MichaelAaron Flicker

One thing that all the listeners can think about is humans are much more emotionally driven than rationally driven.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman said, thinking is to humans like swimming is to cats.

I started my company when I was 14 years old in my parents' basement.

And it was a time in 1997 when the world believed that...

the internet was a great equalizing force.

And maybe high school kids knew more about the internet than anybody else.

And in that moment of opportunity, the kid I grew up with across the street and I formed our company.

And we said, we're gonna do internet programming.

We're gonna do computer programming on the internet.

And that was really innovative at the time, almost silly, real computer programming rich, belonged in the domain of mainframes and big corporations.

And the idea that anybody could do meaningful computer programming online was just unusual at the time and just crazy enough that they let a bunch of high school kids work for these big companies.

And the story of the last 28 years for me has always been at the intersection of thinking about how can we come up with

smart ideas to solve problems.

How can we solve things that others haven't been able to solve before?

It's led me now to I own nine companies.

We have a number of them in our professional services, a number of them of our own brands, but what connects them all and what's been so interesting is that behavioral science has been a key to understanding why people

do what they do, and to really understand how they act in the real world.

So much of what we learned in our years was you would run these studies and ask consumers, would you be open to buying this brand?

Or would you be open to taking this medication?

And when you ask them that, they give you an answer, then you go into market and they do the exact opposite.