Using Frequency And Motivation To Make Better Connections With Jaqui McCarthy Of Frequency Coders

Life is all about making the right connections. The people who you want to work with aren't necessarily going to be your best friends. Join your host Stephen Jaye as he talks to the CEO of TealHouse and the creator of Frequency Coder, Jaqui McCarthy. Jaqui explains the frequency coder as an onion with many layers. There are people inside and the distance between them will determine their compatibility. There are also all the layers that you have to keep in mind. Listen in if you want to understand the frequency coder and how it's different from a Myers Briggs test. Start understanding yourself today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Using Frequency And Motivation To Make Better Connections With Jaqui McCarthy Of Frequency Coders Sometimes, a part of the journey needs to be understanding ourselves, others, who we are and how we interact with one another. This is where behavioral science comes in. My guest is Jaqui McCarthy. She is a behavioral scientist and serial entrepreneur, which I know a lot of you readers out there will be pursuing entrepreneurship eventually as a path. She has some interesting ideas about understanding our behaviors. We are all familiar with at least one of the personality tests, whether it's the Myers-Briggs or Big Five. Her idea is to measure this personality measure or motivations to understand ourselves on multiple dimensions. --- Jaqui, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining. First of all, what would you describe behavioral science to really mean if you were to explain it in a minute or two? Behavioral science understands how humans interact with others, the technology and then themselves within the technological platforms. You have these algorithms that are trying to understand humans. It's studying that and gathering actual measurable data to determine how these people behave. It's not just how people think. It's how people are going to behave. A lot of the algorithms might think about what you said. Technology is trying to predict purchasing and shopping behavior. Do you see technology being used to understand behavior on a deeper level about things that matter beyond what you are going to buy? In a positive light, we are very much struggling with that. Hopefully, we will be seeing a new generation of entrepreneurs coming out and creating more ethical algorithms. A lot of attention is, "How can we better understand consumers so we can sell them a bunch of crap they don't need?" In a few of the projects that I have taken on in the past, what we did is dove into trying to understand the human factor behind interacting with each other on platforms and how to optimize those connections between people. We live in an era of loneliness and some of the negative consequences of loneliness. We are very disconnected. People are turning to violence, drugs, suicide and all these terrible things because we need human connection. Do you see hope in people understanding human behavior on this level and then designing algorithms to help us make better connections with one another? Do you see that as barely treading water and not making a difference? It's going to depend a lot on where investors are going to put their money. Where is the return on ethical algorithms? Is there going to be a monetary return? It's not most likely a lot of the time. In the case of WiGo Trips, which was a platform that we developed, it's connecting random strangers to each other but understanding who they are so that when they do connect, their experiences are optimized. We had a way to monetize it by booking travel. It's going to be up to the entrepreneurs to find those monetization strategies or up to the investors to invest in things that aren't necessarily going to return the money but will make the world a better place. One place I naturally go is some wealthy philanthropy. It's things like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In their case, malaria is their biggest thing, but I know they also do a lot of other things. Do you see that as possibly a way that these social entrepreneurs will get the funding to create the platforms that will improve human connection? Do you think that it requires that creativity with booking travel? The people who you want to work with are not going to be the same people you enjoy your lunch with. Share on X Now that you have mentioned something like that, that would be fantastic. It goes back to the investor. Does the investor see and care enough about this problem? Technology connected us all, but it disconnected all the humans at the same time. When, where and how will we put enough attention onto this matter for it to matter enough for people to put their money into it, even though there's no return or we have to go fall back? Maybe this is a hopeful fantasy in one way that all these wealthy early investors in Facebook and these other platforms that have now come to the realization that these platforms have disconnected us will donate some of their money to these entrepreneurs to try to make things right. Who is raising their hand to say, "I was a part of this problem and I want to fix it. I'm willing to write a check and invest into solving this problem?" Even though someone is creating something or a plugin to go into Facebook, does Facebook pay for those to make it more ethical? The only example I can think of is Tristan Harris in the Center for Humane Technology. His focus is less on re-establishing the connections and more on making the technology itself less harmful, which is also an important part of the entire process, given that these platforms are not going away. It's our future. It's eventually the metaverse and going into this whole virtual world. I see my kids playing on those virtual worlds on their little tablets. They are not nice to each other. When you have a fake identity and you are an avatar and you are not using your real name, you can be a bully to whoever you want to be. It's like, "How do we meet this problem early on, bring this value to the table and show humanity in a technological world?" It can be stress-inducing. When I think about the metaverse, I get a little bit down about the idea that we have already gone so far down the rabbit hole. We are going to have these headsets on possibly twelve hours a day in some future world. That sounds depressing to me. On a happier note, I was going to ask you to talk a little bit about your dimensions of behavioral personality work as it pertains to all of us trying to understand ourselves and our social interactions. Frequency Coder was a project I took on and I have been working on for many years. I didn't know how to code, but then I ended up teaching myself how to code. I was able to develop it, or at least the beta version of it. Where I want to get it to is like, "You have your personality profile and we can put it into an AI. This AI can take your information and someone else's information, input them both together, see how you guys will interact and recommend you both to each other." I would love to get it to that point. Frequency Coder measures you. Unlike the Myers-Briggs and a lot of the other personality tests, we don't measure introversion or extroversion. We measure frequency. Frequency is the energy that you are bringing. It's the energy I bring to you and the energy you bring to me. That's number one. The perception is like, "Who are the dreamers and realists? How would you perceive the world around you?" You have your group roles, leaders, independents and followers. In a group setting, you don't want to have a group of ten leaders in there. That will create a situation where a lot of people are butting heads. You also don't want a bunch of followers in there because no one will know where to get things started. If you have a bunch of independent people who are artists or solo people, no one is going to be talking to each other. You want to have a good healthy group with a leader to the followers, but they have to have a shared interest and then a couple of independent people here who can help out with the creativity. That's how you optimize that group relation. It's motivation like, "How are you motivated?" We have people who are motivated by authority. They have to be in charge. They are usually your officers or political leaders. You have people who are motivated by harmony, bringing peace into the world and within their friends, and making sure that the world is a good place, kind and calm. You have people like myself who are very impact-oriented. We are here on a mission to create some impact. You have your achievers. It's people who are motivated by achievement. They want to be recognized for how well they do. They are usually your CEOs and the people who climb up the corporate ladder. People who are motivated by experience are typically traveler types. They travel around the world, go and see a new place, meet new people, and do new things. They are constantly doing new novelty seekers. Frequency Coders: Behavioral science is just understanding how humans interact. How they interact with themselves and with others. Also, more recently is how they interact with technology and in technological platforms. You have people who are motivated by security like, "I'm going to make sure my finances are in place and my family is taken care of. I want to know where I'm going to be tomorrow in 5 or 10 years and have a good plan. I'm going to go ahead and follow it." Once you take all those parts together, you end up with a personality type. We have the go-getters. As you can imagine, the go-getters are typically motivated by either achievement or impact. Your alphas are people who need to be in charge. Your engineers are people who love to problem-solve. They can be mixed with a bunch of different things. They can be impact-oriented, achievement-oriented or security-oriented....