[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We know there's no easy button, but if there are any like, lights that we can follow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, if you could each take one minute and then I think I'll, I'll, uh, yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thank you all for sharing all your stories, and I realize a lot of you are pre-hiring, so you aren't thinking about some of these issues, but I created a resource list.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's sort of a living document. So uhm, I will list everything that you guys mentioned, all the resources and tools that you've used. Uhm, and we're, you know, Steven is gonna be sharing that with the class and with everyone online. Uhm, and Jen, I wanted you to talk a little bit about the framework for creating like ongoing D&I programs, but I'm just gonna have you, since we don't have time, uh, I will hopefully work with you on a blog that you can...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And Lever also has an incredible series. It's a ten part series that walks through.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More on this. Uhm, so, uh, we will be sharing that list with you, uh, and also kind of putting together all your notes and then anything else that we missed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, this is such a meaty topic and there's, you know, a lot here. Uhm, but thank you also for, for listening and, uhm, you are feel, you feel free to reach out to me with any questions that you have, either for the speakers or for me. Uhm, I'm Kat, K-A-T at ycombinator.com and I can connect you to any of these.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Any of these ladies and gentlemen, uhm, if that's desired. So thank you again, uhm, and thank you. I wanna, I wanna reply.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, my name is Kat Perez and I am the co-founder and CPO at Health Sherpa. Uh, we are a technology platform and team of people helping individuals enroll in marketplace coverage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, we've enrolled over 840,000 folks on our platform to date apart from product, uhm, and just leadership things. I also lead up DNI at HealthSherpa and we're about 20, scaling up to about 40, 50 in the on-season, the open enrollment season.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah. So uhm, for our team, I mean, I was, I was higher number seven, uhm, and we, I mean, we were a pretty small team. We scaled up, uh, really quickly, but by nature of who we're serving, we are serving,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, folks of lower income, uh, folks who would qualify for subsidies on the marketplace.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Kaiser Family Foundation released a report, I think for 2015.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, the majority of the uninsured under 65 market in the United States are, uh, people of color, over half. Uhm, so 55 to 60%. Specifically, Latinx, Hispanic communities as well as black and African American communities. So for us, it was, it's a no-brainer. I mean, our mission is to,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Enroll these people, give them access to coverage, let them know what options they have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you can't do that if you have a team that does not reflect that audience. So it's, for us it was really simple and straightforward why we needed to do that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so, so we, we had a few missteps, I'd like to call them, uhm, and early on when we started our D&I initiatives.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we started about two years ago, and at the time, you know, I had come on as hire number seven, so we were still pretty small. Made the really big mistake of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Assuming everyone had the same, uh, perception of what diversity and inclusion meant to each and every one of us and our lived experiences.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and that means everyone, including, you know, white cis males on the team, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Jenny talked about this, but one of our biggest mis-missed ups was just not, not necessarily even


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Practicing this, this concept of inclusion with, with our white cis male team members, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thoughts matter, uhm, and they need to be involved in the conversation as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, I think that was our, that was our biggest mistake is just assuming, oh, team of seven, everyone conceptually agrees we should do this, uhm, but not really having that tough, uncomfortable conversation about it. Uhm, and then the second thing I'll just add there is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We approached it as a to-do list, which is a terrible thing to do. Uhm, we were overly ambitious. We had like seven initiatives we wanted to roll out at the same time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Definitely don't do that. It's, one is enough. We learned to approach MVP style. Start small because this stuff is really, uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Emotionally taxing and intense and triggering for people, so uhm.


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[Assistant] So yeaah, just starting small would have been something we would have changed from the start.


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[Assistant] Can only share what's worked for us. What's worked for us may not work for everyone. There is no playbook. The one size or blueprint that, you know, one size fits all. Uhm, for us at HealthShare, but what we did when we were hiring, uhm, is we leveraged pop tools, not to be mistaken with the other.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so people ops tools, that's what, that's what it stands for. Uhm, one specifically that we use, it's called, it was called Unitive, it's a Kport Capital, a portfolio company, they're called Talent Sonar now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and we used it to run our job descriptions through it. Uhm, and the job description check would, would score the job description. It would call out words that were heavily biased. Uhm, and the reason we did that was to obviously cast a wider nut.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so, super easy tool to use, uhm, they had other features like the blind resume review, uhm, as well as, uh, scoring questions and making sure that, uhm, each person who was interviewing a candidate was asking every single person the same question and those questions map back to competencies and skills that you need, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This, when you're a startup, you're gonna do things in a scrappy way, but we finally built some structure around our interview process.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And what we, what we ended up finding after rolling out that one initiative is we ended up hitting our diversity goals. We, we 2x'd our Hispanic, Latinx, um, hires and team members as well as our, um, black, uh, team members as well. So, so it totally worked. Uhm, another thing I like to throw in there as we had that new team,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hiring diverse team members, especially when you're serving diverse communities really does impact your bottom line.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Baseball Game. Written by Russ Buiak. Focus Question.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What can you see at a baseball game?


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[Assistant] Connections. Writing and art. Draw a picture of yourself playing baseball. Label the items in your picture. Science.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Share your ideas with a partner.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, my name is Emmett. I, uh, graduated from Yale Computer Science, uh, in 2005. Uh, started my first company, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right out of college, uh, we made a bad copy of Google Calendar before Google Calendar existed. And uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then we started, uh, Justin TV, which is the company that wound up turning into Twitch.


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[Assistant] Uh, and so I've been doing basically continuously employed working on that since 2006.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, our, our primary metric that we care about is a metric, uh, called minutes watched. It's the number of minutes of video that are consumed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, every month on Twitch, uh, and we just crossed, uh, 30 billion minutes.


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[Assistant] Interesting thing, uh, for me, between Twitch and Justin TV, uh, which are two very similar products, right? They're both live video products with chat. Uh, for Justin TV, we were our own users. Uh, we were building a product for us to build a TV show. And after that, we really sort of declined to actually speak to users in any significant way. Uhm, and,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unsurprisingly, all of the good ideas we had were things we came up with when we were building it for ourselves, which sort of brings me to my first point of talking to users is it's possible, especially very early, to build a product for yourself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and if you truly are building something that is for you to use, uh, that can be super effective. In fact, you don't necessarily need to talk to anyone else. Uhm, eventually you'll need to because...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you have to actually really want it. Uh, it can't be, you can't be like lying to yourself about that. It can't be something that you think is cool. It has to be something you, yourself, actually desperately want to use every day.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then we went through a long period in the desert where we were wandering about, uh, not talking to users, not really using our own product and not building anything of, of value. Uhm, and the thing we did with Twitch that I thought was really


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, good for talking to users is we talk to them in person. Uhm, I had done some amount of surveys and talking to users over email. Uhm, and I found that getting people on, at least on Skype, or if not, uh, literally in person, uh, changed my depth of understanding of who they were. Uhm, the other thing I would say about it is that we focus down really hard on


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which of our users we cared about and we decided it was the broadcasters and we decided not only was it the broadcasters, it was like the successful broadcasters. We didn't want to talk to people who had two viewers. We wanted to talk to people who had 200 viewers. Uhm, and so we went and talked to a bunch of, uh, broadcasters on the platform because we decided they were the important ones.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The other thing we did that was, I think, really valuable is we decided it wasn't just people who are currently using our service, it was people who...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We wanted to use our service and so we talked to a bunch of people who were streaming on other platforms rather than just already on Twitch because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The, the people who have cho- chosen to not use your product, especially if they've-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Deliberately looked at your product, decided it sucked, and went somewhere else, are like some of the best people to talk to. Uh, because they know what's wrong with it. Uhm, and so I actually think the most valuable things I learned, especially early on, were from users who had tried Justin TV, they'd tried Ustream, uh, they'd tried Own3D,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, they tried YouTube and they had a coherent opinion as to why ours was not the one they chose. Uhm, and that was super valuable. Uh, because they really pointed at the details of where we were wrong.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's like. One of the, memorably one of the biggest issues was we were not listed on the Team Liquid Starcraft, uh, web, fan website.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was like one of, like, we lost maybe, you know, 3,000 broadcasters over that. Uh, we had to email them and ask them to like, relist us, because they just hadn't, didn't have us there. Uh, yeah, tiny, tiny issue, but like, really mattered to our users.


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[Assistant] Uh, saying about, about minimum viable products, uhm, they like to call them, uh, what they're aiming for, a minimum remarkable product, which I think gets more at what you're trying to accomplish, which is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A viable product brings into mind this whole ecosystem of support, like a viable organism that's got all the things it needs to live. And you don't actually want that. Like if you're launching something that's actually self-sufficient, that's viable in a real, in like a, this thing could go live on its own sense, you definitely waited too long. Like this thing is going to be on life support when you launch it, and you are the life support system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What you actually want is you want something about the product when you launch it to be


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Actually good. You want to get to the point where you've built something that maybe at least one person in the world finds remarkably useful or remarkably good. And you don't know really if you've gotten there until you


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Put it in front of someone, which is why you need to launch it so quickly. But I, you know.


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[Assistant] I think it's really important to remember like Dropbox, for example, one of the big YC successes, uh, did not launch an immediate product because they were building a backup.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The minimum remarkable product for Dropbox was a video.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, basically saying, look at this awesome thing we're going to build, uh, and getting people to sign up for a newsletter. And that's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That worked because the idea, like the visual idea of what Dropbox was going to do was super compelling.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, that would not have worked for Justin TV. Uhm, we really needed to get something out in front of customers immediately. Most importantly, because we really needed to produce this show. We had this idea we were going to go build a show, and we basically did the minimum possible work, maybe a little less than that, to get a show onto the internet. Uhm, and,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we launched it, we, it like, could only have one channel, uh, the


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[Assistant] The way that broadcasting worked, we had, the only way we could actually get it to work consistently is we had a, uh, Mac Mini running Parallels, which is a virtualization environment, uh, for Windows XP where we had this piece of, uh, broadcasting software called


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[Assistant] It got bought by Adobe later. On Flix? Online? I can't remember. Anyway, uh.


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[Assistant] That we were automating with Windows shell scripting.


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[Assistant] To pick up the right, the, the camera input, and then auto reboot if it went down, uh, because it broke all the time, because it was a, uh, really buggy software.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That extremely jury-rigged, uh, thing worked. It, like, put a video stream on the internet. Uh, and, like, it was not a scale, like, we could not scale that up to thousands of streams. It was impossible. Uh, but we got something that at least was compelling to at least one person onto the internet, um, that was compelling to us. And, uh, that was, that was a critical step for us. Because before we did that, we basically weren't learning anything.


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[Assistant] Having historical baselines for important user actions, uh, you will thank yourself later. Every time I've ever been like, oh right, you know, how many people are, are using that feature?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we like, don't know. And we, we can't find out. And now, now, even if we find out how much it is now, we don't know if that's like, up a lot or down a lot. And like, we have no idea whether, what the trends are. It's, uh, it's awful and you then can't make a decision for another three to six months until you, as you build that baseline.


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[Assistant] Uhm, actually I got the best advice about this from Suhail, uh, who runs Mixpanel, uh, when he was convincing us to try Mixpanel, uh, for the first time. Which by the way didn't work because Mixpanel at that time was only like six months old and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It broke when we tried to, like, instrument everything. But, uh, we went back to it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It works a lot better now. Uh, we went back to it. Uh, we're still on Mixpanel today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we use a bunch of other stuff too, because we're, uh, a little too big for just Mixpanel. But, uh.


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[Assistant] Uh, Mixpanel, uh, the advice Suhail gave me that was, uh, I think more important than the software or using Mixpanel specific, even though I do think it's good software, was pick your top five to seven most important user actions, whatever those are, and just log those.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like you don't need to log everything. You really don't. You don't, most of the things people can do with your product aren't important.


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[Assistant] There's maybe five things people can do, like for Reddit, right? It might be like vote on something, comment on something, submit a story, load a page.


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[Assistant] I don't know, some short list of things, and...


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[Assistant] Those are important, and you can kind of just ignore everything else. Uhm, if they're not, if it's not instrumented, who cares? Uhm, and so we instrumented, I watched a minute of video, I sent a chat message, I followed a stream, uh, and I, uh, bought a subscription. And that turned out to just give, like, those four


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And also, the other thing I'd recommend is use a third-party service. Like, use...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You collect logs, like by all means, like put them into your own system because I guarantee you, you'll want to do something the third party service doesn't allow at some point and you'll be super annoyed if your data is only in the third party service. So collect logs or whatever, but just in the beginning you don't have time to mess around with building


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So just use Mixpanel or use Google Analytics or use whatever. Anything. They're all, they're all better than what you need right now. Later on, you'll need something more complicated. You don't need it today.


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[Assistant] I've also gone through a bunch of redesigns, uhm, like big, big redesigns where you have to rebuild the whole product. Uhm, they've,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They've been mixed actually. We've had some that were super successful. Twitch did a big redesign of our mobile app maybe three years ago, uh, from the first version that had basically been a cloned version of the Justin TV app.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, to a completely new version. It's basically the version you can use today. And, uh, that increased engagement by like 35-40%.


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[Assistant] Uhm, per customer, uh, when we launched it. It's huge, like you-


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[Assistant] Changes that make that big of an impact are actually really rare. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, they're usually data errors and in this case it wasn't. In this case it actually was like a huge increase in usage. Uhm, and so absolutely redesigns can make a big difference. Uh, but we weren't doing the big twitch, we didn't do that redesign because we'd like


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They fall into this trap that engineers and product managers often fall into, which is, oh, we have to fix these eight things. Let's just fix them all at once. It'll be easier. Uhm, that that's wrong. You should just fix them each one at a time individually. If you have eight things that are wrong with your product, that's awesome. You like have this huge great list of things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just fix them one at a time. Like fix everything one at a time. Uh, crank them out quickly, you'll get there way faster one change at a time than you will in a big rewrite.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A big right for a really early stage startup is almost equivalent to like pivoting the company, and I just like generally advise against it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You talk to your users first, and then you have the ideas about the product. Almost everyone does it in the opposite order. It's called product validation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you find yourself thinking I'm going to go talk to my users to validate my product idea, you've gone horribly off the rails. You do it in the other order. You don't talk to users to validate your product ideas. You talk to your users to have your product ideas. And so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I just have a- I just have a rule in general for people who want to have a-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Voice in product design is that they better talk to the users and look at the data too. If you haven't talked to users and you haven't looked at data, you don't get to have opinion about the product. I'm sorry, like the person who's actually done the work gets to have the opinion. You can have ideas, but they get to make the call. But in the case you wind up where both people really have talked to the users and both people really have looked at the data.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And people still disagree as to what we should build. Uhm, which by the way is actually much more rare. Once both people have actually talked to users and actually looked at the data,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's usually relatively easy to get to consensus, uh, but it will come up where people still disagree.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have found it's better when you just have someone who's in charge. Uhm, at the end of the day you have someone who's the CEO and everyone agrees this person's judgment will be trusted and you let them make the call.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, don't, don't avoid conflict, talk about it, argue about it, but then,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have someone who just gets to make the call. Uh, cause anything else leads to just decision making that's far too slow for a startup.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One thing I've found actually is that if you, your goal of talking to users shouldn't be course corrections on a


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then actually we could have gone, we didn't because we had other reasons to go talk to users, but we could have gone six months without talking to a user. Because we actually, we knew what users wanted. They wanted to make money on the service, like streamers wanted to make money, they wanted to reach more viewers, and they wanted positive social feedback for what they were doing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you kind of just check anything you were doing. Is this going to deliver this to our streamers? Like yes or no. Uh, and if so, how much? Great. You don't have to talk to anybody. You already know what they want. Uhm, and you need to go back


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And revisit it and sort of talk to users periodically because you need to understand,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More of the nuances of, you know, the things about your service that are bugging them and someone else doing something really cool. But, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The goal of talking to users is not to get them to tell you what features to build, uhm, because users are really bad at that. They actually have no idea what features to build. The goal of talking to users is to like, get to understand them really well, uhm, and users don't change that fast. Uh, so I actually, I personally prefer more in-depth time, uh, with my customers, talking to them for a while, and then


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Depending on the size of the thing we need to do or what we're trying to move, we might go just work and build and look at metrics for the next six months. Uhm, and not actually talk to users that much for a while. Uhm, because if you know that what people want is to make more money,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can spend six months optimizing, you know, the sell through rate on a, on an object or on how much advertising you have, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you just can have faith that it's going to be good, uhm, and you will be rewarded.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Making sure, as much as I said, don't talk to users, you don't have to talk to users every week. It's totally unnecessary. You do need to look at your numbers every week.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You really need to know, and you don't need to look at them every day, it's actually like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pointless and almost just ego gratification to look at your numbers every day. But you should look at your numbers every single week.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you should confront, are they up or down, uh, and ask yourself why. Uh, and the holy grail of product design.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is for your numbers to move and for you to truly understand why they moved, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We still struggle with that. Like I don't, I, there have been points where I felt like I understood it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then it slips away again as the business gets more complicated. Uh, but you're always trying to be able to explain fully down to like atomic ground truth, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We are up 20% this week because we got this many more new devices in and our retention rate is this on those devices and this is the conversion rates and if you do the math and you can explain it all the way down to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This new feature moved this conversion rate on this page by this amount, and therefore we are up. And if you can really do that, it's super powerful, it's also really hard, but you'll never get there if you don't build the intuition of just looking at it every week.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, an advertising product actually, uhm, which is funny. Uh, so all of our users told us really, really clearly uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And make money off of our, uh, off of our streams. Uh, that was a clear desire. Everybody wanted it. And they also told us their least favorite thing about our competing pro-competitor's products was that they would show these ads over the stream and it would be disruptive to their user's experience and they hated it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, and it was very interesting getting these two pieces of feedback because they both really wanted us to put ads on and sometimes literally the same, sometimes different people, sometimes actually literally the same people, their biggest complaint about the opposing service was, uh, competitive service is annoying my, my viewers with all these ads. Uh, and this is like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is a hard nut to crack because you kinda need to solve for both. You're not allowed to just give up as a product manager and pick one. And I'm really proud of our solution, which was we gave them a button. We inverted it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we gave the streamer the ability to hit a button to run ads on their own channel. And, like, it's funny because normally you'd think of, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, that is something that will, if you're uploading content to like, you know, Facebook, you would never like press a button to, on that to show more ads to your friends. Uhm, but because we were cutting them in on the revenue, they were actually heavily incentivized to hit this button. Uhm, and we basically got this paid workforce of, uh, people placing advertising in the down time of the, uh, of the stream.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, and I'm really proud of that clever solution. I think it's, it points at something that I think is a really important principle of product design in general, which is, uh, that you want to just try inverting all of your assumptions. Um, there's, we, we got stuck on that advertising problem for a long time because we didn't want to make it disruptive to the customer experience and we couldn't figure out how to automate, uh, putting it on the stream in a good way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And at the same time, we really wanted to show ads on the video stream. And we, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we had this implicit assumption in our heads that, uh, we had to figure out where to put the at. Um, and once we gave that assumption up, uh, it was much more clear what to do going forward. And I think that's a,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's one of the most, I don't know, I was really proud of that product because it was one of the things that made our, made our broadcasters super happy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, and, and no one can, like, you can't complain, you hit the button.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's a really good question. I don't know the numbers offhand a lot. It's clicked very often. People, people really like that button because it's a click the button, make $15 button and like, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But they're also aware of the trade-off, uh, which is that their, their viewers don't like it when they hit the button too much. Um, and so by make, you know, putting that in their court, they get to make the optimal trade-off for their stream and, uh, in their situation.


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[Assistant] It's really obvious when you've hit product market fit. So your product is bad. Uh, you can point at seven things that are broken about it. Uhm, and, uh, you have all these features you know you need to build. And,


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[Assistant] Weirdly, it's growing really fast anyways. Like it's really obvious in your product market fit, your product is growing like crazy. And you are spending, you don't get to fix any things that are broken or bad about your product, because you're spending all of your time, uh, fixing it as it scales. Uh, and you are,


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[Assistant] So I, I, the metaphor I use for startups, uh, is kind of Sisyphean. You're like pushing this boulder up a hill. Uhm, and you're pushing the boulder and you're pushing the boulder and you're pushing the boulder. Uh, product markets fit is when you crest the hill. Uh, and your job doesn't get easier, but it does change a lot because now you're chasing the boulder as it tries to roll away from you down the hill on the other side. And, uh, now you're sprinting flat out trying to catch up.


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[Assistant] Uh, which is hard in its own way, uh, but it feels totally different because whereas before you have this like, oh god, we're like,


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[Assistant] Every inch is like, as Steve was describing with Hipmunk, every inch is like you're pushing this boulder and you're fighting for every inch. Now it's like, oh crap, like.


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[Assistant] If we don't keep up with this, it's gonna run away from us. Uhm, and that's a, that's a totally different feeling and you'll know. And here's the problem.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and it's, it's, I guess, uh, it's like asking how do you know if you're in love. Trust me, you know.


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[Assistant] Uh, I think the, uh, uh, there's two kinds of startups. Uh, there are startups that are building things for themselves. Uh, and where your customer is easy to identify, it's you and people like you. Uh, and there are startups building things for a third party group of users. Uh, where...


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[Assistant] You should arrive at which customers are your customers through an analytic mode, right? Through like, thinking about the problem. So Twitch is an analytic startup, because I was a huge fan of watching game streaming, but actually I wasn't much of a streamer. I've never been much of a streamer. And...


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[Assistant] Uh, I basically dug in on Justin TV and realized that like,


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[Assistant] 80% of the minutes watched were coming from our top 200 streamers.


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[Assistant] And I was like, oh, they're the most important people. We lose them, we lose everything, and if we can get 200 more of them, we'll be twice as big. And so, uh,


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[Assistant] It was sort of identified analytically that that was the right group of users.


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[Assistant] And those are the right customers. And I think that, uh, you should just know which one you are. Uh, and the most important thing there is that if it's not for you, if you're not legitimately building something for you and for you to use,


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[Assistant] You aren't a big group of people, uhm, in this case. Uh, you should absolutely use the analytic mode, and like, I don't know, it's different for every single company, but like, think hard about it, I don't know.


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[Assistant] Written by Sarah Gusan Illustrated by Beatrice Castro Focus Question


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[Assistant] Discuss your ideas with a partner.


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[Assistant] To look like Katy Perry anymore sometimes. Okay. And like, that is a little bit of why.


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[Assistant] I'm really happy. Mine doesn't have enough salt and pepper.


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[Assistant] Close those eyes! Why do I have to close my eyes? Do it! Yeah, they're closed. Tighter! Yes sir. No peeking! Alright, they're closed. Rico!


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[Assistant] Open that hatch. Aaaaah. Fire in the hole! Achoo!


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[Assistant] Too like you mean it. Savor it. Mmm. And? Well?


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[Assistant] Nah. Just smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave.


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[Assistant] Shovels and find more popsicle sticks. You don't want to risk another cave in.


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[Assistant] And me, Skipper? I want you to look cute and cuddly, Private. Today we're gonna blow this dump.


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[Assistant] You, quadruped, spreckin' the English? I spreckin'. What continent is this? Manhattan. Hoover, damn, you're still in


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[Assistant] Do you ever see any penguins running free around New York City? Of course not. We don't belong here. It's just not natural.


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[Assistant] This is all some kind of whacked out conspiracy. We're going to the wide open spaces of Antarctica. To the wild. The wild?


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[Assistant] Thanks! I love it, Melvin, I love it!


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[Assistant] Back to your roots, clean air, wide open spaces!


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[Assistant] Doesn't it bother you guys that you don't know ANYTHING about life outside this zoo?


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[Assistant] I'm ten years old, my life is half over. And I don't even know if I'm black with white stripes or white with black stripes.


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[Assistant] Hmm, you have to say the secret words. Then you can come into our house.


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[Assistant] Granny, I love our tree house. I don't want to ever come out.


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[Assistant] The idea of being streamed, it feels stunty to me. How much is, let's say, Katherine Hudson?


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[Assistant] Household. Yes. All of which is being live streamed to the world.


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[Assistant] Thank you Katy. I really appreciate it. Good on you, Katy Perry, for trying to grow in a way that I think a lot of people don't try to do.


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[Assistant] I respect that she's willing to question everything in a public setting.


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[Assistant] I think I understand the impulse of saying I want to bear whatever I can to people. She communicates a strength and a vulnerability simultaneously that I think is appealing to people. It's appealing to me. Take 14. Hold that shot.


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[Assistant] I have not met Katy Perry. Not only that, I barely knew who Katy Perry is because I live under a political rock. Uh, I had to Google Katy Perry, which was very embarrassing to a lot of my friends who told me I need a pop culture tutor.


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[Assistant] Come on now, baby. My little fillet.


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[Assistant] Does this work? Oh. So I'm Sarah and this is my co-founder Andrew. Uhm, we're building Kani. Uh, Kani helps teams collect and manage feedback from their users. Uhm, essentially what it is is teams can integrate our product into their website or mobile app and that allows their users to post and vote on feedback.


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[Assistant] Yeah, uhm, we lost our MVP about a month ago on Product Hunt, uhm, and that was pretty good traffic, uhm.


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[Assistant] We have, uh, 25 paying customers, so those are people who have, uh, either integrated or using us in a certain way.


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[Assistant] Uhm, it's the range, so uhm, on the low end we have like a two dollar plan, which was our, our alternative to freemium, uhm, GPM, and uh, and it goes from 1949, 129 from there.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and we're really, it's really early and we're trying to iterate on this and figure out what our best price point is, which is probably one of our main challenges right now, I think.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I mean, I think so the 2.1 was kind of special. We were flip-flopping between freemium and gpm. And I think.


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[Assistant] That was a good decision because it narrowed down our potential customers by a lot and


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[Assistant] We figured that people who are not going to pay us anything were never going to pay us anything.


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[Assistant] 19. Uhm, we limited our 2R plan very heavily, so it's really people who, like, are a solo founder, probably, no revenue, yea.


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[Assistant] Right, so right now we're charging by how many end users you have. Uhm, that was kind of our proxy to how much value the company was going to get from our product.


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[Assistant] This is kind of a challenge, uhm, especially because we can't particularly tell how many users they have. Uhm, so we're iterating on this as well.


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[Assistant] It really depends on how many end users they have and also how well they've implemented our tools.


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[Assistant] Like if it's less discoverable, they're gonna get less feedback. And so we've been trying to, um, help that by giving them design advice.


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[Assistant] But, um, like our top team probably has 300 posts. Um, and the thing about this versus email is that you might get, you know, if a post has a hundred votes, you might get a hundred different emails. And so we help you like,


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[Assistant] Save time by responding to all those 100 people at once instead of like sending individual emails back and forth.


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[Assistant] As an aside to this, I think we can, we've been getting a lot of feedback that we can actually charge a lot more. And so uhm, I think there's a few features that we can build out that will help a lot. Do you use your own products? Do you have a, yeaah. Definitely. Uhm, that's a good way to figure out if it's providing value.


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[Assistant] As an alternative to GitHub and GitHub issues, I think, uhm, and they're bringing us in a lot of people, I think that's a, that's a good move for us. Uhm, but so far I think our strategy is really to, you know, put our product in front of the public, uhm, you know, it's powered by candy, uhm, and that's, yeaah, kind of where we're at with that.


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[Assistant] Yeah. So right now we've decided to go this other way for now, but uhm, you know,


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[Assistant] There is a possibility that this is, uhm, that one day we're connecting all the users if they post on multiple, you know, products that, uhm, that use Kani. Uhm, we can connect all those people, so maybe there's some potential there eventually, yeaah.


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[Assistant] Kenny was really hard to find, uhm, we went through many different, uh, names but, uhm, a core part of our product is the subdomain. And we didn't want to use something that was like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Get this or try this, uhm, use this, uhm.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so something short and sweet, uhm, we got candy.io, so it's not the worst, but it's not, it's not the best.


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[Assistant] Uhm, to your point about, uh, broad use cases.


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[Assistant] After our product launch, it came out with a lot of people using candy for different reasons. And so I think.


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[Assistant] To, especially like market it on our homepage. How do we pull people in with that one value?


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[Assistant] Yeah, no, I'm fine. I often doze off while I'm getting an MRI.


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[Assistant] Thank you, Gloria. Besides- Alex, it's not my fault that we were transferred!


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[Assistant] The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license.


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[Assistant] Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high quality educational resources for free.


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[Assistant] To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu.


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[Assistant] People called him the Sixth Simpson. Not sure why.


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[Assistant] Man, this is the weirdest pregnancy craving ever.


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[Assistant] You have regrets, mister. I get to see the weather girl from the side. I made the worst financial decision of all time. Oh, I can't think about it.


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[Assistant] I won't think about it. I don't want to think about it. Oh, I'm thinking about it.


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[Assistant] That's the coolest bowling ball I've ever seen.


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[Assistant] Hello, Bear Stearns. I'd like to sell all my apple stock so I can buy a fancy bowling ball.


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[Assistant] Heads of internet obscured. Heavy blue balls are the future.


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[Assistant] Oh, you cost me a piece of all that! Oh, don't cry.


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[Assistant] If it makes you feel worse, I am the man who bought the stock you sold.


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[Assistant] We're toasting marshmallows. Marsh... mellows.


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[Assistant] Hey, I'm the one in bed with two beautiful women.


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[Assistant] Let's just say I've got to get to work on time, and if you knew me, you'd know just how odd that sounds.


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[Assistant] What you got there, Homer? Weird thing under a tarp. That's what I thought. Have a good one.


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[Assistant] Yes, my terrorist masters are always talking about you, Lisa.


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[Assistant] With some eco-friendly activists. They wanted gas, grass, or ass, and brother I had the ass.


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[Assistant] They taught me something I found shocking. Pigs aren't happy to be made into pork chops. This t-shirt lied to me. And they also gave me an alcohol detox. And they also gave me an alcohol detox.


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[Assistant] Lisa, I've never prayed to a city in my life, and if I did, it would be Hershey, Pennsylvania. I was kneeling on the affirmation rug they gave me.


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[Assistant] Lisa, the most horrible truth of all is the plant where I work poisons our water and our air.


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[Assistant] Uh, sweetie, you told me a thousand things a million times. Even with a brain the size of a dinosaur's, I couldn't take that in. Anywho, this canister is full of spoiled milk and utility-grade chicken. Both sold to me by a foo this morning.


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[Assistant] When I release it into the AC system, it'll stink up the plant forever.


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[Assistant] No, I just stopped late watching a movie. Something with William Holden and...


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[Assistant] Okay Bart, be cool. Calm down, you're not gonna die up here.


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[Assistant] Dear Lord, please help me land safely. Or transform this basket into a flying killer robot that I control with my mind. Amen.


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[Assistant] No, mother, I did not use any of your talc. I don't know why the bottle feels lighter. Maybe you're just getting stronger. Some days I could just kill you.


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[Assistant] Now I want to talk a little bit about some foundations. So today and Monday we're going to talk about two very big ideas.


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[Assistant] Now one of these things, one of the things that makes these theories so interesting is their scope.


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[Assistant] Uhm, most of the work we're going to talk about in this class, most of the ideas are narrow. So we're going to talk about somebody's idea about racial prejudice. Uhm, but that's not a theory of language acquisition. We'll talk about theories of schizophrenia, but they're not explanations of sexual attractiveness. Most theories are specialized theories.


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[Assistant] Now this is not a history course. I have zero interest in describing historical figures in psychology just for the sake of telling you about the history of the field.


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[Assistant] For better or worse, we live in a world profoundly affected by Sigmund Freud. If I had to ask you, choose a psycho- you know, name a famous psychologist.


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[Assistant] The answer, mostly, would be Freud. Uhm, he's the most famous psychologist ever. And he's had a profound influence on the 20th and 21st century.


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[Assistant] Uhm, some biographical information. He was born in the 1850s. He spent most of his life in, uhm, Vienna, Austria. And, uhm, but he died in London. And he escaped to London soon after retreating there, uhm, at the beginning of World War II, as the Nazis began to occupy where he lived. He's one of the most famous scholars ever, but he's not known for any single discovery.


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[Assistant] A celebrity recognized on the street. And throughout his life he was a man of extraordinary energy and productivity. Uhm, in part because he was a very serious cocaine addict, but also just in general he was just a high energy sort of person. He was up for the Nobel Prize in medicine and in literature. Didn't get either one of them. Didn't get the prize in medicine because Albert Einstein,


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[Assistant] Everybody loves Albert Einstein. Well, Albert Einstein really wrote a letter, because they asked for opinions of other Nobel Prize, wrote a letter saying, don't give the prize to Freud. He doesn't deserve a Nobel Prize, he's just a psychologist. Oh, yes. Okay, uhm,


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[Assistant] He was not a very nice man in many ways. He was deeply ambitious to the cause of promoting psychoanalysis. To the cause of presenting his view and defending it. Uhm, and he was uhm,


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[Assistant] Often dishonest, extremely brutal to his friends, and you know, terrible to his enemies. He was an interesting character. My favorite Freud story was as he was leaving Europe during the rise of the Nazis.


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[Assistant] As he was ready to go, to go to England from, uhm, I think either Germany or Austria, uhm, he had to sign a letter from the Gestapo. Gestapo agents, uh, intercepted him and demanded he sign a letter saying that at no point had he been threatened or harassed by the Gestapo. So, he signs the letter.


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[Assistant] And then he writes underneath it, the Gestapo has not harmed me in any way. In fact, I highly recommend the Gestapo to everybody.


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[Assistant] He was identified as a Jew who was devoted to destroying the most sacred notions of Christianity. And to many extent, to some extent, uhm, many people see him this way, and to some extent, uhm, this accusation has some truth to it.


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[Assistant] Uhm, Freud made claims about people that many of us, maybe most of us, would rather not know. Well, okay, what did he say?


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[Assistant] Phallic symbols, arguing certain architectural monuments, are, are, uh, subconsciously developed as, uh, penile representations. Uhm, and related to this, he developed the notorious theory of penis envy.


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[Assistant] Now, if that's the sort of thing you know about Freud, you're not going to have a very high opinion of him or of his work.


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[Assistant] In fact, you might want to marry John, uhm, because he reminds you of your father.


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[Assistant] Or because you want to get back at somebody for betraying you. Uhm, if somebody was to tell you this, you'd say, that's total nonsense.


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[Assistant] You might not know what, why you do what you do. And this is something we accept for things like visual perception.


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[Assistant] Why you feel the way you do towards your friends, towards your family.


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[Assistant] Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you're, you're doing something or you're arguing for something or making a decision for reasons that you can't fully articulate? Have you ever forgotten somebody's name at exactly the wrong time?


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[Assistant] If you're unconscious was a reasonable rational computer. If you're unconscious was really smart and looking out for your best interest. But according to Freud, that's not the way it works. According to Freud, there are three distinct processes going on in your head. And these are in violent internal conflict.


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[Assistant] And the way you act and the way you think are products not of a singular rational being, but of a set of conflicting creatures. And these three parts are the id, the ego, and the superego. And they emerge developmentally.


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[Assistant] It works on what Freud called the pleasure principle. It wants pleasure and it wants it now. And that's, according to Freud, how a human begins. Pure it.


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[Assistant] Freud had his wonderful phrase, polymorphous perversity. His pure desire for pleasure.


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[Assistant] And this leads to a set of reactions to cope with the fact that pleasure isn't always there when you want it. Either by planning how to satisfy your desires or planning how to suppress them.


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[Assistant] And this system is known as the ego, or the self. And it works on, uhm, the reality principle.


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[Assistant] And in between these two screaming creatures, one of them telling you to seek out your desires, the other one telling you to be ashamed of yourself, is you. Is the ego. Now according to Freud, most of this is unconscious.


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[Assistant] So we see, bubbling up to the top, we feel, we experience ourselves.


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[Assistant] You can't introspect and find them, rather they do their work without conscious knowledge.


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[Assistant] So according to Freud, there are people in this room who are what they are because they got stuck in the oral stage, or the anal stage. And, and, that's not good.


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[Assistant] It could lead to serious problems in his personality development. It could make him, as the phrase goes, into an oral person. And this orality could be described literally. Freud uses this as an explanation for why somebody might eat too much, or chew gum, or smoke.


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[Assistant] You could then go to your roommate and say, you're an oral person. The first year of your life did not go well.


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[Assistant] Called the Oedipus Complex. And this is based on a story, the mythical story of a king who killed his father and married his mother.


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[Assistant] And according to Freud, this happens to all of us in, in this way. While all of us, by all of us, Freud meant men. Uhm, so here's the idea.


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[Assistant] And then they asked themselves, what's the worst thing dad could do to me? And the answer is castration.


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[Assistant] As in terms of different ways we use.


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[Assistant] You're defending yourself against the horrible parts of yourself.


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[Assistant] Maybe sexual energy or aggressive energy. But instead of turning it to a sexual or aggressive target, what you do is you focus it in some other way. So you can imagine a great artist like Picasso turning the sexual energy into his artwork. There's uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So rather than own them myself, I project them to somebody else. A classic example for Freud is homosexual desires. Uhm, the idea is that I feel this tremendous lust towards you, for instance, and any, any of you, all of you, you three. Uhm, and, and, and I'm ashamed of this lust.


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[Assistant] Because what I do is I take my own desire and I project it to others. And Freud suggested, perhaps not implausibly, that men who believe other men who are obsessed with the sexuality of other men are themselves projecting away their own sexual desires. There is rationalization.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, which is that when you do something or think something bad, you rationalize it and you give it a more socially acceptable explanation. Uh, a parent who enjoys smacking his child


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[Assistant] We'll typically not say, I enjoy smacking my child, rather we'll say, it's for the child's own good. I'm being a good parent by doing this.


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[Assistant] Normally we do these things to keep an equilibrium among the different systems of the unconscious. But sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes things go awry.


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[Assistant] And what happens is, a phrase that's not currently used in psychology, but was popular during Freud's time, uhm, hysteria.


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[Assistant] It's a common enough idea in movies. Often in movies what happens is somebody goes to an analyst. They have some horrible problem.


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[Assistant] They can't remember something or they have some sort of blackouts and so on and the analyst tells them something and at one point they get this insight


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[Assistant] And once you know what's going on with deeper phenomena, your problems will go away.


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[Assistant] But, I'm gonna present this as an example here, because it illustrates so many of the Freudian themes. Particularly themes about dreams, the importance of dreams, about repression, and about hidden meaning. So this is from a television episode.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, in particular he has panic attacks when he sees, his first panic attack originated when he walked to his swimming pool and he saw a family of ducks fly away. And he had a panic attack.


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[Assistant] And these panic attacks grew worse and worse until he saw a therapist who ended up prescribing a medication. And this is discussed as one of the meetings he had with the therapist.


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[Assistant] Freud's contributions extend beyond the study of individual psychology and individual pathology. Freud had a lot to say about dreams.


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[Assistant] Uh, as you can see in this illustration, he believed that dreams had, uhm,


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[Assistant] A manifest content, meaning, manifest meaning what you experience in your dream.


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[Assistant] Universal themes, certain aspects of unconscious struggles, and certain preoccupations of our unconscious mind. And Freud had a lot to say about religion.


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[Assistant] Uhm, for instance, uh, he viewed a large part of our, uhm, of the idea of finding a singular old powerful god as seeking out a father figure that some of us never had during development. What I want to spend the rest of the class on


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is the scientific assessment of Freud. So what I did was, so far as I've told you what Freud had to say in broad outline, I then want to take, uhm, the time to consider whether or not we should believe this and how well it fits with our modern science. But before doing so, uhm, I'll take questions for a few minutes. Do people have any questions about, about Freud or Freud's theories?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Focused on the family life of the people he interacted with, which is rather upper class Europeans. And, and these sort of questions would have been difficult for Freud to answer. I imagine that what a Freudian would have to say is, you would expect systematic differences.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you would expect a child who just grew up with a mother, just grew up to be a father, with a father, to be in some sense psychologically damaged by that, failing to go through the normal psychosexual stages. Yes?


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[Assistant] Relative to men. I think Freud would say that women have super egos. They're just not the sort of sturdy ones that men have.


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[Assistant] Uhm, I think psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic scholars right now would be mixed. Some would maintain that there really are deep sex differences. Others would want to jettison that aspect of Freudian theory.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But what sublimation is, a lot of these, it's a good question. The question is to sort of, what is sublimation? How does it relate to other defense mechanisms? A lot of defense mechanisms, uhm, involve taking a desire and turning it.


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[Assistant] And you say to your roommate, for instance, uhm, that's just because you haven't had sex in a long time. And you want to have sex, so you devote all your energy to your math exam.


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[Assistant] And that's such a good question, I'm going to defer it, I'm going to talk about it in a few minutes, because that's actually, that speaks to the issue of the scientific assessment of Freud. So I'm going to try to get to your question in a little bit.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and there's a lot of well-known criticisms and attacks on Freud. This is just actually an excellent book, uhm, on the Memory Awards by Frederick Cruz, which uhm, and Frederick Cruz is one of the strongest and most passionate critics of Freud. And,


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[Assistant] The problems with Freud, uhm, go like this. There are two ways you could reject a theory.


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[Assistant] There are two problems with a scientific theory.


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[Assistant] So suppose I have a theory that the reason why some children have autism


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[Assistant] A profound developmental disorder is because their mothers don't love them enough. This is a popular theory for many years. It's a possible theory, it just turns out to be wrong.


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[Assistant] But another way, and so one way to attack and address a scientific theory is, uhm,


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[Assistant] Is to view it as uhm, just to see whether or not it works. But there's a different problem a theory could have. A theory could be so vague and all-encompassing that uhm, that it can't even be tested.


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[Assistant] Are they true or are they false? Well, we'll talk about that. But the point here is, they can be false. They're interesting enough, uhm, that they can be tested.


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[Assistant] Is that they can't be wrong. They're not even wrong. I did my, I got my horoscope for today. On the web. Uhm.


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[Assistant] A couple of negative aspects could make you a little finicky for the next few days. Okay, I'm going to watch for that.


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[Assistant] The problem is, a few days aren't gonna go by and say, God, that was wrong. It can't be wrong.


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[Assistant] And there's been some efforts cross-culturally to go back to the question this young man asked before.


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[Assistant] Now, there's one question, I'm actually going to skip over this for reasons of time.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and just go to some examples of the unconscious in modern psychology. So, here's a simple example of the unconscious in modern psychology. Uhm, language understanding. So when you hear a sentence like,


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[Assistant] John thinks that Bill likes him. In a fraction of a second, you realize that this means that John thinks that Bill likes John. If you heard the sentence, oops, John thinks that Bill likes himself,


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[Assistant] In a fraction of a second, you would think that it means John thinks that Bill likes Bill.


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[Assistant] So much of our day to day life can be done unconsciously. Uhm, there are different activities you can do.


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[Assistant] Driving, chewing gum, shoelace tying, where if you're good enough at them, if you're expert enough at them, you don't know you're doing them.


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[Assistant] And he said, oh, I got on a highway and I drove to work.


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[Assistant] And the more pain you go through to get something, the more you like it.


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[Assistant] The idea of subliminal death crimes is this, you sign up for your human subjects requirement.


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[Assistant] And then you, uhm, they put you in front of a computer screen.


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[Assistant] And then they tell you, oh just sit in front of the computer screen and we'll ask you some questions.


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[Assistant] Like that. But they're being flashed so fast it looks like, like that. You don't see anything. Words like corpse, dead, dying.


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[Assistant] Has dramatic effects on how you answer those questions. People exposed to death crimes, uhm, become more nationalistic.


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[Assistant] The final example I'll give of this is a short demonstration. Uhm, to do this I'm going to cut the class in half at this point. So you'll be on this side of the class, the right side, my right, and this will be on the left side. And I simply want


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[Assistant] And here's the effect. Half of you were asked to list three features of the person. Half of you were asked to list ten.


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[Assistant] I took a class once on how to teach when I was a graduate student. And I just remember two things from this class. One thing is, never grade in red pen. Because people don't like that.


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[Assistant] But the answer to your question at the end is no. Although Freud was very sensitive to the brain bases of behavior, Freud was totally convinced that the method through which to cure disorders like depression and anxiety would not be medication, uhm, but rather through the sort of talk therapy and insight.


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[Assistant] It's true that drugs might make the panic attacks go away, but the panic attacks are actually not your real problem. And by making them go away, you don't get to the root of your problem.


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[Assistant] So, the answer is both Freud and modern day psychoanalysts would think that medications are substantially overused in the treatment of mental disorders. Yes?


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[Assistant] I will also answer the question, who thinks about sex more in dreams, men or women? And what proportion of, oh, there's so many great questions I won't answer.


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[Assistant] And that story I told you with the penises and the penis envy and the replacement is sort of a very shortened version of the electrocomplex. I think it's fair to say that electrocomplex was a sort of add-on to the main interest of Freud to Oedipal Complex.


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[Assistant] So it plays a fundamental role later on determining her allegiances in life and in fact her own sexual preferences and interests. So it's not the sort of thing that affects her just for a short period.


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[Assistant] Read him and weep, the novels of Charlotte Bronte. Uhm, I thought we were playing cards.


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[Assistant] I honestly don't know. I'm just teaching myself massage here with online videos and a store mannequin.


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[Assistant] The motorcycle dudes are chicks! I wonder what else is chicks.


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[Assistant] Some secret societies used to send dried melon seeds, orange pips, things like that. Five.


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[Assistant] Charming. Well done. Just saving her time, isn't that kinda?


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[Assistant] Why has he found that? He's broken his pattern. Why?


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[Assistant] Consulting criminal.


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[Assistant] I'll handle this, dear weirdo. Pick up weirdo kid and send.


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[Assistant] If this kid's dad isn't here in one second, he's going in the garbage can.


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[Assistant] Well, well, well, Rachel Maddow, everyone came back for Chip's funeral. Everyone came back for Chip's funeral.


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[Assistant] Look, let's get this out of the way. Just because we both worked at Channel 6 and you made it big and I didn't doesn't mean I'm bitter.


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[Assistant] I'm not a newsman anymore, I'm a geologist. I keep discovering a new rock bottom.


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[Assistant] Now don't forget, this is the first exam under the new honor code.


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[Assistant] Will Homer make it, or will he leave a crater the size of the one that destroyed the Yucatan? Find out in our next exciting installment, Fat Splat, or When You Squish Upon a Car.


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[Assistant] That one was all on her own so she decided to make friends. Oh, a magic mirror.


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[Assistant] Hello, I'm one. Hello, I'm another one.


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[Assistant] I am one, two, three, four, five. Five blocks. High five. I love stars. They have


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[Assistant] What we're doing today is continuing on the theme of emotions. Emotions is a two-part lecture, uhm, and we're continuing along certain themes. I want to begin, uhm, by responding to a question


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[Assistant] Which was raised in the last class concerning smiling in non-human primates. It was a very good question. The issue was, uhm, we know that humans have different sorts of smiles.


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[Assistant] To convey different sorts of information, the question was do non-human primates like chimpanzees or gorillas or gibbons have the same many sorts of smiles?


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[Assistant] That, uhm, that primate, non-human primate smiles actually correspond almost entirely to appeasement smiles, their don't hurt me smiles. Uhm, they're equivalent to the coy smile that we saw in humans.


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[Assistant] That non-human primates do not use smiles for greetings. There's no equivalent of the greeting smile or Pan Am smile, nor do they use them as genuine expressions of happiness. There's no equivalent to the Deschen smile.


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[Assistant] So that's as far as I know. If the world's expert gets back to me and says something different, uhm, I'll keep you posted.


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[Assistant] Another thing, going back to the beginning theme of the class, uhm, what we started just to review, we talked about the different functions of emotions.


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[Assistant] As we were ending, we were talking about, uhm, about the relationship between an animal and its children, particularly in cases like humans and birds and mammals, where there tends to be, uhm, a close relationship with our children. We invest in quality, not quantity.


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[Assistant] Uhm, I might produce very few children in my life, uh, and


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[Assistant] My evolutionary trick then is to focus very intently on them and make sure they survive. If I were to produce a hundred children, I could stand to lose a few.


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[Assistant] But if I just produce five in my lifetime, or two, or one, they become very precious to me.


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[Assistant] And so, uhm, the story of the evolution of species like us involves a long period of dependence and deep, deep bonds between the parent and the child.


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[Assistant] And that's part of what I talked about, how parents respond to children. And I want to begin this class by giving an illustration from a documentary about parental response to children, but I want to give it in a species that's not us.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and here's why. I'll explain why with an analogy.


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[Assistant] I have a friend of mine who studies the psychology of religion. He studies why people hold religious beliefs. And he tells me that when he's talking to a non-specialist, somebody not in the field,


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[Assistant] He doesn't ever tell them, yeah, I'm really interested in why people believe in the Bible, or why people light the candles on Sabbath, or why people go to church. Because these are religions that people around here hold.


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[Assistant] And if you tell people you study them, they'll sort of be puzzled, why would you want to study something like that, or uh, or offend it.


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[Assistant] If you want to talk about the psychology of religion to an audience like this, what you do is you start with the exotic.


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[Assistant] So you start by talking about people who, uhm, who put butter under heads. There's a, a, Dan Sperber talks about a culture where the men put butter under heads in the summer and it kind of melts and that's part of one of the things that they do. Or you talk about, uhm, about a culture that believes in spirits. Or that trees can talk.


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[Assistant] You say, oh that's interesting, I wonder why they believe that. And you use that as a way to look at more general facts that exist even in our culture. You use the fact that we don't take the exotic for granted.


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[Assistant] As a way to motivate the scientific study of things we do take for granted. And this is of course true more generally. This was the point in the William James quote.


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[Assistant] When he talked about things that are natural to us and noticed that some very odd things are equally natural to other species.


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[Assistant] And it's true, I think, in particular, when we talk about things like the love we have for our children. Uhm, so one way to look at the love we have for our children, scientifically, isn't to look at it head on, because the love we feel towards our own children feels sacred, it feels special, but look at it in other species.


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[Assistant] And so one of the nicest illustrations of this is the emperor's, uh, penguin.


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[Assistant] Uhm, which was, uh, which, whose childcare and mating practices were dramatized in a wonderful movie called March of the Penguins. Uhm, and, uhm, this is interesting because they have this incredibly elaborate and quite precarious system of generating and taking care of offspring.


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[Assistant] So I want to show you a brief clip of the movie to illustrate some parts of this. Uhm, what they do at the beginning, which is not, which leads up to this, is uhm, they take a very long trek from the water to their breeding grounds. Their breeding grounds are protected from the wind and they're on a firm piece of ice, so they can hold a whole pack.


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[Assistant] They do the breeding there, and it's there that the eggs are created. So this is where, uhm, the movie begins at this point.


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[Assistant] March of the Penguins was the second best, second most popular documentary of all time, uhm, beaten only by Fahrenheit 911.


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[Assistant] And uhm, and people responded to it in different ways, which are informative when we think about the generalizations you can make, uh,


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[Assistant] From animal behavior to human behavior. Some conservative commentators saw this as, uhm, a celebration of family values. Such as love and trust and monogamy. Uhm, some liberals, uhm, who hate everything that's good and true.


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[Assistant] Responded, responded by saying, well, you had a monogamous for one breeding season, it's a year, then they go and find another mate, you add it up, it's pretty slutty.


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[Assistant] I think more to the point, people were impressed and stunned.


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[Assistant] By the rich and articulate and systematic behavior that these animals were showing, plainly they didn't pick it up from television, movies, culture, learning, schooling, so on. To some extent, this sort of complicated behavior came natural to them.


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[Assistant] And uhm, it's understandable that some proponents of intelligent design or creationism pointed to this as an example of, of how God creates things that are deeply, richly intricate.


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[Assistant] So as to perpetrate the survival of different animals.


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[Assistant] From a Darwinian standpoint, uh, the Darwinian would agree with the creationists that this couldn't have happened by accident. This is just far too complicated. But would appeal to the, uhm, to this as an exquisite example of a biological adaptation. In particular, a biological adaptation regarding parental care to children.


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[Assistant] Shaped, uhm, by the fact that children share the parent's genes.


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[Assistant] And so parents will evolve in ways that perpetrate the survival of their children. Then there's the other direction, which is how children respond to parents.


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[Assistant] How uhm, how the young ones are wired up.


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[Assistant] They'll usually prefer their mothers, uhm, because their mothers are typically those who are closest to them. They'll prefer her voice, her face, her smell.


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[Assistant] Uhm, it used to be thought that there's some sort of magical moment of imprinting, that when the baby is born, the baby must see his or her mother, and boom, a connection is made. If the baby doesn't, terrible things will happen with attachment later on. This is silly.


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[Assistant] There's no reason to believe there's some special moment or special five minutes or special hour. It's just in the fullness of time.


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[Assistant] Babies will develop an attachment to the animal as closest to it. They will recognize it as, at an implicit level, at an unconscious level, as their kin.


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[Assistant] Well, how does this work? How does the baby's brain develop, come to develop an emotional attachment to, to that creature? Well, you remember from Skinner that operant conditioning could provide


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[Assistant] A good answer to this. And this is known as the cupboard theory.


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[Assistant] Which is babies love their mums because the mums provide food. So law of effect is operant conditioning.


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[Assistant] Uhm, they will approach their mothers to get the food from them.


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[Assistant] And they will develop an attachment because their mother provides food. And this is contrasted with


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[Assistant] A more nativist, hardwired theory developed by, uh, Bowlby.


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[Assistant] Which claims that there's two things going on. There is a, drawn to mom for comfort and social interaction. And afraid of strangers. Now,


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[Assistant] In the real world, it's difficult to pull apart these two means of attraction. Because the very same woman who's giving you comfort and, uhm, and social interaction is also the one giving you milk.


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[Assistant] But in the laboratory, you can pull them apart. And that's what Henry Harlow did. In the movies you saw last week. So Harlow exposed primates to two different mothers.


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[Assistant] One is a wire mother. That's a skinnerian mother. That's a mother who gave food. The other is a cloth mother.


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[Assistant] Set up so that she'd be comfortable and give warmth and cuddling.


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[Assistant] And the question is, which one do babies go for? And as you can remember from the movies, the results are fairly decisive. Babies go to the wire mother, uh, to eat. Yes, as one of the characters said, you gotta eat to live.


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[Assistant] They develop an attachment to the warm, cuddly mother. That's the one they use as a base when they were threatened. That's the one they use as a base from which to explore.


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[Assistant] And that actually takes me to the, oh, except for one thing. It almost takes me to the end of the question of our emotions towards kin.


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[Assistant] Uhm, one question you could ask is what if there's no contact at all? Now, you could imagine that the effects of


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[Assistant] How, a lot of people are interested in the question of the effects of the child's early relationship to adults around him or her and how the child turns out later.


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[Assistant] This becomes hugely relevant for social debates like daycare. So for instance, a lot of psychologists are interested in the question, is it better for a child to be raised by a parent, usually a mother, or does it make a difference if the child goes to daycare?


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[Assistant] What if the child goes to daycare at six months? What if the child goes to daycare at two years? How does this affect the child?


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[Assistant] The short answer is nobody really knows. There's a lot of debate over whether or not there's subtle differences. And it's deeply controversial. But we do know that it doesn't make a big difference.


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[Assistant] We do know that, that, if uhm, if you got raised by mom, or perhaps mom and dad, or maybe just dad, all through your life, until going up for school, and I, my parents, threw me in a daycare at age three months, uhm,


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[Assistant] It's not going to make a big difference for us. Maybe a subtle difference, though it's not clear which way it would go, but it won't make a big difference. But what if there's no contact at all?


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[Assistant] What if uhm, what about terrible circumstances where people get no cloth mother? They get nobody for attachment. This is


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[Assistant] Uh, really, in the real world, of course, you can't do experiments on this. And in the real world with humans, this only happens in tragic cases. Uhm, but this has been studied. Uhm, so, so Harlow, again,


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[Assistant] Raise monkeys in solitary confinement. So they were, they were, uhm,


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[Assistant] Raised in steel cages with only a wire mother. In other words, they got all the nutrition they needed, but they got no mothering.


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[Assistant] It turned out that uhm, that you kinda get monkey psychotics.


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[Assistant] They bite themselves, uhm, they're incompetent sexually, they're incompetent socially, they're incompetent maternally. In one case, one of these monkeys raised in colitary confinement was artificially inseminated, uhm, when she, uhm, when she had a child, she, uhm, banged its head on the floor and bit it to death. So,


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[Assistant] And uhm, and these children, if the, if the, in other words, they get fed, barely.


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[Assistant] But nobody picks them up and cuddles them. Uhm, these children, if this happens for long enough,


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[Assistant] Uhm, they end up with severe problems with social and emotional development. Uhm, from an emotional point of view, they're often insatiable, like they really need cuddling and support, or they're apathetic, they don't care at all. Now, there's some sort of good news.


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[Assistant] Which is, if you get these people or these monkeys early enough, uhm, you can reverse the effects of this bad development. So there's some research done, uhm, with monkey therapists.


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[Assistant] So what they do is they take the monkey, they raise it in the steel cage. The monkey comes out. The monkey's kind of psycho.


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[Assistant] And then they send in a younger monkey who's just goofing around, jumping all around the place and, and, and everything. And experience with this younger monkey who just follows them around and clings to them.


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[Assistant] Uhm, leads to gradual improvement. It makes the, the solitary monkey become better. Uhm, there might be a similar effect with humans. So one story more about, of an anecdote than an experiment was a situation where at the age of one and a half, uh, children were taken away, uhm,


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[Assistant] From a really harsh orphanage where they had no contact and brought into a home for mentally retarded women. Where these women gave them plenty of contact and cuddling.


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[Assistant] And apparently from what we know, brought them back to normal.


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[Assistant] And this is all I want to talk about, about the emotions we feel towards our kin, towards our children and towards our parents. Uhm, any questions or thoughts?


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[Assistant] Uhm, it's a good question. Do children in orphanages comfort each other? Uhm, I don't know. The situation probably wouldn't be there.


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[Assistant] The problem is children in orphanages who are in these terrible situations tend to be babies and very young.


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[Assistant] Right, so this is, this is, the question is what does that tell us about the middle ground? So this is an extreme case. But what do we know about the middle case? Say your parent, you're not raised in a cage, you're not in a Romanian orphanage, but your parents just don't pick you up very much, they don't love you very much.


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[Assistant] Uhm, there's no good evidence that that has any effect on a person. The problem is, and we're going to talk about this in much more detail in a couple of weeks, is it's true that parents who aren't affectionate have kids that aren't affectionate.


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[Assistant] So when you get away from extreme cases, effects are hard to see and require careful experimental research to tease out.


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[Assistant] I think what it's safe to say for a lot, for everything but the severe conditions is we don't know what kind of effects there are, but if there are effects, they are not big and dramatic ones.


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[Assistant] Animals' good feelings, animals' emotional attraction to their kin is not a huge puzzle from an evolutionary point of view. Evolution is driven by, uhm,


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[Assistant] Forces that, that operate on the fact of how many genes get reproduced and replicated, uh, among your descendants. So it makes sense that animals would be wired up to care for their kids.


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[Assistant] Is that animals, including humans, seem to have exquisitely complicated relationships with non-kin.


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[Assistant] In particular, animals are nice to non-kin. You are nice to people that you're not related to. There's a lot of examples of this. Uhm, animals groom one another. You know, you go you.


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[Assistant] Pick off the, the lice and the bugs off your friend. They pick it off you. Uhm, they, uhm, they give warning cries.


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[Assistant] So uhm, warning cries, all sorts of animals give warning cries. Uhm, you are uhm,


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[Assistant] I don't know. You're like a little animal and a big animal comes charging and you say


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[Assistant] Oh, you made some sort of cry and everybody runs away. That's very risky for you.


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[Assistant] You know, hugely ugly. The vampire bat shares food. What happens is the vampire bat, um, vampire bats live in caves and they fly out.


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[Assistant] And what they do is often a bat will strike it big. So find a horse, for instance. Bite the horse. Pump in tons of blood.


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[Assistant] And then fly back. And what it does is it doesn't keep it to itself.


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[Assistant] Rather, it goes around the whole cave and vomits blood into the mouth of all the other vampire bats. So everybody benefits. Isn't that nice?


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[Assistant] The benefits outweigh the cost. This is known as reciprocal altruism, meaning my behavior to you, my good behavior to you, my altruism for you, uhm, is predicated on the idea of reciprocation. I'll benefit from you. And you imagine how vampire bats, for instance, why this makes sense.


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[Assistant] This is a, if you're a vampire bat, it's a better system when anybody strikes it big to feed you, rather than for anybody to strike it big, use the blood and spit out all the rest of it. But here's the problem. Here's why it's such a puzzle. The problem is the existence of cheaters.


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[Assistant] And in economics and sociology, these are also known as free riders. And what a cheater or free rider does,


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[Assistant] Is, it takes the benefits without paying the cost.


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[Assistant] Imagine two genes. Imagine one builds a vampire bat that accepts blood from others and shares blood.


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[Assistant] The other gene accepts blood from others and doesn't share blood.


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[Assistant] In the long run, B will actually out-produce gene A.


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[Assistant] Because in fact, B will be healthy while other vampire bats get sick.


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[Assistant] And uhm, and then so the offspring will do better. Uhm, an even sharper example is an example of warning cries. So gophers give warning cries when there's a predator. It is extremely adaptive to give a warning cry.


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[Assistant] A really good solution then, is to listen to warning Christ, but not to give them.


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[Assistant] You know, suppose we had a system, uhm, it is very adaptive when people are going to the bar, when people buy drinks, to accept the drinks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is not so adaptive from the standpoint of one's wallet to buy people drinks. Here's a solution. Accept drinks, but don't pay for drinks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How could this cooperation evolve? How could it be an evolutionarily stable strategy? And the answer is cheater detection.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, reciprocal altruism can only evolve if animals are wired up to punish cheaters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now that requires a lot of mental apparatus. You have to recognize cheaters, you have to remember cheaters, and you have to be motivated to punish cheaters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and not every animal has this degree of complicated apparatus, but actually we know, uhm, that vampire bats do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in one clever study, so the theory says, evolutionary theory says, yeaah, I see what these vampire bats are doing, but you see, and this is a case where evolution makes a nice prediction, that couldn't evolve unless bats are keeping track. If bats aren't keeping track,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then the system could never exist because the cheaters would just take it over. They must be watching for cheaters. So the experiment which was done is, you, a vampire bat strikes it big. It flies back.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then what happens? Well, what happens is when the other bats strike it big, they starve the selfish bat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just as if we go to bars and everybody buys around. Except for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this happens over and over and over again. Pretty soon you're gonna buy a round, but you're not gonna give me one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so just as humans are keeping their eyes out for people who are taking the benefits without paying the cost, so are other animals.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Recipro- reciprocation, uhm, plays a powerful role in the evolution of social behavior and the evolution of social emotions. And the classic illustration of this, uhm, is the prisoner's dilemma.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now many of you, I think, have seen the prisoner's dilemma in one course or another. Uhm, it shows up, it is one of the main constructs in the social sciences. It shows up in cognitive science, psychology, economics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, the teaching fellows are passing around something which you're not going to use right away. But for some of you, this is the first time you're going to be exposed to the prisoner's dilemma. So let me spell it out. Here's the idea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they say, we wanna know everything that happened. In particular, we want you to rat out your friend.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Here are the options. And one thing about this is nothing is hidden. The police officer could actually print out a copy of the prisoner's dilemma and put it right in front of you. And what he could say is, look, uhm, you're a prisoner too. You could cooperate, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have two options. You could either cooperate with your friend, uhm, you could stay silent, or you could defect, or you could squeal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you, uhm, cooperate with your friend, and he squeals on you, you go to prison for life, and he'll walk out. However, if you squeal on him, and he cooperates, he keeps quiet, he'll go to prison for life, and you'll walk out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now, on the nice side, what you can do is you can say, no, I'm gonna be quiet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No matter what you, what your friend chooses to do, you're better off squealing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So suppose you're a prisoner too. You believe your friend's gonna cooperate with you. He's not gonna be, he's not gonna give the information out. Well then, your best thing to do is squeal on him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What if you believe he's gonna squeal on you? Well, your best thing to do is squeal on him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you could coordinate this, you would both be quiet and get a fairly minor penalty.