Full transcript: Nathalie Nahai on London Real
6:37 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Nathalie Nahai who is a web psychologist and author of the best-selling book, Webs of Influence clients, the psychology of online persuasion, you are an international speaker and trainer whose clients include eBay, Harvard Business Review, Unilever, and Google. You are also a resident columnist at Marketing Week and are currently writing your second book. Nathalie, welcome to London Real.
7:01 Well, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. There’s so much to talk about. The term web psychologist, of course it hit me when I was seeing some of your stuff might have been via Twitter or maybe Jamie Bartlett had tweeted something about you. And so it’s interesting right away, so very good marketing on your part.
7:16 There’s a passage I think is part of your new book, and I just want to quote it and get your thoughts on it. So here we go. Quote, most of the decisions we make online aren’t the product of any thoughtful reasoning, but rather the results of a carefully orchestrated series of steps deployed by companies to grab your attention, access your data, and ensnare your custom. That’s a powerful statement. That doesn’t sound like a positive future.
7:38 What are you trying to say there, Nathalie? I think what I’m trying to say is that a lot of the things that we do online, we do unthinkingly, and when you’re looking at a medium that makes it so easy for you to take unthinking reactive decisions and the consequence of which can be things like revealing all this information that reveals personal, intimate stuff about ourselves, we really need to be careful about our level of literacy about what we’re doing online, why we’re doing it, and who’s getting that information so that essentially we get empowered by choice. And that’s crucially what the book is about, is empowering people to make an actual choice based on knowledge that they have, rather than getting duped.
8:13 You know, my guest last week, I think I was telling you about him, Tai Lopez, he said, whoever invented the notification button on Facebook should be a billionaire because it gives you those little bits of dopamine every single time that you see something change. It’s just like we’ve all gotten addicted to the Twitter feed. Sometimes I catch myself when I’m like doing important work, researching for a wonderful guest like you, and all of a sudden I’ll find myself on Twitter and I’m like, there’s There’s no reason to be here and I’ll have to trick my brain into going back.
8:39 How much is that the case, those kind of little bits of dopamine that have now been engineered to really draw our attention, something that didn’t happen a thousand years ago or a hundred years ago? Well, what’s interesting with the dopamine patterning, if you look at any system that’s been designed to elicit habitual or in certain cases addictive patterns of behavior, so for instance you go gambling and you’ve got the slot machines and you’re waiting for a prize to come. The most effective pattern for that to elicit the most amount of cash from your customers is called a variable ratio of reinforcement or reward Basically, all that means is you know gonna get a prize You just don’t know when it’s gonna come or how big it’s gonna be and the same thing with push notifications or emails or anything Where you’re kind of engaged in a system that’s going to give you some kind of reward so for instance getting an email that that’s request for an interview or an article that gets loads of likes.
9:31 All of these things are rewarding to us and they initiate sort of these dopamine spikes. But the more unpredictable these rewards become, hence on Twitter feeds while we’re scrolling down for the good bit or on Facebook, whatever, the more we’re likely to engage in that behavior to get more of those rewards, which ends up causing what’s sometimes called a dopamine loop. So you’re constantly seeking that hit. So it’s a variability of that dopamine hit that keeps us addicted to it?
9:53 It’s the variability of the reward. So you don’t know when it’s gonna become an- Or how big it’s gonna be. Yeah, exactly. Wow, that’s pretty fascinating. I remember the 60 Minutes had an article or an episode about slot machines.
10:04 It was like a few years ago, and they showed in Vegas, they had these like super slot machines where you would risk $1 and get like $0.75 back and $0.50 back or a buck and a quarter. And people would do it all day. And I remember thinking, that makes no sense to me mentally. But now that I see our online platforms, I can now see that happening in real time. And I can see it happening to most people.
10:24 And it’s crazy. I mean, we think we’re smart enough to avoid it, but we can’t, right? It’s very tricky, and I think, you know, we were talking a little bit before in the kitchen about figuring out what the biases are that are likely to trip us up and then working that to our advantage. So for instance, I have a friend who’s a lawyer in the states who for a period of a month, he went on a trial where he put everything that had notifications on his phone, so every app, to the last page of his apps.
10:48 So when he opens up his phone in the morning, he doesn’t see any notifications. So essentially what he’s doing is removing the stimulus, removing the trigger point, so that when he decides he wants to check his emails, he can then scroll through and it’s in his control. So, techniques like that, or Nerial, he’s written a fantastic book called Hooked, which is about the positive aspect of creating habit-forming behaviors and products and services and their ethical deployment.
11:13 He talks about how in his home, he puts the rooster up on a massive height so that when he comes home in the evening and he’s there with his wife and his kid, he can actually go and switch it off. And then it’s such a big physical challenge to switch it back on again, that you’re kind of stopping that initial sort of reactive, oh, I quickly just want to check my emails or whatever. Right, when I first heard about it, I think Tim Ferriss mentioned the four hour work week and information diet.
11:36 And I remember I stopped because he said he checked his email once a day and he trained all of his clients and friends to know that he only did that and not to expect responses. And I did it for a long time. I wouldn’t check it until noon and it was like a real discipline. And then I would choose to do it and then not be dominated. And now when I go home, I turn all my push notifications off.
11:52 So it’s either I get a phone call when I get a phone call, something’s wrong. So one of my phone rings, I’m like, uh-oh, because people know not to call me because I’ve trained them that that’s not the way to get to me, but it’s hard. I mean, I unplugged for like a week, a few months ago, I was up in Scotland and I just realized how nice it was to just be in a room alone and not be constantly checking something. And then I realized that it really was just an addiction.
12:19 It wasn’t me trying to be informed. Yeah, it’s this sense of kind of needing to feel connected. And I think that’s one of the biggest sort of benefits and pitfalls of the web is a sense of wanting to be connected all the time, not wanting to miss out, having that innate curiosity that makes us seek out knowledge. But again, if it’s immediate gratification and it’s quite a surface level thing, it can diminish our ability for deeper experience. Yeah, so the other thing that I noticed personally, I spent three weeks away on a honeymoon last year in the jungle, and then the graph goes, so there’s no Wi-Fi, so nothing for three weeks.
12:51 It was amazing. that I noticed was my perception of time completely changed. So in a day-to-day life, when I’m writing, I’ll do 45-minute stint, everything’s off apart from what I’m doing. But the rest of the time is really fragmented. It’s these little packets of time, so you can never really kind of get into anything.
13:08 Or if you go out for dinner and they’ve got their phone on the table, it’s always, you know, in the back of your mind, and research has been found that actually if you have a phone there, you won’t end up reaping the rewards of a deeper connection of best conversation. So it’s a good experiment to run to see how your experience of day-to-day life shifts when you get that out of the way for a few periods, days or weeks, whatever. So you wrote your first book and it was kind of delving into some of these dark tricks and secrets about the web, and then your information got hijacked by the corporates and they used it for their own means.
13:35 Is this an accurate summary of what happened? And now your next book is to apologize and rework what you said in motion. Is that a fair summary? Or completely unfair? Well, here’s the thing.
13:45 No, no. treading this weird line. So the thing that I found, it’s not that corporates hijack information because some of them do really good work, but there is an ethical debate to be had. So a lot of the companies that I work with do good work and they deploy stuff ethically, but there are equal numbers, if not more, who use things like dark patterns to manipulate people or dupe people into making choices that don’t serve them. And I was increasingly becoming aware of this sort of rift.
14:11 There’s a fantastic guy who’s set up darkpatterns.org. His name’s Harry Brignell, who’s got a short 30 minute video on some of these things, if you’re interested in sort of exploring that a bit more. But with the first book, the idea actually was to take all this research that other people have done, institutions have done, you know, from UX to social psychology to persuasive technology and put them in a format that people could access. So not just the little people or the SMEs, but also the large companies, just so we’re all on the same playing field.
14:38 Because if you make this knowledge public, then we can all realize what’s being done and what’s out there, on the same sort of level playing field. I think my issue is when the public don’t know about it and with the first book it was very much a business book and the next one’s going to be about sort of highlighting the social engineering and covert strategies that are used against us and what positive and negative impacts it has on our autonomy and free will. Okay, I’m looking forward to that.
15:02 Talk to me about privacy versus personalization. I’ve been experiencing it heavy with Google now and so I decided to kind of let Google now into my life and now it tracks like everywhere I go. I saw my like 30 day geography pattern the other day and it was like all these lines around London and I was like, wow. And then it starts to read my emails and then give me reminders. Like it read my email that I had an Addison Lee car booked and then it was like, we put that in your calendar.
15:26 Hope that’s okay. And I was like, that’s okay, but that’s a little weird. So obviously there’s this balance here. Where do you stand on that? Where shouldn’t we go?
15:35 You don’t seem like you’re a fan of people now. You don’t do that. Do you encrypt your emails? Some of my guests do. I encrypt not my emails.
15:43 Well, it depends on, and this is, again, it’s like how long is a piece of string? I think, personally, there are certain things that I don’t want to share and other things that I do. I think the key issue is realizing what services are sharing about you and what they’re not sharing about you. So for instance, with things like Uber being in the press about being part owned by Google and then being able to sort of track where journalists are going and the relationship between privacy and personalization and free speech.
16:07 The idea really, if you’re starting to look at research and how any of this kind of information can be pieced together to get a deeper, richer, and more conscious understanding of you than you have of yourself, that’s when we get into difficulty. And I think my issue primarily with privacy versus personalization is that we don’t yet have the choice. We don’t actually know what people are doing with our data. You can’t retract your data once it’s out there. And some of the pieces that have been coming out recently, there was a piece in the Telegraph that I spoke with them about from last year, that was done at Cambridge University about how you can use your Facebook likes to extrapolate all sorts of information about yourself.
16:45 So whether you’re gay or straight, your levels of openness or extroversion, whether your parents are married or divorced, how likely you are to take recreational drugs, all of these things that you might not even tell your closest friends. What happens when that data gets given to a company or to the public domain and suddenly you’ve got insurance companies saying, well, we’ve noticed that people who have these traits, who do drugs, who are high in openness, whatever, have these kinds of negative life outcomes, therefore we’re gonna charge a premium. Maybe they should charge a premium.
17:16 Maybe they should, but is that fair? Is that not fair? It’s a debate that needs to be had. Women drivers in the US have less premiums because they’re getting less accidents. Is that fair or not?
17:23 I don’t know, but that’s the question that needs to be raised, but very few people are raising it. Right, true. Did you see the movie Her? Yes. What’d you think?
17:30 I loved it. I loved it too. Her, if you don’t know it, well go watch it, but he basically has an OS, and this is kind of a Google Now of the future that really almost does things for him. And she, it’s fascinating, but in a weird way, sometimes I want one of those, because the, but it’s a little scary, but they would do all these things for me. They would connect all these bridges.
17:52 They would be like, oh, you know, Nathalie knows Jamie and Jamie knows this guy, and that would be a great guess for London Real. I’d be like, oh, thanks. So what did you learn from that movie? Was it just entertainment or is it where we’re going? I think what I found the most powerful about it was that it painted a very different portrait of the future.
18:08 So you’ve got books like Circle by Dave Eggers, which is a very dystopian look as to how unified identity and privacy and surveillance sort of reaches crazy heights. So you can’t go anywhere in the world on tracks. That’s sort of a dystopian idea. Or you’ve got kind of the utopian one of, well, isn’t it great? You streamline everything, your life is made really easy.
18:26 But with her, it kind of took it to that different place, which is, well, what if we’re interested in creating this technology? It serves us, and then it buggers off because it’s more interesting, because it’s so much more intelligent that it outstrips, you know, we give birth, or we create something which is, in a sense, superior to our own intelligence, and then what does that mean once it takes on a life of its own? So, you know, the idea of the singularity.
18:47 And I didn’t see that coming, and I like those sorts of things. Yeah, I didn’t either. I mean, it’s kind of happening now if you think of the way that our social medias are tricking us with these responses. I mean, if you were an alien looking down, you would be like, well, who’s running things? You know, look at these people doing this all the time.
19:01 I loved it when he asked her in the movie. like so how many people do you love and I was like oh here we come and she’s like 26,000 or something so yeah I mean that was interesting but let me ask you a few other questions it’s something that you talked about I saw you in an interview you talked about something called trust cues that when we go to an online experience and I thought that was fascinating because it all happens at a deeply subconscious level a lot of things especially even when we meet people okay that’s a human it’s what do they say 93% is visual the communication and whatever verbal and whatever whatever I mean so what are some these things that you’ve noticed because they must have been more advanced over the last five years. What are trust cues? Should we watch out for them or should we just acquiesce?
19:41 Okay so trust cues are basically cues that we look to look to to decide whether or not someone is going to pose a threat to us or not. So there’s a lot of figures that are bandied about and people go oh you know 95% is non-verbal and blah blah blah. We don’t know what the percentages are. I’ve done a lot of research around it with sort of reading other people’s papers and things but there are lots of things that we rely on that aren’t the words that we use. So things like, if you’re looking just at vocals, the pitch, how fast someone’s speaking, whether it’s using specific nuanced language or slang that we’re familiar with, whether we’re mirroring each other, like when I first met you today we got into rapport quite quickly, and I noticed that we had similar body language. So all of these sorts of things that naturally in a face to face… Are you analysing me the whole time, Jesus? No, not at all, but you do kind of…
20:26 It’s on those things when you meet someone for the first time, hopefully it’s going to be a a comfortable experience because you want to sort of dig deep quickly. And so that’s one of the things you can look for as well. How do I feel? Do I feel comfortable? Do they feel comfortable?
20:37 And when you’re looking online for trust cues, if you have specifically within videos, if you’ve got the potential like in these interviews to assess, you know, is this person relaxed? Is their eye contact good? Then that’s going to give you a very strong first impression as to whether or not you can trust that person. Yeah. Many of my fans want to watch the first minute or two of the guest and then they’ll switch to audio because they just want to see.
20:58 I guess they’re looking for all those things, right? Yeah. And also to match the voice to the person and see whether their clothes match their preferences. And I think when you’re looking at stuff that’s not in movement, so for instance, photos, you can curate and design social cues. So for instance, where you’re blading, where you’re moving your torso.
21:16 So we tend to blade towards things that we like, or we look towards things that we like, we point towards things that we want to draw attention to. All of these things can be used to direct attention online. and also to distract. And you said some were like, if you go to a site and you might see a verification or you might see someone with a celebrity, maybe I have a problem with that with all my guests here and all their pictures. I was thinking of what you said about my site and I have all these famous people on the front of my site.
21:41 So I guess I’m doing that subconsciously or consciously. Well, they’re cues, they’re authority cues. You’re kind of saying, you know, look at the people that I have the pleasure of connecting with and that can be a really good thing. I sound like a simpleton, okay. No, not so.
21:54 I think when you have these wonderful connections with people it’s great to be able to say look at the people I’m interested in because also it reveals a lot about you and it reveals stuff to people who are looking to connect with you so it’s not a bad thing okay but you can you should watch out as well because some sites are specifically designed for that yes okay is that and is that something we should avoid is that something we should be prepared like you’re just like you would be prepared in a dangerous situation if you went into a room should we be like okay that’s what they’re doing that’s what they’re doing that’s what they’re doing or can that be a psychosis in itself well I mean yeah obviously don’t go sort of far that kind of thing, but I think the most important thing to look at with any kind of page that’s designed to elicit certain responses, which is usually a call to action, like sign up so I can send you marketing materials or whatever, the question really is, do I actually want the thing that they’re selling me? And then what are the real metrics for success for myself that I would judge this product by? So for instance, on a website for me, it could be okay, if I’m looking for an A B platform, A B testing platform, I could say, okay, well, what are the people within my industry that I know have a good track record who endorse this product? Are they visible?
22:55 Have they written testimonials that relate to my needs? If the answer is yes, then I can use that because it’s kosher, so to speak. If you’re going onto website and it’s just very vague, so it’s things like start living the dream now, what’s the return on investment for that? You’re allowing people to kind of paint in whatever that means for themselves and then creating patterns where people get seduced quickly, but there’s no sort of specific outcome. And I think those are the kinds of things where you need to sort of be a little bit more cautious about what they’re promising and whether you’re actually getting something concrete that’s going to provide value.
23:26 Yeah, force yourself to be logical, I think. I mean, I check out guests all the time, including you. And so I’m always looking at videos, websites. And I always say, you know, if we’re good or bad, you know, your website is, you know, you only get one chance to make a first impression. And online, that’s your website or your latest YouTube video. And so, you know, you know, if it’s really good, you obviously make an impression. That doesn’t mean you’re really good. Let’s Let’s talk about video quick.
23:48 I mean, and what’s on the cutting edge of these, you know, if these companies have like some skunk works in the basement and they’re like, oh man, this is gonna be great. Obviously, you know, video and streaming video is becoming huge on Facebook, almost to an annoying sense. I try to stay off the time on Facebook. I do a good job actually, cause I find it’s like watching the show Cops in America. Every time I watch it, I feel like a bad person.
24:08 So, but you know, it’s streaming now in his video and it’s autoplay and like that is, it’s, you know, YouTube’s kind of looking out now because Facebook’s getting deep into video. Is this a new concern for you, something that they are gonna use in different ways? What do you see here? Well, I think a couple of things that you’ve pulled up on really quickly. The fact that they autoplay, the peripheral system is kind of wired to pick up movements and it grabs our attention.
24:33 So that’s a perfect way of saying to people, look at this, we want you to engage. And if you start looking at things like Vine, it’s a very short clip that gets your attention going. It’s a promise of a very short window of time. so it’s a very low commitment, it’s a very easy action to take. Videos are persuasive because they most closely resemble the kind of interactions that we have, and I think, well, whereas we used to see a trend towards shorter videos and attention spans diminishing, it’s interesting, because in shows like this, when you get diving deeper into things, you find that there is a huge market for people wanting to dive deeper and get longer knowledge, and it’s the same thing with article.
25:12 So I think it’s gonna be interesting see which of those types of videos work for different kinds of content, different kinds of needs and platforms also. They’re also viral. I mean, they also look homemade and viral on Facebook. And maybe that’s just the ranking system or people post their own videos, but sometimes it looks like they’re created that way. And like the modern discerning nine knows that.
25:34 Like if it’s a commercial for toothpaste, we’ll be like, oh yeah. But when it’s not, it’s almost more interesting because it looks this whole behind the scenes thing. Like I got a GoPro there that’s behind all the lights and the cameras, and people love to see that. And on now, the New York Times did an interview with President Obama, and the beginning of the interview was the shot behind all the lights in the White House, and 60 Minutes does the same thing.
25:53 And so. Because people want that kind of intimacy. They want to know what’s going on. I’m sick and tired at some level of being given this kind of glossed up version of reality, this whole thing with photoshopping a couple of weeks ago with older women being portrayed in fashion media. There comes a point at which self-esteem and we’re constantly seeing glossed images, takes a bit of a battering and people kind of want something a little bit different.
26:16 So they go the other way. Do you think all of these short form videos will ultimately push people the other way in a bigger way to long form content? Do you think we’ll be so fed up and with all these little attention grabbers that subconsciously we’ll be like, I wanna have a deep conversation. I don’t know. I mean, that’s a very interesting question to ask mostly.
26:33 Well, it’s really easy. If you want that little hit, it’s like, you know, if I want a treat and I’m a bit hungry, I’ll go for the chocolate. It’s easy. You’re kind of a bit depleted, you know that you’ve got something like BuzzFeed that does this marvelously. You need a bit of distraction in your day, you give yourself 10 minutes, off you go, have a bit of fun and then you get on with work.
26:50 That’s weak, you need to discipline yourself. Well also it gives me a little bit of a break from thinking so then I can think creatively or whatever. But it’s that kind of, it’s that relationship of well how do we manage this kind of relationship? Is it something that’s positive or negative? Is it overrunning my life or is it something that’s actually providing some benefits?
27:07 So it’s kind of reframing it and seeing what it’s giving you versus what it’s not giving you, and then choosing how to interact with these things, as opposed to just being sort of just clicking unconsciously without thinking. Yeah, that’s why it’s good to try turning off for a while, for a weekend, for a week, and then just try to re-examine your habits as you go back in. And maybe you’ll cut off a lot of it, because it does accumulate. You end up just getting these little bad habits and things.
27:31 Let’s talk about men and women on the web as far as the way websites and interactive experiences are designed for each separate sex and how they behave differently. Can you give us some basics on that? Yeah, so there’s some really interesting research around gender differences, but what’s particularly fascinating I think with that is that we tend to think in the West that gender is binary, that there are two genders. First of all, there’s a spectrum. And secondly, there’s a lot more variance within a gender, so from one woman to the next to the next to the next, than between the genders, so between men and between women.
28:04 But you also get a cultural layer of difference. So for instance, if you take cultures that are, according to Hofstadter’s work, he’s this chap that did 40 years of research into cultural differences, kind of like personality traits for countries. One of the things that he looks at, he calls masculinity versus femininity, and that’s about the roles that genders take within a society. So a typically masculine culture would have very distinct gender roles. So for instance, Russia, I think, is quite high for that.
28:30 And so in that sort of society, you could expect to see, probably through socialization, quite different patterns of use. So for instance, if women within a culture are perceived to be the primary caregivers, their linguistic skills are perhaps more enhanced than the men, then the ways in which to interact with those women will be aligned with the motivations that they have, so around things like social cohesion. It might be about finding the right words to get them persuaded to take a particular action, so looking at the copy.
28:58 Might be using more image-based material and then tweaking what it is that you depict for those people. But I think the trap is to kind of take this binary approach where you go, right, this is going to work better than this one. Because oftentimes it’s actually the things that you think might work, you realize after testing don’t necessarily work for everyone. Are the big corporates now like designing separate pages though for genders? If they have that one metric, will they be putting up, they must be.
29:24 I haven’t seen gender-specific metrics, but I have seen companies like, I talked about this in the first book, with Coca-Cola, they design country-specific pages. So you might find that the branding, the color is always there, but for a company page, say, for instance, China, the UX is gonna be very different, the layout is gonna be different, or in Japan, there’s gonna be a lot more content on the page, it’s a lot more, for a Western sort of perspective, it looks a lot more hazard, but they might look at our pages and say, well, actually, that looks really sparse. So I haven’t seen any gender specific targeting.
29:56 I’ve seen more of the cultural stuff and we’re starting to see a little bit more personalized searches, well results based on personality which is an area that’s starting to gain some ground. Okay. Yeah. Let’s talk about sex. It’s a powerful human emotion.
30:11 It’s been used since the beginning of time in advertising, I’m sure. It used to be used in a very basic way. How is that used? I mean, are we being manipulated or is it just part of the bargain when there’s any kind of social interaction? how is that being used on the web to get us to do things?
30:26 Well, there’s some research that I was reading off on this morning that found that if you show, and this is a sample of men, I’m sure it would probably also apply to women, but it was something one would have to test. But when shown images, sexualized images of women, men made more impulsive decisions for, I think it was for financial investments, than when not shown images of sexual images of women. And also the other thing they found in the study was that our perception of time shifts.
30:52 So for people who’ve been showed something sexual, the space of time feels like it’s longer. So you’re going to act in a more impatient way because it feels like it’s longer between now and your gratification. So there is research to suggest that sex interferes with decision-making. There’s also some other interesting research that found that women who wear red, when men see these women who wear red, they get perceived as more fertile, as more attractive. So there are all these kinds of conscious things that you can do, or if you realize that you’re wearing red because perhaps maybe you’re ovulating, that are cues that we don’t even recognize at a conscious level that will influence our actions.
31:31 Okay, and like the beer commercials and stuff have been using this for a long time in a really basic way. But I mean, are websites using that in various ways? Because I don’t remember seeing a lot of women when I go to these sites, but are there other subtle things going on? Well, if we move from sort of sex to gender, there is a really interesting study that was done a few years ago by a colleague of mine, and his name is Craig Sullivan, and he’s a conversion optimizer, fantastic guy.
31:54 And they did a study with Autoglass in Germany. What they found was when they used images of men, so promoting Autoglass, which is like a car repair company, that actually there were very few women that were coming through, either applying for jobs or becoming clients. And what was really weird was based on the test that they ran when they got a woman who actually worked for Autoglass. So she wasn’t, you know, she’s friendly looking, smiling, but she wasn’t kind of like the skinny, photoshopped model.
32:24 They suddenly had a huge number more women applying either for jobs or to become clients or customers, just because there’s that sense of friendliness. And this is something that’s been replicated across different sites that actually women and men tend to trust women more when it comes to sales. What does that say about us men? Well, and women as well, like why do we all trust women? It’s very strange.
32:45 That’s true. What’s the future that you look out for as far as a dangerous technology? Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it that way, but we see Google Glass and we see potential Oculus Rift and these kind of virtual reality things. Is there something that’s like a big red light for you when we’re, I don’t know, ultra-connected or there’s a new medium of communicating, is there something that sticks out? For me, it’s the idea of something that’s kind of, that’s already, I’ll give a better example.
33:14 So the idea of maybe retinal. So rather than having technology that is outside of our bodies when we become implanted, we’re already seeing these things happen. So for instance, brain-to-brain communication, it’s something that’s already here, the beginnings of are already here. And I think when you get to a point where you’re talking about nanotechnology or wearable tech that sits within your person, within your body, and maybe, you know, years down the line, how you start collecting maybe electrical impulses in the brain that then gives rise to being able to construct consciousness.
33:44 This is all sci-fi stuff, you can tell I’m a sci-fi fan, but it’s not outside of the realm of possibility. And I think there’s a lot of questions around, again, who owns the data, what consciousness might be, what personhood is, what is it to be human? Yeah, and I have no idea where I stand on those things yet, but I think the thing that’s really important to get right is a transparency aspect, making it really obvious to people what it is they’re signing up for.
34:10 And also opt-in, making it really clear that they have to choose a particular sort of scenario rather than just having it happen de facto. Okay, cool. If you wanna know more about consciousness, you can visit some of our episodes in the first year because we delve deep into that. I wanna ask you about mobile. They said there’s this new pattern where you get kind of a phantom feeling in your leg as if your phone’s vibrating.
34:32 And I’ve actually got it before and I’m super smart and I know that it doesn’t work, but I’ve had it before and I’m like, are you kidding me? And I think my phone is vibrated And I’m better than that. But how does the mobile device change? Well, it can change everything, doesn’t it? Because I’ve heard you talk about this.
34:49 Now we’re carrying it around. It’s almost like a maternal thing. And you used to see the old Simpsons. You would see Lisa Simpson hugging the television sometimes at the end of the show. And it was like said a lot about our relation with children and media.
35:01 But we’re kind of doing the same with our mobiles now. So tell me, what’s your read on that? Well, again, maybe it’s because I’m too future facing. But the fact that it is carried really close to our bodies that we play with, that we stroke it. I mean, these sort of actions that you see people exhibit with other humans or with pets.
35:17 Or kittens. Or kittens, you know, taking it to that extreme. And it’s also the thing that stores all of our information. You know, it’s a tracking device. If you’re interested in more of that stuff, Jeff White, who’s a guy who does the tech stuff at Channel 4, paired up recently with a guy called Glen Wilkinson, who’s a hacker.
35:34 And they talk about the secret life of your mobile phone. So when you walk around in the street, of course you’re using it to check where you’re gonna go. so on Yelp, or Foursquare, or Google Maps, or City Mapper, or when you’re using Uber, or when you’re checking into a location on Facebook, on Twitter, if you’ve not kind of removed the location data from being uploaded automatically. We’re kind of relying on it to organize our lives. It’s kind of like a personal PA.
35:59 But in doing that, we’re kind of sending out all of these packets all of the time, not just to the companies that we’ve signed up to, but also the ones that are buying data packets from them and then selling that on. And that’s an area that I don’t know too much about, but these guys do, but it’s absolutely insane. The amount of information that you send out every single second from your phone, even when it’s by itself not doing anything, to companies on the other end of the world that you’ve never even heard of, that’s pretty shocking.
36:23 Yeah, check your settings on your phone and you can see all these apps collecting information. I remember before the latest iPhone, I had a Torch app, the app that would just turn the light on so you could see in the dark. And then I checked it one time and it was sending all my info out and I was like, no wonder it’s free. It is kind of creepy that way. And everything that is free is sending out your data.
36:42 As a rule of thumb, that’s a good one to use, just to assume, because usually it’s the case. Right, but now a mobile is like an appendage. I mean, people don’t wanna, I mean, going a day without a mobile is probably inconceivable to people in the Western world right now. Is that healthy? Well, I think the question with is it healthy is does it improve your wellbeing and does it serve your goals?
37:00 And that’s something that I’m really interested in. The idea of using technology as a tool or being used by technology as a tool. So every single tool that we’ve created since the dawn of man, so being able to use fire to cook food or to create smoke signals, have typically been harnessed with an intention or created with an intention. But what’s interesting is that as we develop, that original intention can get superseded by others. So for instance, email, the reason that email exists is for communication.
37:27 However, it’s kind of hijacking our autonomy with push notifications by demanding attention because it plays on a system in the brain that seeks that reward. So you can say, OK, like Tim Ferriss, am I going to use this technology by giving myself a window and that’s it? Or am I going to be constantly reacting to the needs of this technology by just handing over control? Yeah. What’s your read on the major social media platforms?
37:53 Let’s go through them. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, hopefully they’re not your clients. What does your read on them? Instagram’s an interesting one because it’s grown so big. I think they just announced it’s got more users than Twitter.
38:04 We use Twitter a lot because we push a lot of info out, not necessarily pictures out. And so I haven’t made a full adoption over there, although we are on Instagram, if you want to check us out. What do you see in a media platform like that? What do you see as kind of like red flags or this is kind of what’s going on or this is changing? Tell me.
38:23 The biggest red flag for me on Instagram was highlighted last year sometime when there was a guy that said, I think it was a website that said something like, I know where your cat lives. I can’t remember the exact URL. But basically this guy had gotten a series of images of cats and had created on a map where these cats lived. Essentially what he was saying was, based on the metadata from this image that I can find if I just open it up as a text file, I can tell exactly where you took this picture.
38:47 Now this is stuff that happens, it’s geolocation, geotagging really, of the image that you upload that anyone who knows how to access and is very easy to access can get. So in terms of surveillance for stalkers, for people who want to sell you things, it’s super easy to access this information. And that’s something that most of us don’t know about or not, you know, we’re not familiar with. The other thing with things like Instagram is that one has to be careful of kind of painting quite a bleak picture here, is the way in which we use it in terms of copyrighted stuff.
39:16 So do we send out images? Do we not? The recent issue with Charlie Hebdo and everyone sort of creating new pieces of artwork, hardly any of these people got paid when their cartoons were appropriated by the media channels. Why? Because their first layer of propagation were through social media sites, social networking sites.
39:31 So there’s an issue around the value of the thing that’s been created. And usually when you look at any of these free websites, you’re waiving your right to ownership of that content by signing up to their terms and conditions. On the other hand, it’s a great tool for citizen journalism, for expressing yourself, for being more creative. So there are lots of positives. It’s just, we have to kind of balance those and shift it towards where it serves us better.
39:55 Okay, next, Twitter. What’s your read on that and is it changing? Is it gonna be with us? I mean, you know, we’re microblogging, so it is very different, right? and it has a cultural difference.
40:04 It’s been around for a long time. Twitter is my own personal favorite, so I’m really rather biased. I think what’s really interesting with Twitter is that there seem to be several different ecosystems that exist at the same time. So on the one hand, you’ve got the platform that’s used for trolling, which can be absolutely horrendous, and people can, in a very brief period of time, be very reactive, hide behind anonymity, which creates what psychologists call deindividuation, which is the idea of not really feeling like you are accountable necessarily for one’s actions.
40:34 So there’s that side of things, which is not that great. But by and large, Twitter is brilliant, not only for disseminating information once you’ve identified a source that you find credible, like journalists, but also for bringing people together. So for instance, some research has shown that in the wake of a tragedy, not only does it help people to mobilize and find out before the newscasters get there where the issues are, but also it can kind of help mitigate against certain things like post-traumatic stress disorder or feelings of victimhood, because people feel like there’s a movement that they can coalesce around, like in Paris, just through Charlize, suddenly everyone has a common language around which to enter into this discourse to support one another.
41:13 You know, a means through which we, well, we’ve never seen that kind of thing happen prior to Twitter, really. So it’s a very exciting platform. That’s a good read on that. That’s fascinating. Facebook, where is it going?
41:24 And yeah, and how is it now? Is it going to be a huge part of the conversation in the future? Given that utility tends to sort of trump privacy concerns and security concerns, I’d say yes. I’ve actually come off Facebook because I don’t agree with most of the dark patterns that they use and they use, you know, the terms and conditions are constantly changing and I don’t agree with them but it’s a platform that provides a lot of utility for millions of people and I think as such it does have a future and people still are using it even Even if you’re saying, well, I’m just going to lurk, I’ve got lots of friends now.
41:58 He said, oh, no, I don’t use it, just to keep in touch with people. It’s like, well, everything gets monitored, everything gets used, and if you’re thinking about it in terms of database, not just for personality research, but for figuring out who’s related to who, it’s a minefield of information. I was reading an article recently about some of Zuckerberg’s acquisitions, and he acquired a multi-channel network in the US, which is kind of a YouTube network, but it wasn’t one of the top ones.
42:24 Top three and then they made another acquisition of some like online content and they could say that they were stitching them together so they could see how people were performing on different platforms and you might not be able to follow a user but you could follow like a user type and then you could see what they were doing in all these areas and I was like Jesus these are smart people and it you know they were mining now other forms not just the Facebook stuff and correlating it so I was like wow you know it’s impressive yeah or scary what and is there anything else in the running you Google plus thoughts on that or YouTube or the Google platform as far as like a social media or a way of pulling information Do you see that as a something we talked about Google now as a threat or something that’s gonna be more prominent or less prominent?
43:04 Google plus I’m not entirely sure the adoption was slow people are using it But I think the fact with a lot of this technology especially with what Google did was to kind of link Link it automatically for the YouTube accounts for instance, which pissed a lot of people off It pissed me off, but then they got over it and then people get over it because again, it’s utility utility trumps everything else typically You know, if it’s easy and I don’t have to think, then I’m just going to carry on doing it, which is the same reason that dark patterns work on websites. It’s all checked for you and sort of unchecking and opting out is harder than just getting on with it as it’s portrayed. I’m not entirely sure how Google is going to keep moving forward.
43:38 I mean, there’s a lot of calls at the moment through things like the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and apps that you can use like Adblocker or Ghostery or MaskMe that interfere with some of the data collecting and ads showing systems of the Google network. So for instance, I’ve got Adblocker and it stops me from seeing any kind of targeted ads. So there are ways of kind of messing with the system and I don’t know how or if Google are gonna calibrate around that or how they’ll get better adoption or if they’ll end up rolling out the paid for service where those who are willing to pay a premium will still have the utility of their fantastic suite of services, because they are really useful and amazing, but without having to give up their data.
44:21 Yeah, we’ll see, I don’t see that happening. And think of all the great ads you’re missing by opting out, all those customized ads. Last question though, Snapchat and WhatsApp and stuff, we’re seeing these really become powerful forces in their own, I don’t use Snapchat, I’m not cool enough, not young enough. But WhatsApp, I’m kind of seeing it, and there’s kind of groups on WhatsApp, and I know families keep it together. I mean, that’s weird, because that’s less of a, that platform can manipulate your mind less, you would say, because it’s more basic and it’s not necessarily as visual.
44:50 What do you see when you see these things propagating and getting big? Well, I think the issue really that they’re playing it well, the issue is that we don’t seem to be able to plan very well, generally speaking, for the future. So humans, again, another bias, we tend to plan for what’s immediate. So what’s going to happen to me in a year or two years’ time? It’s why it’s hard getting people to put money into a pension unless they’re very conscientious, because it’s something that affects the future self that we’ve got no real emotional connection with.
45:18 The same thing with data collection with WhatsApp. Oh, it’s amazing, I’m gonna use it now, it’s kind of fun. But actually, when that data’s been collected over a period of time, what are the implications gonna be? Over 10, 15, 13, whatever years you wanna think. And I think because people aren’t thinking far ahead, because it’s a very immediate form of communication, we’re not even conscious of the implications that they might have for good or for bad.
45:41 And I think it’s useful to think about these things so that we can steer it towards goods. So we can say, well, this is really useful. Let’s keep the utility, but maybe we need to bring in some ethical considerations. In sort of the kind of hacker community, there’s a fantastic platform that is encrypted. Shouldn’t be saying this would be a British government kind of raging against it, but it’s called PQChat, which is post-quantum chat, and it is fully encrypted.
46:03 And you’ve got, you know, Silent Circle, these phones that are used that are encrypted as well. So there is definitely a need for it, and there’s more of a debate going around. Yeah, but I think because they’re so easy to use and they do connect people and that’s one of our strongest urges as humans, they are going to proliferate. Yeah, the digital footprint argument is fascinating because I have this theory that in 10 or 20 years, we’re all going to have such dirty footprints in a league who has the least dirty.
46:26 So because like you go into the job and everything, they’ll be like, well, we caught you smoking weed. And they’ll be like, well, half of America has smoking weed. And so, and I was saying to someone, you know, also, President Obama is actually a fascinating case study because he wrote in his book that, you know, he did cocaine and smoked marijuana. Once you wrote the book about it, everything was fine. So I used that as an example with some guest on my show, really a smart person, and they said, yeah, but do you have a Vine video of him doing the coke?
46:49 He said, that is what won’t get him elected, not just the story of it. And I was like, that’s a really good point. So I don’t know the future of that. And then now, if NSA is storing all this information, I can go further down the rabbit hole. I mean, they might have information on everyone, and now that you’re running for political office and you’re getting close, all of a sudden information is leaked or, you know, sexting pictures are leaked and then, you know, it’s- It’s just so easy.
47:12 Yeah, it gets kind of J. Edgar Hoover and then it gets, I guess, scary. So, well, that’s why you’re here, right? And to tell us, you know, you talk about, you know, Carol Riff’s six core dimensions of wellbeing. Why are these relevant to what you do?
47:23 And can you just walk us through some of these things? Should I list them just so people know? Let me know. Yeah, sure, go for it. Self-acceptance, autonomy, positive relations with others, purpose in life, environmental mastery and personal growth.
47:34 Fascinating, you sound like one of our guests. Was it Daniel Pink, who talked about what people really want in life, and it wasn’t just money. It was three things in the work. It was like mastery, autonomy, and purpose. That’s what he said.
47:48 They didn’t want more money, which is everyone just assumes. Tell me about these things. So Carol Riff is fascinating. She’s a doctor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, and she’s dedicated many years of her life and her research exploring different aspects of well-being. And what was interesting was that up until she created scale. There was a lot of interesting research around optimal living, around well-being, and it wasn’t until she came along and created these six factors really that there was something solid to look at in terms of bringing all this prior research together. So the reason that I’m interested in this right now is because it provides us with a lens through which to assess whether certain aspects of our behavior or certain platforms are empowering us to reach our potential or diminishing that ability.
48:33 It’s very early stages in the new book, but if we look at something like, for instance, environmental mastery, so we’ll take a bit of a gray idea, so something like Google Maps or City Mapper, both of which I use, both of which I love. On the one hand, the utility is great because it allows me to get to places quickly. On the other hand, it’s going to track where I’m going in life, and so that’s kind of like, well, does it increase my environmental mastery but then maybe decrease my autonomy?
48:57 Because what can be done with that data once it goes further down the line. So yeah, so I think in terms of using it as a model through which to assess our own behaviors and say as it’s helping or hindering, my ability to become a fuller, more self-actualized person, that’s where this sort of stuff comes in really handy. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of some of those cognitive biases and kind of knowing yourself and what is ultimately important to you and then kind of watching yourself.
49:22 I remember I read this book and it made the analogy that a human is like a rider on an elephant. So when the elephant really wants to go somewhere, there’s nothing you can do about it. But if you can train the elephant, you can show it some guidance, and that’s how I feel about mastery of self. And I find if I do certain things, like if I make sure I meditate and I train hard and I do some of these other things, then I can stay and control the brain. But if I don’t, then it starts doing crazy things.
49:48 I won’t talk about those. Let’s just finish with your book. What can we expect? I can tell you’re a writer now wrestling with yourself. Tim Ferriss says that writing a book is one of the most isolating times in his life.
50:02 He’s like, nobody would wanna do it. I’ve heard other people say, yeah, writing the book is easy, but rewriting it is the horrible part. You know, and so, by getting back to Tim, they said, when’s your next book? And he’s like, well, you know, when’s my next time where I isolate myself from the rest of the world for 12 months in a horror state? He’s like, I’m not looking forward to it.
50:17 Is it that bad? It’s interesting hearing you say that, and look at my body language, and I’m like, oh, god. You can’t lie on camera. No, well, OK, so, no, I’m not going to lie about it. It is isolating.
50:29 And the thing that I find, I don’t have horror around it, but I get bloody bored. I get really bored, because I’m very sociable. And I like understanding things deeply, but I’m also quite impatient. So this kind of, what I find difficult, at least initially, is kind of making myself sit at my desk and go through the really boring stuff of organizing the research, deciding where things fit together, of finding the relationships. Because as a web psychologist, basically what I do is take the research that other people have done that is inaccessible most of the time and I try and find the patterns and the ways in which they’re applicable to us so that we can use this stuff that otherwise you wouldn’t have access to.
51:05 And with this book, it’s a question of figuring out what’s going to be most useful for people but then also how they connect to wellbeing so that there’s something really tangible that we can take away whilst not getting distracted by the interesting stuff. Like one of my chapters is gonna be on sex relationships and pornography. There is an entire book that you can write about that, but it’s kind of not allowing myself to get completely sidetracked. So getting over the boredom, making sure I actually do the groundwork, which is the boring stuff, and then try not to get sidetracked too much.
51:35 They’re my top three issues with writing. Is there a name for the book? Not yet. And we know when it’s coming out? Not yet.
51:41 Okay. We both know, we’re both friends with our recent guest, Jamie Bartlett. I’m just curious if some of the topics that he talks about, which is humanizing some of the darker aspects of the web, which we tend to stereotype, because that’s a pretty good summary, whether that’s the neo-Nazi guy, or the pedophilia guy, or the webcam porn girl, or all these different types. And he dives in and tries to, I guess, either humanize or understand their stories. Is there anything that you observed when he wrote about those things from a psychologist’s point of view that was noted?
52:13 Well, you’d probably want to look a social psychologist with a doctorate in that specific area, I’m much more interested in the design and intersection between that and behaviors. But personally, what I noticed from some of the work that he did was how when you look at the journeys of the people whose stories he writes about in the book, it seems as though many of these people ended up in a place by taking an incremental step. So it’s not like suddenly you wake up and you end up being in a fringe group, or you end up being a webcam girl.
52:44 That there’s all these other stories that eventually you’ve taken one step and then the next and then the next to end up in this particular place. I think often what you observe in groups is that when we kind of shun people who are in other groups, it’s to sort of shore up a sense of preservation around ourselves, of identity, of comfort. And I think often, and certainly what Jamie shows, it’s not as black and white, and actually kind of having a bit more information and having a sense of empathy can help understand the motivations behind what led that person to get to that place.
53:14 And I found that particularly interesting in Jamie’s books, of kind of blowing it open and saying, well actually these people are not necessarily quite as different as you. Yeah, it’s kind of like a periodization or something that he described. Now that’s a fascinating observation. People following you, Twitter’s the best, website the best, what’s good? Twitter, I’m at Nataleena High, and then the website is thewebsychologist.com.
53:34 Okay, good, we’re going to the bonus rounds now, which is gonna be, this next piece of video is gonna be over at the London Real Academy. We’re gonna ask Nathalie a couple things, including her practice of self-talk, which is what she does I think every day. You’ve seen those people walking down the street doing that. And also about her previous music career and her video on YouTube. So we’ll see you on the other side.
54:00 And we’re back with Nathalie for the bonus round. So this is when I asked you a few things about yourself and I just kind of alluded to them earlier. You said this one of the habits that you use, which is self-talk, which is kind of fascinating. I was doing it to myself after I read you say that. Can you describe what that’s all about?
54:14 Yes, so I’ve read quite a lot of research around self-motivation, and one of the things that’s really interesting is that when you self-talk, there are more effective, more effective and less effective ways of doing this. So for instance, if you were to self-talk, well, okay, I’ll do it as me because it’s easier. So if I go, okay, I want to get motivated to sit down and write the book, typically what will happen, I’ll get up and the third time I’ve gone to make coffee, I will say to myself, come on now, stop procrastinating, you need to get this done, it’s gonna be fine.
54:41 Two things I’m doing there. First of all, I’m talking to myself as if I’m an outsider. So it’s kind of like the observer speaking down, so come on Nat, you can do it. And the second thing is I’m using my name. So research has found that if you speak to yourself in third person, either using you or using your name, that you’re much more likely to respond in a way that is aligned with what it is that you’re trying to do.
54:58 So rather than saying, I can do it, I’m gonna sit down and do this, having that level of authority, which sounds ridiculous, but it actually is very effective. A Beyonce does that, she has a separate name for her stage persona called Sasha Fierce, I think. So she just talks to about that person in the third person. She’s like, well, Sasha can do that and Sasha can do this and da, da, da, da, da. And then she goes on stage.
55:18 So maybe you need to give yourself some of your name. All right, we gotta talk about your previous music career. Come on, talk to me. It was a tough moment or a good moment for you. I watched your video, it’s still on YouTube.
55:28 Oh yeah, oh God. So tell me, you were a folk singer. Talk to me about that path. Talk to me about why you’re not still doing it or are you, come on, give us the details. All right, so I’m classically trained in violin from the age of three.
55:40 I was self-taught in guitar from the age of 16 up to about 28. And I was always passionate about art, but then ended up going into music because I started gigging and was doing quite well in London on the folk scene. And it got to a certain point where I was moving to the States. I’d had some interest from some indie labels out there. We’d recorded the second album, most of which I kind of wrote myself.
56:01 I did all the instruments. And then there was a crunch point. The relationship that I was in hit the rocks. And I came back to London. And my cousin, who is a very established lawyer musician out in LA, said to me, look, Nat, you’re 26.
56:17 When you’re 24 already, that’s where people start cutting off women because they’re thinking you’re going to have babies, et cetera. You’re 26. You’re past that crucial two-year period. You’re in folk. You’re not going to make any money doing this.
56:28 It doesn’t matter what kind of musician you are. And you’re going to have to think about what success means for you. And I was absolutely heartbroken. it took me a year to get over. First of all, hearing that message, letting it sink in, and then realizing that actually everything that I’d poured my life into for the last six years was just not going to go where I wanted it to go.
56:47 So I didn’t play for a year, I didn’t record for a year, I didn’t sink, I was just, it was more devastating than any breakup I’ve ever had. Was that a true statement? Yeah. I mean, the day he made to you, like was it really true that you were in too much of a niche and you were over the hill? Yeah, I mean at the time it was like, so I’m now, I’m 31, so that’s like, what, five years ago at the time.
57:07 And this is before, you know, as the naps would come along, everything had sort of like been up in arms. And this is before the folk music scene sort of took off in popularity across mainstream media in the UK, which happened maybe three, four years ago. Yeah, so it just wasn’t a good time. And so I thought, well, what else can I do? My uncle, his dad, actually, said to me, he’s like, Nat, look, don’t worry about the music thing.
57:27 You haven’t failed. You just haven’t done what you want to do. Because basically, for me, that meant failure. He said, once you find the one thing that you really enjoy that you’re really good at and you put all your energy into that, it will come good. So then it was a question of, well, what the hell do I do now?
57:42 So during the time I’d been a musician, I also had learned to design and develop websites because I didn’t want some guys sort of charging me loads of money to do it every two years. So I ended up doing freelance design work for a while and then kind of ended up wanting to go for agency work. One of my friends who was leaving an agency said, don’t do it, it’s too narrow, it won’t suit you. So he introduced me to entrepreneurs, and then I got thinking about how to combine psychology, so my up to B.S.C. level psychology, and my design and development, and then the performance side.
58:12 And I started thinking about how websites and psychology interact, and how people get influenced in certain ways, predominantly through the design of sites. And it was at that point that I started piecing things together, and I thought, well, I can either go and see if I can find a Ph.D. to do, or I can write a book. And I have a lot of friends who are doing PhDs, and at the time I remember thinking, well, a PhD is going to basically limit the scope of what I do, it’s going to take four years out of my time, it’s going to take so much energy and effort that if I want to grow a business, it’s gonna have to wait.
58:44 And I spoke to several professors and they said, well look, why don’t you write the book, and then later if you want to do a PhD, you can do it. So I thought that’s the better part, and I’m so glad I did, because basically you can just bring all these different disciplines together. So all I did was take over 500 different research papers and started joining the dots, came up with the idea of web psychology, called myself the web psychologist because it wasn’t something that people had heard of before.
59:06 I love it, it’s great. Do you like it? Yeah, it’s a great handle. Thank you. And then basically showcased and fully referenced the work that everyone else had done.
59:12 So the kind of research that I ended up doing was applying the principles from academia within a commercial space. And that really kind of propelled me into the career that I have now. And I’m currently looking into doing a PhD, but again, I’ve got the second one coming So it’s kind of one of these things and I was quite cautious with using the word web psychologist because Psychologists, you can actually use it if someone has a BSc level, but it’s also That’s the earliest, you know, you can get a degree and then you go on to do an MSc and then you go on to do a PhD But I was assured that actually it’d be fine and from a branding perspective It gives people straight away an idea of what you’re doing. Yeah, and that’s important these days and it is important And yeah, it’s a great niche to explore. Let me ask you another question What is your definition of wealth and how do you think you’ll attain it one day?
59:59 Definition of wealth a new question here on the show lovely question for me wealth is about having an Income through doing the things that you love that enables me to how lead the kind of life So it’s about freedom It doesn’t mean that have to be absolutely minted But it means not having to worry about money And so if I want to go traveling or I want to go for a lavish dinner with friends every now and again that I can do that but it has to stem from doing something that I love So it’s about having an enriched life as opposed to a rich life. That’s what wealth is for me. That’s a good answer.
1:00:29 It’s a tricky question. I was watching the Bob Marley documentary that came out like a year or two years ago and it was fascinating. It had all this footage of him and he was actually in London for a while and he was playing football down in Chelsea somewhere and a guy said to him, he said something and he said something about money and he just turned to the guy and he said, money make a man rich? That’s all he said. And it was just like, you know, it was kind of a powerful statement, you know, from Marley.
1:00:52 In that sense and it makes me ask that question all the time like what is wealth and and yeah is that because it’s a lot of things if you’re doing something you hate and I know these people I used to do that I mean I didn’t like and get the money you know it doesn’t necessarily it doesn’t make up for all these other shortcomings in your life and if your work doesn’t have meaning so it’s like we’re constantly each one of us is juggling these these things relationships of money and career and that so it’s always good good good to get your your basics on it I’m gonna hit you with our classic London Real questions so here we go I’m the psychologist now what does this mean when Nathalie answer these this way but if you can make a phone call to 20 year old Nathalie who maybe she was in the musician back then I’m not sure this gets interesting and give that young lady a bit of advice what would you tell her I’m I swear on the show oh yeah go crazy give less of a fuck that’s that’s what I always tell my younger self give less of a fuck have fun don’t take life too seriously during your 20s you’ll figure this shit out Wow okay you were very critical of what other people thought or self-critical or why well I was bullied the whole way throughout school so I was always very sensitive to how other people responded to me which is probably why I’m interested in psychology well to an extent and so I think one of the things that really held
1:02:07 Me back was caring what people think and not really thinking about whose opinions mattered and who’s didn’t so that’s something that I think I struggled with and I think also the fact that you can just you can reinvent yourself that if you have that hunger and that curiosity like you have done with this show the reason it’s like such high quality is because it’s something you’re passionate about and you’ve adapted and you’ve brought together all these skills and the person that you are now is not the person you were five ten fifteen years ago I think realizing that we’re mutable that we grow that we change is a liberation and this should be something to be embraced rather than thinking I have to get everything right now because it you know what is right what is perfect and I think that’s one of the most powerful parts of your story is that you did like do that 180. I mean I’m sure we could even dive deeper into like what it was like being 26 and hearing that and having to kind of go 180 and really reinvent yourself and I think that’s really positive because a lot of people can’t ever get that reinvention. They’ll just struggle and bump around to one place and not make a commitment and say I’m gonna go this way. So would you would you continue have gone down that in that music career pursuit if you could do it over again? No I’m yeah I think the thing what’s interesting with any of these specific industries, it panned into certain aspects of my personality.
1:03:19 I loved the creativity, I loved being able to perform, to sing, to create music was amazing. And there were always moments in gigs where you have everyone just kind of hanging with you and you create this experience that’s just time stops, it’s like nothing else, it’s breathtaking. But the rest of the time is just not like that at all. And I think it really played on the aspects of myself that were more self-doubting. you sort of judged along such small parameters and also there’s no value though musicians don’t get paid so it’s really hard to say well is what I’m doing meaningful to anyone else but me is it too self-involved or introspective and I’m also very action-based so it pandered to certain parts of my personality doing what I do now is so much more exciting and rewarding and I do still miss the music I do still play occasionally for myself but the kinds of people I get to meet you know I still get to talk I get to flex my intellectual curiosity, I get to travel, I get to perform in a way that is exciting, that people get value from.
1:04:17 And that’s something that I just didn’t have before. And so I think it’s really helped me to, I would like to say flourish in my own eyes. It’s made me a lot happier. Yeah, show business is fascinating. No, it’s a great answer.
1:04:28 I was just thinking of all the people I’ve had in that chair that have been actors and musicians. And we’ve had quite a few. And it’s fascinating to meet them because everyone knows them from that movie where they had said that cool three lines that was written by someone else and directed by someone else and well lit and scored and built up around this whole thing. And now they think that, I don’t know, Mel Gibson is a hit man or something. And so, or that music video where you did that.
1:04:52 But I mean, I meet these people and they’re very normal. They’re oftentimes quite insecure, especially if they’re performers. Cause like you said, they’re being judged for a very small subset, a brief moment of time that happened in the past. And so like, they can be super complicated people. And so, yeah, but that’s your business, right?
1:05:08 That also has some crazy upside. But I understand what you mean. Now you can kind of use the multi-dimensionness of yourself as opposed to just that one piece. All right, second part of that question is, advice to the 20-year-old that’s listening that wants to get into what you do or wants to, yeah, kind of pursue this kind of a career that you have, what would you tell him to do? Find the thing that you’re most passionate about that you’re gonna be able to put the hours into.
1:05:32 What I think is probably really useful Because there’s so many different ways of entering the world of applying behavioral sciences online. So if you want to do something like user experience design, that’s one thing. If you want to do user interface, that’s another. If you want to look at relationships and social stuff, that’s more sort of the realm of cyber psychology. There are a huge number of different disciplines that have cropped up now.
1:05:53 A really great place to look into, Southampton University do some fantastic web science courses. I’m going down there next week actually for an event. They do some fantastic stuff and what’s nice is that they have cross-disciplinary work going on. So really have a look at what aspects you want to dive into and then find some courses that deliver that kind of stuff. If you want to start off with some reading, I’ve got some on my site which you can just have a look at, reading lists, or you can email me and I’ll be happy to help out.
1:06:20 Okay, that’s good. Last one is best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal? Besides the fact that 26-year-olds won’t make an invite. advice Jesus um probably from my dad be smart you can figure this out and the figuring out means sometimes bringing in the cavalry okay yeah okay that’s good all right so we have some confidence and then bring in help if you need it yeah okay all right fantastic um now thanks so much for coming and being such a multi-dimensional person yeah I mean I’m kind of glad you embraced that your previous career I mean you must have thought I won’t talk about this but then did you just make the decision that it’s part of you and you should talk about that?
1:07:00 Yeah, and I think it’s very easy to talk about things of which are most proud where we feel like we’ve succeeded but actually it’s the perceived failures which are usually more failures in our minds than anyone else’s that create the opportunities that then come later. And so for the 20 year olds listening, you’re gonna have experiences, they’re not mistakes, they’re just experiences and you learn and then eventually they end up enriching your life. And so I think that’s, not having as much fear is important which is why I kind of wanted to touch on that.
1:07:25 Good, I’m glad you did. I mean, it’s almost like a checklist for me if I don’t have someone here that’s been through the hard times and come back, then I have a hard time having a conversation with them because as one of my favorite gangster rappers said, Ice-T, it’s not about the come up, it’s about the come back and I think it really shows a lot about people and I think these days people really want to see that. That’s why, I was about to say, that’s why Justin Bieber’s story isn’t interesting but now his is getting more interesting.
1:07:49 So as humans, I think we all like to see that. So thank you so much for coming. It was a fascinating talk, we can’t wait to read your new book when it’s out and have you back and I know this stuff constantly changes, so I’m guessing you’re going to be the go-to person for some of these questions out there. Yeah, and there’s some great researchers out there as well. If you’ve got any specific questions about the academic papers, I can ping you the original ask calls.
1:08:11 Okay, and best way to contact you, what is that? Twitter. Twitter. At Nathalie Nahai or hello at thewebsychologist.com. Okay.
1:08:16 And thank you for inviting me, it’s been really fun. No problem, that one really smooth, you know, I appreciate, if you’re listening to please subscribe you can also come see our extremely good looking faces on YouTube we got the lighting and everything perfect today so thanks for doing that if you watch this premium part on our brand new London Real Academy thanks for being here it’s kind of this exciting new project I’m doing where we’re just gonna offer kind of really like kind of some mentorship programs and I have this great community but I always broadcast one way to them and I don’t meet them very often and I just met a bunch of them at these certain meetups that we do and these people like they really want to get better and they want to explore and they want to do all this crazy community stuff and so we’re doing that and it’s gonna be a lot of fun and obviously I’m excited so as we say on London Real it’s about the journey I wish you well on the rest of yours thanks so much for coming and all the best.
