you get a sense of those experiences and so on. You can start off as a very junior research associate and learn from the bottom up. That's a fine way to go about it. You would want to communicate how your interest has translated into your own behavior. So if you would say, I'm really interested in behavioral science, but I've never run an experiment on my cats. Or-- and I've never taken a course. Or at some level, you want to be able to demonstrate your interest in terms of what you've done. And that could be reading lots of books. It could be starting a podcast. It could be making things and asking things. And it doesn't have to be formal study. Of course, I think it is going to help you to formally study the thing that you want to do. On the other hand, there's a lot of ways that you can do behavioral science without actually being called a behavioral scientist. So if you think about product designers and program designers, there's so many applications of behavioral science that will help you become a better program designer or product designer. But you would still need to work as a program or product designer in order to gain those skills. That's definitely an on-the-job kind of training that you can kind of bring in your passion for insights of the mind or whatever you want to call it, even though it's not a part of your job description. So we've mentioned research a lot. And I'm wondering if you're saying it's going to help if you can show that you've run some sort of experiment that you're engaging with this subject matter in some way. If you have done research, does it matter what kind of research could I have done research in a purely academic setting? Let's say I was on my social psychology lab at my university. Is that something that can I show skills from that that will be applicable in a more industry setting for behavioral science? Absolutely. And I think that really, it's all about crafting your story to match the job description that you're applying for. So if you've done only academic work and you're applying to a product position, well, how can you think of the work that you've done as how can you frame it as a product and talk about the problems that you solved in getting to the final product? How can you just kind of like perform some mental gymnastics if you think, well, the story that is normally told about academic research doesn't really set me up for success in this thing that I'm applying to. Just think about it a little more and try and reframe things and think through, what can I-- definitely, I would say, don't go back for more training before you start applying to jobs. With this testing mindset that we have in behavioral science, like you don't have to perform an actual experiment. But spend a month applying to jobs getting feedback about where you're lacking. You can always ask, why didn't you call me for a follow-up interview? And you will get so much more information out of that one month than the five to seven years that you went back to school to get another PhD or a master's in another area. And what I'm also thinking about is, I mean, this field, when you enter this field, it was in its infancy or maybe even like still in the womb. Like, it was not the field that it is today. And it's still very much in its infancy. And that means that it is continuing to change. Its priorities will continue to change. And the skills and the competencies that are required will continue to change. And so it makes sense to me, the advice that you're giving, which is just try, like see what skills do I have now that can be applied to jobs right now. And you will continue to learn-- this is the kind of position or job or whatever you want to call it-- that you will-- it sounds like continue to develop the necessary skills while you're doing it, which is really what you did. So I would love to-- so you specialize in-- actually, you know what? Let me ask you one last question before I get to that. When did you start to call yourself a behavioral scientist? Like, when did you own that title? Do you remember? I would say probably about-- and I'm just making this up-- I think it's like that it feels right to me and ignoring whatever the past three years have been. Maybe about five or six years ago. And it's interesting because I think I dropped psychologists pretty quickly. When I joined Dan Arieli's lab, he's very much a behavioral economist. So I took on that title right away. I was like, OK, this is going to be my improvement. It's one step up from psychologists. People know behavioral economics is the thing right now. Everyone wants to be a behavioral economist. So I just went with that. That had its own issues, right? It's very niche. People don't really understand what behavioral econ is. There's different definitions among the popular audience and among people who are actually studying judgment and decision-making or really deep in the decision sciences. And so as soon as I saw-- I think the first time I saw behavioral science as an alternative to behavioral economics, I was like, OK, at the Center for Advanced Science, we're now a behavioral science lab. And I'm a behavioral scientist. And all of us are like, we're changing all our job titles. We're no longer. And I remember that conversation with Dan where I was like, remember how you think we're behavioral economists? Now we're behavioral scientists. Scientists. He still calls himself behavioral scientists. Yeah, he does. Yeah. He'll never change. But everyone else will. Honestly, I'm not too clear on the difference. What is the difference between behavioral economics and behavioral science? Is it just that behavioral economics is applied to the economy and financial problems? Absolutely not. No, Dan would be so angry if we were to say that. That is what many people associate with behavioral economics. And are you sure you want to get into this? We don't have to, but if you can point people to a resource that would help them answer that-- I'll give you the shortest version that I can muster without annoying myself. The behavioral economics, I really think of it. I think Dan would say is the study of irrationality. So it's really kind of a reaction to economics. And in particular, classical economics where all of these really pretty fake models of how people should behave given optimal conditions, these models have been constructed to predict behavior in all sorts of situations. And lots of decisions based on this idea of the rational actor, this homo economicist. And so behavioral economics was really a reaction to this to say, oh, look at us pick through your logic and show all of these instances where people are not rational. And these models are really misleading. And so that's sort of where-- that's close to a definition of behavioral economics. It has all sorts of other associations. And it's definitely not financial decision-making within-- it's not the behavioral science of financial decision-making. That I would just call behavioral science. And financial decision-making. OK. So I'm going to open it up to audience Q&A after this question, because we have a lot. And I also want to get to some that we're submitted ahead of time. But I just am curious about-- so you're-- you specialize in digital health, right? So what does it mean that you're a behavioral scientist who specializes in digital health? What are the problems you're dealing with, and how are you solving them? Yeah, I think-- I mean, I think that's really just one of the ways that I specialize. So I talked a lot about how I hate specialization earlier. But then I have this generalist who really focuses in on a certain type of problem. I think that's kind of-- But it's a big problem. So it is a high level problem. Yes, there are lots of health problems. And I'm attracted to the digital space and technology. I think that the ability to measure and intervene is just so huge within tech that I would only want to-- I shouldn't say that. I'm very attracted to technology. And digital health is just an interesting area for me with very hard, intractable problems. I think health problems are the hardest problems. There are not as many behavioral scientists studying health behavior and problems within the health space, at least in the real world. There's lots of health psychologists. There's not as many compared to, for example, behavioral scientists within FinTech or within government working on other problems. That's not to say that it's not growing because it's very much growing. And I'm seeing tons of jobs now within digital health. But it's a little bit behind, especially in, like, capital-H health care. Fairly health care is behind on everything, not just behavioral science. So what do I-- remind me of that in the actual question. Like, what is it-- can you give me an example of a problem you would try to solve? Yeah, sure. And some of the things are like, how do we help people take their medication or do their exercises within-- Can you help my physical therapist right now to make me do my exercises? Because the app is just not doing it for me. Oh, interesting. Well, I will say, pattern health is partnered with the joint health at Duke in order to create a physical therapy program that actually does exactly that. So it's-- OK. How do we create interventions that not only deliver the exercises and what do you have to do for your joint pain and recovery and this progression from-- sometimes it's post-surgery or pre-surgery prep and so on. But also, how do we bring in social support and accountability with through a care circle or how do we stand the right messages to the right people at the right time, how do we use technology and really deliver the right intervention that will be helpful to a particular person. And I think that personalization aspect is probably one that, going forward, I am most excited about. I think that if you look at personalization within academia, really, a lot of the research is very old school and not really-- it's not what you would call cutting edge. But if you look at applications within industry, particularly with health AI and machine learning and just like understanding data in new ways, I think that that's really where the field is going. OK, yeah. You answered one of my questions, which is what does the future of this field look like? So thanks for doing that. Well, that's not the only future. I think the future is integration. I think that right now we're starting to see behavioral science jobs. I think, hopefully, there will be a lot more behavioral science jobs than everyone will be a behavioral scientist. So we'll have a lot fewer behavioral scientists jobs, because it'll just be a part of what you do. And some people will be more or less trained. And it'll be more of a differentiating factor than this is my entire identity. OK, I have so many more questions that I-- I mean, I'll get to them if we run out of audience questions, but I'm going to transition over now. So let's see. OK, the first question I got is, what is more desirable to employers? A specific master's in behavioral science or a general MBA? Is a general MBA still attractive? A specific-- yeah, I mean, I struggle to generalize, because employers are like all people, right? So I'm going to give you a cup out. It depends. What is the job? Who's the employer? What are they looking for? What's the problem that they have? I think you'll be able to understand a bit more about where you stand based on the job description and talking to people at that organization. I also think that if you're a really strong candidate, it doesn't matter. If you've done interesting things and you have a good story, one is not better than the other. So someone asked, how to go about finding mentors? Cool. So behavioral science communities are growing. It's really easy to find people online, or at an online conference. Action design has monthly meetups. There are all kinds of communities. I hate to say join Twitter, especially now, but I actually learn a lot from my peers through the things that they share on the internet, podcasts, and so on. That's, I think, a first step in just getting a sense of what's happening and who to talk to. And then I would say, reach out to people. I did a lot of that kind of shamelessly, just asking people, hey, can I-- but you're not going to get that kind of in-depth mentoring that you need that way. I think you need to find someone who is within your organization who is also a behavioral scientist and can kind of show you the way. And if you can shadow them, just ask. People say yes. Just ask to shadow. So if somebody were to ask you, Alene, can I shadow you for a day and obviously expressed enthusiasm and interest in what you wanted and what you did? In theory, people are open to that. And you would maybe be open to that. If that person was at my organization, and I felt like we could develop a relationship, and I think also, if you're going to make that pitch try and think of what the other person can get out of it. So I sometimes get requests like, oh, I just want to pick your brain. And I'm like, I don't have any time. Yeah, that sounds great. But I do try and find-- so maybe I shouldn't share this. But I do with people who add me on LinkedIn, for example, just randomly. I host these intro chats where I get everyone in the past two or three months who has added me and just do introductions and talk about whatever they want to talk about. That's also-- --anything. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of a good thing to-- that's awesome. That's awesome. It's really fun. That's really, really cool. I mean, you're cool for doing that and offering your time in that way and giving back to young people. Well, I've gotten a lot, so it's the least I can do. Paying it forward, yes. OK, let's see. I think this is a good question. So how do I get hired if I don't have any prior-- if people are hiring for experience, but I don't have experience-- Yeah. How do I do that? Right, you know, it's a real cash 22. So yes, sometimes you have to really kind of start over-- working from a job that-- a position that feels maybe slightly less prestigious than you would like to think you're qualified for. But there are also lots of programs. Like if I think about that number of YouTube videos and the Coursera and edX and Khan Academy courses that I've taken just to kind of brush up my skills and learn things that I didn't-- don't have any formal training in. I think all of that looks good. And you can kind of speak to those sorts of things. There's also, you know, anyone can run an experiment. You can do that on your own. How? How? Oh, man. This is what people need, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can be able to run-- but how? Like in theory, yeah, I can run-- but what do I-- where do I start? Where do I go? Who do I ask? Can I get mentorship? Can I do it by myself? You can do it by yourself. You know, it's different when you're doing it on your own. I think the version that you might want to try would be, you know, like no ethics board would have any qualms with it. Like, you know, what do people like better? Two Hershey's kisses or a lint ball, et cetera. And then you put them out. And you know, you create your different conditions. You randomize people to condition. If you can, some, you know, some observational studies not going to go quite as-- it's not going to be as easy to do that. But you know, there's the internet. If you create a website, you can send half of your visitors to one page and half of your visitors to another page and then see what happens. Like with technology these days, it is so easy to run an experiment. And you can do that. You can either just see organically who trickles in or you can recruit people. You can pay them like, you know, what is the Ebtirk rate? Like $0.5 a minute or something. Like it's very cheap to get people to do really easy manual labor. And if that's-- if you want to have, you know, a couple of experiments under your belt and you have to spend, you know, $500 at the most to do that. Maybe it's worth it to you. It's definitely a lot less expensive than an MBA, for example. Yeah. This is-- OK, so somebody asked a question that I'm glad you asked about this because I got this-- or version of this question many, many times. People are asking, what are entry-level industry like job titles to even eye out for and apply behavioral science. And that can be for, you know, recent bachelor's level people or even master's level people. How do you break in at an entry level? What are the job titles you should be looking for? I think, if you know. Fortunately, the way that many job search technologies are created is that you don't have to search for the exact title. You can search for behavioral scientists. You can search for behavioral designer or even just behavioral science, behavioral design. And maybe those are-- you know, the keywords will pop up some things that might be relevant and some things that are not as relevant. And you have to do some searching to figure out what's right. So I think those are good places to start. You know, if you search for psychology, human factors, you're going to get a lot of things that maybe aren't as relevant. But job hunting is a job. It's hard. So you just kind of have to like, trudge through it. The world is not in a place where it will be easy to find a one-to-one match where you just do a search and the right thing pops up. It's going to be hard. That said, I think that a lot of leads-- and it's no lie that jobs come about often through networking and relationship building and just being a part of a community. So in my LinkedIn and my Twitter, I see six new behavioral science jobs a day because I'm connected to all the other behavioral scientists and those jobs. So I think part of being in that community and just like having all of that just pop up, training your algorithms to give you what you want. It's more of a long-term feed and train approach than a, OK, I'm going to go into LinkedIn or Indeed or wherever people search for jobs and type in behavioral scientists and get the right result. That's, you know, do it, but you're going to get a lot of false positives. But yeah, no, no, sorry, finish what you were going to say. No, I think I was just going to say, again, relationships are really important. I was Chesky, red my mind, OK? Yeah, somebody asked what role networking had in getting your current position or we could say broadly, any positions you've ever applied for, what role did networking and relationship building play in that? I think-- I don't want to say networking is everything because obviously you have to show that you're good at things in order for people to want to work with you and recommend you and so on. That's kind of a, you know, it's the obvious part of it. But yeah, yeah, referrals have a huge impact. There's studies showing this, the impact of a referral. I wish I had the number on hand, but it's insane how many jobs just come from, oh, my buddy did some stuff down the road. Why don't you talk to them, whatever? There's also some problems with this approach in the world because of how some people end up floating to the top and maybe don't deserve it. But if you're the person who's looking for that job, make connections and use them. It's those weak ties. It doesn't have to be your best friend. Yes, and I also wanted to-- so while we're on this, where-- so if you're somebody who wants to get into behavioral science or looking for a job, where do behavioral scientists live or spend their time that you can go and network with them and build relationships with them? And I know it's hard in this world, but I feel like things are starting to open up again. So even virtual spaces or in-person spaces, where do they live? Where can I go? There's a scanner box if you're here and do it. No, they live on the internet. They live, I think they're kind of-- they want to be seen because behavioral sciences are such a small community that so many of them are shouting from all the rooftops. I'm a behavioral scientist. Come, listen to what I do. I have a podcast. Habit Weekly is a newsletter where that shares jobs and all kinds of articles and resources, et cetera. I say that because the Samuel is my podcast. He posts and he puts out that publication. The behavioral scientist is another publication that will connect you to at least the names of the people. In terms of the communities, I mean, I stay in touch with people through Slack, through Twitter, through LinkedIn, and setting up my own calls just to stay in touch. It's not different from any other job, I think, where there are sort of formal and informal communities. I think I mentioned earlier, action design is setting these chats up. That's probably the most direct. If you are, I think it's really geared towards people who are already practitioners who are doing the applying of behavioral-- I hate the word-- practitioners, but people use it so I do too. Yes, so people who are applying behavioral science within the organizations and want to talk about their struggles and their wins, but mostly their failures-- that's a good place. Do behavioral scientists like to talk about their-- especially like to talk about their failures? Oh, don't-- doesn't everyone? I don't know. Just me, just me. I feel like-- yeah. Successes are boring. Failures are interesting. Well, that's a good mindset to have. OK, somebody asked an interesting question. How do you feel that the priorities of industry impact your work, such as profit, efficiency, things like that? Oh, man. It's tough. I think you have to be really picky in finding an organization that shares your values and also where the application of behavioral science is aligned with the bottom line. So for me, helping people adhere to their health program or make better health decisions, even though it's somewhat indirect, like always ties back to customers are happy. Users are using the programs. More, they're more like adherents. It partially is using the product. And so if you can kind of get all of those things to run in the same direction, if you have that control, or at least you can find an organization that is set up in that way, then you're good to go. If there's a conflict between those things, that's difficult. For me, I would say don't work at that place, but if you have options in the ability to do that, then great. If not, see what checks and balances are there, is there an ethics board? How independent is the research from the product? What is the chain of command and how do different parts of the organization talk to each other? What freedom and independence does the science team have to even say, no, we're just going to do things that are important for people's well-being. And that kind of risks, that's the first business unit to get chopped when there's a ton of sizing. So you've got to be careful of that. I know it's 12 o'clock or whatever. It's the top of the hour, wherever you are. So if you want to stay for a little bit longer, we're going to go for another 10-ish minutes. But feel free to hop off if you have another commitment. So somebody asks, besides experiments, what are other measures of success for a behavioral scientist? So I think experiments are huge. And there's a lot of behavioral scientists who don't do any experiments. And I would say maybe try some experiments. But yeah, there are lots of really exciting methods that are maybe less experimental, but still involved data getting into what we can do with machine learning and so on. And I'm not going to get into that. But I think very exciting avenues within data science itself. And that's something that, as a psychologist, often training kind of stops unless you're really specializing in a quant heavy program. You really won't get much training even as a PhD in the kinds of advanced statistical methods that people are using within computer science. And I think that's a really interesting intersection looking at how do you measure and maybe not even intervene. But there are methods and ways of determining causality that among those who are really experts in this space that don't even require an experiment. And there are other ways of quasi-experimental methods, for example, where you're looking pre and post at or comparing year over year. Here are our sales from August last year and August the year before, and then kind of using that as a benchmark where you don't necessarily have to run an experiment. And maybe you have some confidence that your intervention worked and you've succeeded, but you don't have as much confidence as you would with an experiment. And sometimes you just have to make those trade-offs. Sometimes you don't have the resources or the time or the support. Sometimes there are privacy and security concerns with running an experiment. And so it's perfectly valid to try other approaches. There are also all kinds of user testing approaches that you can take that add something different in terms of qualitative feedback, so not just focus groups, but really take, say, my space is in the app space. So you have your digital health app and you have a guided conversation with 10 different individuals on a one-on-one basis. And you have them go through and you see, oh, where do they stumble, where is it intuitive, what the action is that they need to do versus and so on. And that kind of testing is different and really complimentary to something like an RCT, but really very valuable. All of your vice is so great and so helpful. We have a lot of questions that I didn't get to yet. Let me see. Somebody asked, how does someone with a varied background get into the digital-- they asked digital therapeutic space, but I'm going to switch it to digital health space to keep it general without starting over from square one. I mean, just do it. Thanks. Just do it. Just talk to some people, apply to a job and do it. You don't-- yeah. I don't know. I'm trying to think like, is there a-- That's OK. It's also hard to give specific advice when you don't know the person or their background. But I like your mindset of like, just try. Don't be afraid of feedback. Seek it out. And then see, do I need to take another course or do I need other credentials or do I need to run a couple more experiments or get a mentorship mentor to help me out? I think in general, people are very cautious when it comes to career moves and when it comes to their training and really want to make like a perfectly reasoned decision. But the truth is you're going to-- whatever you do, you're going to come up with a nice story to justify what you did later anyway. So if you just kind of do something crazy and apply to a job that you don't feel qualified for and then get really good at it, and in 10 years, you're going to be talking about how cool it was that you did that and how it-- it's just like just do what you think is going to be enjoyable. We only have 4,000 weeks on this planet. You've calculated that? Oh, I have it. Others. I want others to do the calculating. And then steal their math. So I have one last question for you that I always ask my guests at the end. Actually, let me ask you two last quick questions. One is, if you could tell your undergraduate self one piece of advice. What would you tell her? Mm-hmm. One, anything? Drink less? No. She was just kidding. She was fine. She was fine. She still is. I think I didn't really have an appreciation for the importance of computer science and what that was going to become in the future. And so I don't know that I would have taken a computer science class at the time. I think I would have given Futurali in the finger and said, I don't feel like doing that. But yeah, that would have been useful to have that kind of foundation early on while I was in that really supportive, just learn kind of environment, rather than kind of trying to hack things together later. But yeah, I try not to be so hard on little Alim. Like, she's all right. My last question for you is, what is one skill, quality, or general factor? It does not have to be intrinsic that has served you no matter where you went in life. Oh, dear. Take your time. No, I don't need any. It's so obvious. Curiosity, I think, is the thing that all behavioral scientists haven't common is this like passion for like, why did that just happen? Or like, what is that? Or just wondering, you know, like, I just went to Disneyland with my sister. And the whole time we were talking about like the psychology of lines and like, what Disneyland does to make it. Yeah, I mean, it's so fascinating, though. I agree with you. I'm right there with you. Why do you think I run this podcast, curiosity, man? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's the thing, 100% for real. I love that. You are the best. Thank you for doing this. You are. Guys, I'm sure you have so many more questions for her. I'm sorry if we didn't get to yours. Thank you for being attentive and sending questions and making today what it was. I had such a good time. You are so fun to chat with. And I look forward to releasing this on Thursday. Thank you, everyone. Awesome. Thank you. 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