BlackBoxPhD


About BlackBoxPhD

I’m Sean Young, PhD, behavioral psychologist, educator, and Director of the UCLA Center for Digital Behavior. I’ve worked with some amazing collaborators and friends on how to apply psychology in life. I’m inviting you to online fireside chats with them to give you a sneak peak into their brilliant minds and help you improve your life, work, and relationships. Together, we’ll interview experts in psychology, health, technology, and business. We’ll leave you with weekly take-home points to teach you about Psychology, Products, and People.


What Does Financial Investing Have in Common with the Rest of Life?

Ted Siegel has over 13 years of experience in finance. But he’s a big picture guy. He doesn’t just think about work relating to finance, but thinks about how his work in finance can relate to other parts of life. In this interview, he’ll tell you about some of his work in financial services and how those insights can be applied to other areas of life.


How to Design with Empathy

Hooman Anvar is not only a User Experience (UX) design thought leader, but he’s also a good-hearted person. I met him because he was one of the winners of our Inventathon competition. Afterwards, he told me that he wanted to further deepen his design practice into building products and services to change and improve people’s lives. He’s an ideal person to work on that mission as his approach to UX is based on designing with empathy. In this interview, he’ll tell you what that means and how to apply it to you life.


How to Avoid Spending a Lot of Money Hiring an IP Lawyer like Erik Birkeneder

Erik Birkeneder is not your stereotypical lawyer. He’s more like Marshall from “How I Met your Mother.” He’s a really nice guy, loves helping people, and from the midwest. But he’s also a smart and savvy IP lawyer. He specializes in patents related to medicine and bioengineering and is talking to us today about what people can do to protect themselves from getting sued for patent infringement and some common mistakes he sees people make in this area. This interview will be especially relevant for first-time entrepreneurs.


Building a Graph of People’s Love for Products

When I first moved to Los Angeles about 7 years ago, I missed the startup culture I left in the bay area. The LA startup scene was pretty small at the time. There were a few intimate meetup groups where people quickly got to know each other. That’s how I met Jose daVeiga. It was a Saturday afternoon while I was on the way to the beach, stopping into a meetup event to eat some pizza and drink some beer. My friend came over to me and told me I should meet a guy she just met as we had a lot in common. Jose has a love for science and startups. He’s worked on a number of startups and currently funded by Technicolor Ventures to build Into, a company that creates a social graph of people’s interest in products.


The Role of Psychology in Children’s Health

This week we talked with Dr. Marshall Seligmann. He’s a pediatrician who also has his feet in technologies and startups. He studied psychology in college so he’s a great person for us to interview because he can teach pediatricians and parents about the behavioral medical issues we see in kids.