Jeremy Bailenson, Founder of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab

Jeremy Bailenson (0:00)

When I showed David Shaw, the coach of Stanford, I've been doing VR for 20 years, and when I showed it to Shaw, normally people come to my lab, they say, oh, I can see that's going to be good someday. I can see how that's going to show. I'll put it on his head. He looked at it for 30 seconds.

He put it down and he said two things to me. He said, when can you put that in the football office? And what can I do to get you not to give that to the rest of the Pac-12?

And I'd never gotten that response. And there's such fulfillment out of building something that somebody wants to use.

Michael Gervais (0:37)

I'll see you time.

Peace. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am Michael Gervais, and by trade in training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist. And the idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery to better understand what's driving them. What are they searching for? What are they most hungry to experience and understand in their life? And why are they working so ridiculously hard to become the very best or their very best? And in these conversations, we're just trying to sort out their psychological framework. We're trying to understand the mental skills that they've used to also build and refine their craft.

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Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Jeremy Bailenson. He's the founder and director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He's also a professor at the university. And Jeremy studied psychology, studies psychology of virtual reality, also known as VR. And in particular, how VR experiences lead to changes in perceptions of oneself and perceptions of others.