I'll get a team. Welcome to another installment of that you project Professor Nick Haslam is here. We just met thirteen seconds ago, so we're going to get to know each other over the next forty five fifty sixty minutes. Who knows, could be three hours. I mean we could connect, we could start something that goes on forever. But before I predict that, I'll say hi to Nick. Hi, Nick, How are you very well?
Craigan?
Well, thanks very much for doing this? How often do you you were just marveling at the amount of podcast or the lack of life that I have and the amount of podcasts that I do seven a week. How often do you do something like this?
Very rarely? You know, I do the occasional podcast, but I don't have my own gig. I mean, we run a podcast in my department, and I think we do something like seven episodes a year, So I think we must be just very lazy compared to you. So I'm not sure how you manage it.
I'm sure it's a much better product than what I churn out here at typ Central on a daily basis. But fortunately for me, I do have a good team around me who know how to make me look and sound smarter than I actually am. So I think that's always good to have good people in the background. Tell
us a little bit about you. If you could tell my audience who you are and what rather than me read some potentially stale bio that could be outdated, which I've done in the past, could you just give my audience a snapshot of who you are, what you're doing, what lights you up?
Maybe sure. I'm a psychology academic at the University of Melbourne. I've been here about twenty four years. Before that, I taught at a university in New York City, and I did my PhD before that at the University of Pennsylvania with people you and your listeners may know, people like Marty Seligman, my team, Aaron Beck, the founder of Cognitive Therapy.
I worked in his unit for a while. So I trained as a clinical psychologist, but then sort of moved away from actually helping people to doing social psychology, and so I do a lot of research on things like stigma and prejudice and how concepts have harm have changed through time and metric classification and all sorts of things. So I'm basically a university egghead, but also do quite a lot of science communication, so I write widely for
The Conversation, Australian Book Review, Inside Story. I try to get the word of psychology out there to the intelligent lay public.
A self aware egghead, though, I'm going to say that, you know that's good.
We aspire to him. If you're not self aware as a psychology person, I think you're probably in the wrong business.
I tell you what, there's a few. There's a few, and you know a few, and I know a few. But anyway, let's hope that we're not in that group. I don't know, but I love the fact that you said a science communicator. One of the challenges for me, I'm not really I'm a pseudo academic. I'm more a pro academic. You're an actual academic. But for me, trying to share thoughts and ideas and concepts and science in
a way which makes sense the public. So it's not only you know they can understand, but also they can potentially operationalize it, they can do something with it. It's like, well, cool, Craig, you're talking about all this stuff with a really smart dude. Yeah, I'm not understanding half of it. And if I can't
understand it, I can't do something with it. So every time I talk, I'm trying to have at least a vague awareness of what is the listener experience or the observer or the viewer experience, so that this might be Yeah, it's a good conversation, but more importantly, it's a good
conversation for them, not us. Hopefully it's good for us, but more importantly it's good for them, so that there might be a light bulb moment, or there might be some door that opens on awareness or understanding or insight that actually is a value to people.
Yeah, it's so important to communicate. And again I mean I think you're doing a fine job of that and making it smart but also accessible, I mean, not dumbing things down, but also so you know, not losing some of the fine texture of the detail. And look, I think in my business in the university system, a lot of us are writing for one another. A lot of us are writing in a jargon y kind of way.
There's so many exciting things happening in psychology research, but not everyone feels the need to disseminate it or to learn from how the public receives it. So often things you think are very smart. You mention it to your strange uncle at Christmas and they think it's common sense. So I think there's a two way street, really, and I think it's so important that we do it, and we do it well.
How much of about how much of understanding human behavior happens in, for one of better terms than laboratory, and how much happens just out in the real world at the interface of humanity, just situation, circumstance, environment, conversation, resolving conflicts, solving problems. For me, who's kind of I straddled both worlds a little bit. I love what I'm doing with my research, and I love my academic journey that's been
quite interrupted over the years. But for me, I feel like I'm a better teacher and educator and communicator and coach more based on my experience than anything I've even researched personally or my own studies.
Yeah, look, I think you're right, and I think that's true of everyone. Really. You know, no matter how many degrees you have and how much time you've spent doing research, you still learn most about people just from interacting with them. I mean, that's the thing. All of us are psychologists only some of us are allowed to call us a psychologist because we've been through registration, and I haven't, so
I don't call myself a psychologist. But yeah, we're all sort of learning about human behavior from the moment we're born, and we're all learning how others stick, how others behave. We're incredibly good at sucking up information from the environment about thinking, feeling, emotion, action, all of these sorts of things. And really the academic side to it is really just trying to make some of that unfamiliar and strange and try to sort of take steps beyond that kind of
common sense. But generally the common sense is right. I mean, you know, often you know the fact that we've spent so much time immersed in social interaction, learning about people and introspecting about ourselves means that we are experts even without having done psychology degrees. So I think you're spot on that that's where we get most of our wisdom. But you would hope that there are some things which we don't have common sense about. We don't know how
the brain works, we don't have intuitions about brains. We have brains, and our brains help us have intuitions but we don't have intuitions about how the brain works, so you have to do neuroscience to find that out. And I think it also we don't know what sort of treatments are most effective for certain sorts of problems, and we might have guesses, but unless you do the research,
you don't know. So there's a place of research. But I completely agree with you that we get most of our knowledge about might have behavior just from interacting with other people.
Yeah. Yeah, My background before my current PhD and psyche
is excise physiology. And it's funny coming from that background where I'm working with bodies and teams and athletes, and it's like the protocol or the prescription or whatever for one person that will be highly effective will be totally inappropriate for somebody, even if somebody else, even if they've got what seems to be similar needs and similar goals, you know, And so this kind of what's the best process or what's the best program, or what's the best
dose or what's the best prescription for this or that? It's it's almost like, yeah, for who like you and I could go to the gym tonight and we train and we're probably similar ages and maybe I'm older than you, but you know, we do the same workout and we've got to say, yeah, we want to be fitting strong and you pull up great and I can't move for four days, or vice versa.
It's like, well, it's not vice versa.
I'm guessing, Well, it's trying to figure out, you know, well, what's best for Craig, what's best for Nick? That could be anything from you know, what's the best job, or what's the best work environment, or what's the best breakfast or what's the best relationship context or what's the best way for you know, for me, I have a certain model of study and research and remembering and like managing my mind around this task of study and research that works well for me, but it wouldn't work well for
someone else. So I think, on top of the you know, the research that comes out of all of the labs, also trying to figure out on an individual level, how do I work? Like what is my body? Tell me? What is my energy? Tell me? What are my results? Tell me? You know that N equals one thing?
Yeah, and look at you know, research just takes care of that as well, though I have to say, look, I do personality psychology, that's what I teach at first year level, and it's all about how people vary. And I've always thought that the variation, you know, the variability between people is the most interesting thing. You know, what makes us unique. How you describe our differences, how you
tailor treatments or careers or whatever to human individuality. And as you say, our bodies are highly individual, but of course so are our minds. And understanding and measuring and thinking hard about individual differences, I think is just one of the most fascinating things about doing psychology.
I'm sure there's a million answers to this question, or multiple answers anyway, But what are some of the biggest kind of breakthroughs or perhaps even one eighties that we've seen in psychology in the last I don't know, as long as you've been involved, where we've really become aware of something else or something profound that we didn't realize
or perhaps changed our thinking about something. Has there been any kind of big shifts in research and understanding of not only human behavior, but the mind in general and the brain.
They've probably been thousands. It's so hard to pick something. I mean, I'll just do the ecocentric thing and pick on something that I've been part of Perfect Perfect, and that's I think this idea in the mental health space that we used to believe that people either had one condition or they didn't, that it was a matter of kind. You know, you had depression, or you had schizophrenia, or
you had anorex cinerversa or you didn't. And you know DSM Diagnostic Institutical Manual American you know, Psychiatric Association's classification of mental illness puts of synboxes. It believes that we have mental illnesses as categories. And one of the big I think revolutions of the last twenty years is realizing that pretty much everything's on a spectrum, everything's a matter
of degree. Was sort of moving away from this categorical mindset the differences between people types, and that goes for personality types as well as mental illnesses, and that everything is really on the bell curve. And at some level, once you say that, you think, wow, wasn't that sort of obvious? Well, no, it wasn't obvious to smart people for a couple of centuries. It's still not obvious today.
People are often saying I have you know, condition X, as if it's something that makes them categorically different from everyone who doesn't have a condition X. But the reality is everything's a blur, everything's a smear, And that's a sort of revolution in thinking. That's changing how we formulate cases in psychotherapy and how we do research on the underpinnings of mental illness, on the treatments of mental illness. I think that's quite a radical change. May not sound
so radically. It's not that we suddenly found a new part of the brain or that we overturn some theory, but we sort of had this common sense that people fall into boxes and they just don't.
Yeah. Yeah, And I think it also, I could almost I reckon if you tested me, depends on when you tested me, what time of day, what day of the month, what I'm going through, you might deduce a whole lot of different things for me, depending on you know, It's like if you tested my IQ, sometimes it might be decent and other times it might be very low, depending on my level of fatigue and my level of distraction
and my level of dress and anxiety. And yeah, so's it's kind of a lot of it's fluid, not so much fixed.
Yeah, and you said that beautifully. You know, I think understanding that everything is dynamic. The thing is things very even when you say someone's personality, even if you know saying you know, back in the old days, you'd say she's an introvert or he's an extrovert. That sort of categorical language, which doesn't recognize the fact that people you know, exist on the bell curve, but beyond being on the bell curve, like you say, we can vary along that
spectrum on a daily basis. That doesn't mean some people on average aren't more introverted than others. But you're right, context really matters. Everything's fluid, everything's dynamic, and understanding that sort of dynamics, I think is something that's happening more and more so if you just allow me to give
a plug to some colleagues. You know, back in the old days again, we used to measure a lot of individual differences like personality, characteristics or you know, abilities, using some sort of static tests and assume that the score that you got was some fact about how you would be for eternity. And you know, now what they do is they have smartphone measures and you can sort of
measure things continuously throughout the day. You know, you just randomly send people sort of twenty prompts during the day on their smartphone and say, how are you feeling now, what are you thinking about now? What are you observing now in the world, And you can get a much more sort of fluid, continuous idea of how people's mental processes are changing in real time, rather than just people's summaries on a questionnaire form, which might be biased in
all sorts of ways. So we're sort of getting at the texture of experience, I think a lot more directly than we used to.
Yeah. Yeah, even something like that we get introduced to when we're young, you know, the concept of intelligence. I'm like, well, he's he or she is intelligent? Oh, he's he's one for his IQ is one forty his genius. Yeah, but he can't catch a ball, and he can't hold a conversation and he can't clean a floor. And you know, it's like, well, you know this whole thing that it's all myost situation or task dependent. It depends what we're doing and where. You know, sometimes I go into a
room and I feel like I'm pretty smart. I'm pretty smart. But I go to another room, I'm like, no, I'm actually a moron. It's just like when I started my PhD, right and I'm doing it at Monash in what's called Brain Park, which is a neuroscience neuropsych lab, and you know, and I'm not a genius anyway, but I've never felt so stupid as my first six months in that environment with those people and trying to learn the language, learn the culture, learn the you know, just just how it worked.
And I'm like, I am actually in the wrong place. I'm too stupid to be here. But over time you kind of adapt and you start to learn how to think, how to think differently, how to do research, how to speak that language, how to write that language. Because my last he was twenty years ago, right or twenty years before my PhD, And so it was like, oh, I went to Italy twenty years ago for three months and
I could speak one hundred words. But now I'm back and I'm living here and it's like, I don't get it. So for me, such a steep learning curve, but it's like, oh, well now actually, and I submit in about four weeks, so I'm really at the pointy end. So but I will say six years later because I've been kind of busy. But six years later, so the same guy with the same brain, arguably the same brain and the same potential and all of that. Oh, now it's like, oh, it's
very familiar. It's it's not easy, but it's like, oh, I understand this now. I understand the protocol and the process and the culture and the language and the dynamics, and I understand all. You know. It's like, ah, so I can even at my old age, you can still adapt, you can still learn, you can still evolve. But I think a lot of these things are a bit context dependent and situation dependent.
Oh absolutely, But I think also what I'd say is, you know, you might have thought that your early cluelessness was a sign of low intelligence, but it was just a matter of low knowledge. You know, you didn't know the rules, and the fact that you climb that learning curve, you know, steeply, is what the intelligence was. It's your capacity to learn. And I think we often confuse ignorance
with stupidity. You know what you don't know, and you know, I think what I've always found is the best cue of feeling not smart enough or an impostor, which most of us feel at some point in life. I think is just when someone even younger and stupider comes up underneath us and we realize, actually, I do know more than this individual, and maybe it's more about of acquiring knowledge rather than having some sort of fixed amount of skill or ability or intelligence.
Do you think that do you think that the average person? And I'm not this not a loaded question, and I'm trying to throw anyone under any bus, but do you think that typically we think about how we think? Like do you think about what do I think this way? Why do I see the world this way? Where does this story come from? Why do I process that experience? Do you think that people think about what's going on
cognitively and emotionally and mentally. Do you think that the average person ponders that at all?
Yeah? I do, Actually, I mean I think some more than others, of course, like everything else, but I think most of us are curious, are about our own minds, and have theories about our own minds, are always forming ideas about who we are. I mean, you can think about that as being sort of adolescent self focused if you like, But I think we're always trying to get a sense of what sort of person we are, you know, and again, it can take unhealthy forms or healthy forms.
So I think it's entirely healthy to be psychologically minded and to always be interested in this lump of meat in our head which is capable of doing incredible things, and you know, learning from our mistakes and reflecting on our values. I think that's really important. I think most of us do that to some point, maybe lesser as we get older, I don't know. But they're also the unhealthy form of rumination. So I think you could also say, you know, getting stuck in a rut thinking constantly about
why did I say that? Why did I say that dumb thing? Does she love me? Does he love me? A lot of that kind of repetitive thinking is also thinking about one's own mental process, but it's completely unproductive. But I guess the short answer is I think I've got a lot of time for the late person. I think everyday people are sophisticated. They care about their own thinking as well as other people's thinking. I think it's just part of being human.
How do we I know there's no three step plan, but I'm just you're a straight up smarty pants, So while you're here, I'm just going to exploit you how do we start to understand how other people think, you know, theory of mind. Obviously, it's really important that we at least have an insight into how not that we need to agree with them or align with them or support
them necessarily whatever their ideas are. But how do we begin to understand others thinking that we might be able to build you know, greater apport connection, trust, respect, better into personal experiences. Where would we start with that?
Here are my three steps, Greig, Actually I'm joking.
Look, I think they thought there were four that I was surprised. I thought there was four.
Yeah, yeah, No, if it's four, people can't at least I can't remember more than three things at once, So it has to be three steps. Look, I think there's no straightforward answer to that, but I think a really good start point is one of humility, where you think, you know, they're probably a little bit like us. Other
people's minds probably not that different from our own. There's probably a default tendency with many people to imagine that other people are sort of less sophisticated, less thoughtful than others. We've got this, you know, this set of of biases where we tend to think that we're a little bit better than average, and other sort of bit people a little bit less, less, less clever and thoughtful. But get over that bias and recognize, maybe you know, the other
people's mental life is as complicated as us. Recognize that you have your own. So we know from social psychology, for instance, that people tend to over attribute their own behavior to their context, but other people's baby too much to their personality. So recognize that maybe we're a bit too quick to imagine that other people's behavior reflects their character rather than just how they're responding to the environment
as they see it. So I think partly just giving people the benefit of the doubt, some humility, recognizing that other people are responding to the world as they see it, thinking a little bit about the background they might have come from, how their values might not be different from ours. I don't know. I think it's very hard to come up with a good answer to that, partly because I think we're not really reflecting on it as we're doing it.
We're just doing it, and we're doing it because theory of mind, if you want to call it that, or mentalizing or mind reading, whatever you want to call it, it's a very natural thing that we're always doing.
I think also we unintentionally and probably unconsciously, I think that other people think like us, you know, false consensus effect. I think that's called feel free to correct me, but it's where I assume that my intention will be your experience. So I see you Nick, and I think, oh, I've got some advice for Nick that would be really helpful for him. I don't know what that would look like, but you know, so I share with you some what I think is well meaning kind of feedback or advice
or whatever. And your experience is that I'm just a meddling, interfering, arrogant bullfaired right. So you know that that that intention doesn't always land well. And even though my you know, I have good motives and what's what's in my head is not going to be necessarily your experience.
Yeah, but you know, false consensus is real, as you said, and it's a it's a bias, but it's a pretty good bias to have. I mean, if if you start from the position that other people are like yourself, you know, with your own complexity, with your own you know, cleverness and thoughtfulness and feelings and intelligence and all of the rest of it. That's a pretty good place to start, you know, rather than imagining, I mean to take the opposite.
If you had a false dissensus and you imagined everyone was dumber, stupid, or uglier, less well intentioned than yourself, that'll be terrible. Much better to start from the idea that others are similar to you, and then you know, be open to learning when they're not. I think the problem is not the false consensus to start with. It's more not learning when there is evidence that the person's different from you.
Right right when when you are in front of a group. You do corporate stuff as well as academic stuff like do you stand in front of corporates?
No, not really, I've never really got into that. The closest thing I get is I do a little bit of sub lecturing for officers in training at the ADF on sort of leadership, but it's really not my main thing. I yeah, I never thought that sort of work and probably wouldn't be terrifically good at it.
Come on, bro, I think you'd be all right. I think you're a smarty pants and you can string a few words together. I think you'd be all right. So this is just a curiosity for me. What do you think the Nick experience is like for the world. Not that that's something you should be stressed or preoccupied with, but do you ever think of that? Do you ever think what is it like being around me?
Yeah? I do a bit. I mean, yeah, I'm not sure I want to go too much into the psychodrama of this. Look, I'm a bit of an odd cat, I think in some ways. You know, I've always been pretty quiet, pretty sort of intellectually in my interests. I don't think it's a very typical kind of pattern for an Australian male. So I've always assumed that I might be a little bit intense for some people, and some people might be a bit off put by the fact that I really care about ideas, maybe more than average.
But I don't know, you know, I think I've tried to sand off some of the sharper part of my younger personality, and I'm probably reasonably good company some of the time.
I concur your honor, I concur Yeah. I mean, for me, it's something I was probably way more insecure and way more issues than you. But you know, I was just this growing up. I was just this fat kid this morbidly OBUs teenager living in rural Victoria with all the issues. So I was always obsessed about being liked and belonging and what people thought, and you know, completely unhealthy and rational, but nonetheless that was just my reality at that time.
And so then over the years as I worked in media a little bit, and I've written a few books, and I set up Australia's first personal training centers, and so I've always been in front of people talking and even with this show, this show's eight years down the track and as you asked me before the show, seven
days a week, really, yeah, seven days a week. So I always say, there's this kind of there's this duality of trying to just meet be me and be in the moment and just be raw and real and authentic, but at the same time having an awareness that thousands of people are listening to you and me have this conversation. So how do I be relaxed and real and authentic and me but still have an awareness that, you know, if I say fuck, some people are going to be
absolutely fine and some people aren't. So do I do that or not? Because when I talk, I'm not you know, So just this whole kind of you know, level of other awareness, you know, this kind of social awareness and this. Yeah. So for me, it's just that's why I ask people. I even ask CEOs when I work with companies. I go, what do you think it's like being around you? And the responses are fascinating, Yeah, because I.
Think it's like we probably don't reflect done explicitly. We probably have our own guesses and private thoughts about it, but we probably don't get asked that kind of direct question too often. And it's a good one to answer. I think it's probably very revealing to the person who's giving the answer as well, because you know, I don't
have a prepared answer to that. That's why my response was a bit garbled having been asked it before, and probably a really revealing question for the CEOs in question.
Yeah. Yeah, I've been told everything from wow, I've never thought of that. Thank you for asking. That's I need to I need to go away and think too. I don't give a shit, Like literally, I don't care what they think of me. I'm like, okay, Roger that I think I found the problem in the culture. HiT's up behind this door here?
Well, it's very very important for someone who's powerful to know that, because you know, they're not really going to be getting people's authentic judgments of them. They're going to be getting the supervient term people pleasing sort of response. So yeah, they're not actively seeking to find out how they're seen by others. They're never going to learn.
Yeah, we spoke before a little bit about like understanding ourselves and our own mind. Where do we again, this is not meant to be an interview, by the way, I prof this is just a chat, but your idea of identity, like do we I don't even know that. It's like the who am I question? I don't really even think about it. I'm like, I don't know, I'm you know, where we need to almost define who we are for the world. Craig, what is your purpose? I don't know. Just watch how I live and you'll probably
figure it out. Just watch what I do, how I treat people, how I work. You probably figure out what my values and purpose are. But I don't know. This seems like, and maybe not in your space, but outside of your outside of academia, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on who am I? What am I about? What's my mission, what's my purpose? And I'm like, well, fuck, I don't know what day of the week is it, because my mission and purpose today not the same as
they were on Monday. You know these things. Also, do we need to know our identity or define our identity in that sense?
Probably not. I mean I think probably we ought to have some sort of set of principles we live by, and we can be very confusing to other people if we're not somewhat consistent about what we seem to stand for and what we're pursuing in life. But yeah, whether you need to formulate it, whether you need to have some sort of sort of glossy brochure of who you are to present to the world, that's not clear to me. I do think it's important to have some sort of
sense of consistency and who you are. But the idea that you need to publicize it rather than just manifest it, I think is strange. And again a lot of people, maybe our age, maybe a bit taken aback by how much personal branding there is that goes among especially younger people, where it's an attempt to say this is my identity, this is what I stand for. Well, don't just say it, you know, do it. Doing it. It's much more persuasive
than than saying it. And I think also, you know, I think this is one of the things where your identity, I mean, there's this you know, you'll know Eric Erickson, this unfashionable psychoanalyst from back in the day who wrote a lot about identity and identity and adolescence and as an achievement of adolescens. You know, figuring out who you are is something that you sort of need to do in some way when you were younger, but at some point you sort of become settled. It becomes of crystallized
who you think you are. You may not even have it sort of worked out in a series of statements in your head, but you've still sort of figured out who you are, and from then on you don't need to think about it quite so much. But forming it in the first place and sort of trying on different identities, putting on different hats. I'm this sort of person, I'm that sort of person. Maybe different careers, maybe different interests, maybe it's different ways of dressing, whatever it might be.
You go through that sort of stage of figuring out who you are, and then you settle on something, and I think it's worth having that sense of self. But you don't need to obsess about it, and you don't need to be always telling people about it.
All right, So I'm going to ask you. So we've had the easy interlude. Now I'm going to push your buttons or I'm going to test you. Tell me about like your interest in the mind, Like what drew you to research how the mind works, how we work, Like what was the genesis for that? If anything, was there, something that happened. Was it just always existing fascination or curiosity.
No, I don't think it was always existing fascination. I think you know my story. Again, this is a very long time ago. I was always nature boy. So when I was growing up, I was rested in a bird watching, I collected insects. I had a much loved uncle who worked for the CSIO, who was a botanist and who was interested in plants. And I just loved being out in nature. Did a lot of hiking, a lot of
cross country skiing. Just just loved the bush basically, And I wanted to study animal behavior, so I got turned onto this field called ethology, the study of instinctive animal behavior, by this uncle and you know, even in high school I was sort of getting into that and reading complicated books about that, and I thought, this is what I want to do, and how will you do that? Well, I've thought of do psychology, so I enrolled in a
psychology degree. And then that's when I started getting to the people, you know, rather than animals, partly because when there was no animal behavior in psychology at Melbourne University at that time, nor is there now. So I sort of started off interested in just you know, living creatures as a sort of part of biology. And then I just got turned on by actually psychoanalysis, by you know,
ideas which are very unfashionable now, you know Freud. I've became very sort of passionate about understanding so the deeper unconscious sides of human experience, and you know, that just sort of took me forward until grad school, and you know, I got on the sort of research path rather than getting to this idea that I'd be a therapist of some sort. And yeah, I sort of taken all sorts of twists and turns since then. So you know, I
started with animals and got into humans. And my PhD supervisor was actually anthropologist and he was interested in how people form social relationships all around the world. He'd done he'd done anthological field work in West Africa, and so it got me into culture. So and I've just sort of flitted around, I mean, compared to the average academic career, I've sort of, you know, wanted side to side and just found new things fascinating. Some of it personality, some
of its social psychology, some of it clinical psychology. Again, this might all seem a little bit narrow from the point of view of you know, life in general, but within psychology, I just get curious about stuff. So it sort of started with insects and ended with people.
Wow, I love it. I was talking to somebody this morning at the cafe as I do, and they were talking to me about this new doctor that they've got and how they love this doctor. I'm like, why do you love this doctor? Oh? He's awesome, Like he's funny, he gets me, he asked good questions, he doesn't rush me out the door, he looks at me. He doesn't sit there staring at his computer screen like the last one. Dad. It was all this nothing to do with medicine, nothing
to do with medical knowledge. Like I'm like, you just like him, like, and it was the bottom line was she felt safe, she felt comfortable, she trusts him, she feels confident in his I'm like, it is so interesting that you know whatever it is about, you know, it's like and even I used to marvel at this. So I trained over the years, like I owned multiple gyms, and I for a very long time just worked one on one with people doing conditioning, personal training, you know, athletes,
non athletes and teams and all of that. But in thirty years of working at the coal face of exercise fitness and kind of that physiological change space, I got asked once in thirty years what my qualifications were like Because people would come in, you'd build rapport, they'd like
you, you'd have fun, The experience was good. Yes, we'd do the workout, we'd get a bit sweaty, we'd talk about food, and we'd talk about sleep and life style and behaviors and habits and accountability and process and timeline and decision making and exercise progression. Like we talk about all this stuff. But it's like, but the most important thing was one, they liked me too, they trusted me, and three they
enjoyed the experience it's got. It's funny how little it has to do with your knowledge or academic credibility or qualifications. Quite often when it's that interpersonal thing, you know, even in a medical or clinical setting.
Absolutely, and you know it's not just you saying that. I mean, there's a whole bunch of research on this. Say, I don't know the personal training space at all, but psychotherapy, i'm sure is not radically different nor being a regular GP. Ultimately, it's a sort of form of healing and self improvement and building and boosting well being. And we know that the best predictor of whether you're going to improve in
therapy is not the qualification that your therapist has. It's not the technique that she or he uses with you. It's not the theoretical orientation that they bring to the therapy. It's the quality of the relationship and the quality of the alliance. Is it a working relationship where there is trust, where there is shared understanding, where there's agreement about goals and processes, and is it just a sort of fundamental gelling of the two people involved. The relationship really matters.
And that's not exactly how you were framing it. It was, but I think ultimately a lot of this is about is it a good relationship. Now, some people are better than others at forming as therapists or doctors or personal trainers, no doubt, at forming those relationships, but the quality of that bond is the platform on which the healing happens.
I think in many cases now I'm still being a university people person believe that the knowledge helps at that point, but there's no point having all the knowledge in the world unless you can form that relationship, and unless you can form the human connection on which it builds.
Yeah. Yeah, And I see that too in public speaking, you know, with not so much academic settings, but in corporate settings where someone will come in. I'll often go to an event, it'll be a conference, a full day, and I meet someone, I'm talking to them, I'm like, Wow, she's amazing. She is she is so smart or he is whoever him her, And they've written a book or two, they've done all this great research there, you know, like very very knowledgeable, and then they get up to talk.
Some of them are brilliant, of course, but there are a percentage that create more confusion than clarity and more disconnection than connection, and it's like, oh, wow, you know so much, but you don't know how to share that in a way that's user friendly for one of a less complicated term, you know, And it's it's you know, we were talking about that before. How do I share this information which might be valuable to people, in a way which is actually valuable to them so they can
do something with it. I think that's that's the ever present challenge, you know, well in my job anyway, I wanted to ask you about talking about, you know, belief and like managing the mind around others, and a big part of whether or not this this dynamic between the doctor and the patient, or the psychologist and the patient, or the personal trainer and the client or whatever is going to work on, you know, a lot of that is about what's happening in the mind, which reminds me
of a podcast too. Podcast I've done with a guy from Harvard University called Professor Jeffrey Retteger. His whole field of research. He's a psychiatry, medical doctors, psychiatrist, researcher who last time I spoke with him, which is probably a year ago, i'd imagine, is in the same space, was just like fully immersed in place ebos and no cebos and the power of the mind to here the body,
whatever we want to call it. Have you ever not necessarily gone into that space from a research perspective, but have you ever opened that door yourself and just taken a peek in and been curious about that stuff?
Not much, I mean, but I think it's part of the common sense of the field that these effects are quite powerful on a fairly large proportion of a lot of treatments is ultimately place ebo, you know, you know. So I think whatever is causing it, the power of expectations, the power of the power of the placebo effect, whatever is behind it, I'm not one hundred percent clear on. But the fact that it's real and the fact that you know, a large proportion of the effect of antidepressants,
for instance, is placebo effect. Is the expectation that this is going to work for me. So yeah, I think you've got to recognize that, and you've got to take it seriously, and I think it makes us more humble about again, the role of technique and knowledge versus just the role of positive expectations and having a good, if you like, connection with a therapist or healer. A lot of it's just the power of the expectation or anything that that healer is actually doing or that drug is
actually doing. So I haven't gone into it deeply, I think also from the Nasibot point of view. Yeah, I'm sort of getting into this a little bit because some of what I'm writing about these days has to do with the possible downsides of mental health awareness, where people are increasingly I think the cause our concepts of mental ill health tend to be broadening some people, not the majority, but some people are self diagnosing with mental health conditions inappropriately,
and that can have a no sebo effect. Simply the act of classifying oneself as having a mental health problem can lead to all sorts of downstream of negative consequences for your identity, for your mood, for your behavior. So the short answer which I could have given is not very much. I haven't really explored it as an academic, but I think these things are hugely powerful.
You should come up with a concept called concept creep. I'm just throwing that out there for you should think about that. You know, it's brand new, just came to me, you know, I'm being facetious. Everybody Professor Nick is quite renowned for that idea. Could you just in one of as many minutes as you want. I was going to say, could you explain you kind of did or you open the door a bit, could you explain concept creep to us?
Yeah, well, I mean earlier you said we had three hours, so I figured I'll go to the end of that if it's all right. Yeah, Look, concept creep is this idea I came up with about nine years ago, and it's essentially just saying that in recent decades, our concepts related to harm, you know, concepts like bullying, abuse, prejudice, mental illness, safety, have tended to broaden their meanings so that we now include a wider range of phenomena within them.
So I mean to make it concrete bullying, let me just give you the case study of that. So bullying is bad. Bullying is a bad thing. Everyone agrees with that. But what we just define as bullying has broadened through time. So again to give you the brief version. Bullying was introduced to psychology by this Norwegian psychologist called Dan Olius, and he was really explicit that bullying is a very
particular kind of peer aggression among kids. It has to be intentional, that is, the bully have to be intentionally intimidating or harming another kid. It has to be repeated. That is, a single episode of bad behavior is not bullying. It has to be perpetrated downward in some sort of hierarchy, like a bigger kid against a smaller kid, or multiple kids against a single kid. And it's mostly active forms of aggression, you know, punching, beating, intimidating, threatening, things like that.
So that's what he defined bullying as being back in the nineteen seventies. But then if you follow how bullying is being defined more recently, it's expanded in all sorts of ways. So now we include behaviors bullying which isn't intentional. Now we allow single episodes of intimidating behavior to be
counted as bullying. Now we allow you to we define as bullying when you behave badly not just to people beneath you on some hierarchy, but also according to my university's HR modules, I could bully fellow professors or even my boss. So bullying can be upwards and lateral. And of course, as we all know, the constant of bullying has been expanded out of the domain of just childhood
and playgrounds and schools into boardrooms and at offices. So this is simply one example I could give to tell the same story about addiction and about abuse, about mental illness, about trauma. All of these concepts, for whatever reason, over the last few decades have broadened their meanings, so they now refer to a much wider range of phenomena than they used to. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
I never say that's a bad thing. I just say, maybe that cultural change which has made us more sensitive to harm and to find more sort of mild experiences as being harmful, maybe it has costs but also benefits.
Is it tricky for you? I mean, obviously who you are and what you do, you well, you know, well respected, and you've got a you know, a very respectable position in an amazing university in all of those things. Do you have to be really? Really? Do you really have to feelter what you say? Because and I'm not saying that everything you just said you don't mean. I believe you do. But I feel like for me, who's I'm not you? Right? So I can, within reason without being
inappropriate or distasteful. I can. I can say things that you probably can't say, and I'm not going to get in trouble. Is that tricky for you to navigate that you saying what you truly believe, but also working within the confines and the parameters of, as you mentioned, HR within the UNI system.
That's a really good question and a hard one to answer. I guess it's not difficult in the sense that no one within the university has ever told me stop saying this. I don't get any sort of pressure from colleagues to reign in what I say, and that's partly because I say it always in a very careful, modulated, you know, non inflammatory sort of way. But I think it's also true that this idea does go against the zeitgeist a
bit within my field. So I get and I get some quite nasty commentary by some colleagues elsewhere and from the general public. I did a thing recently on All in the Mind, the ABC radio program, talking about concept creep, and I got basically hate mail from a couple of people. So I think if you wanted an easy life where no one was sniping at you, you probably wouldn't talk about this sort of topic, but I think it's really important. I don't think it's intrinsically a reactionary idea, or don't
think it's intrinsically an insensitive idea. All I can do is speak about it in a way which I think is responsible and balanced. So I don't get any official pressure against it, but I do get a little bit of backlash from people who misunderstanding what I'm saying.
This is a much bigger question than we have time for, so I probably shouldn't ask it, but I'm going to. I'm always fascinated. I just want your thoughts on this. We don't need an answer or a direction, but just your thoughts. So you know, I've been fascinated with my whole life the idea of potential, like what's possible for me?
Because I wasn't talented, gifted, special, intelligent, right, and so I realized if I was going to do well, that would only be through work and effort and discipline and self control and repetition and application. And also so success also like the relationship between what's happening in my external world and my internal world. So by the time when I came out of school, I worked really hard. I didn't go to university until I was in my thirties
for the first time. I did my first degree in my thirties, but I just worked in gyms and I built a business. I employed five hundred people, I made lots of go I did really well. If we're doing really well, manas your business succeeded, then I did really well. But what was a really interesting revelation for me was, in the middle of all of my success, what seemed to be outside looking in success Professor, my life was
a fucking catastrophe. Like I felt mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually bankrupt, and so I'd kind of tick this box. Now. I'm not saying my experience is the usual. I'm saying that was just my experience. But I'd like to hear about,
you know, your thoughts on contentment, happiness, fulfillment. I don't know, and the relationship between what's happening around us and what's happening within us, because I think we kind of grow up in a mindset that success is about what you have and what you earn, and what your own and what you drive, and what people think you and what you look like and your brand and your Facebook likes or your you know, talk to us a little bit about I know that's massive, but what are your thoughts
on that?
Wow? Yeah, that's a big question. Look, I think what you were describing is a pretty you know, common experience, especially in midlife, you know, among people who have experienced certain kinds of conventional success, which evidently you have and which you know not everyone does. And it's it's sort of masking some you know, some things which you're missing, or somethings which aren't going so well, or some costs
that you've borne in order to have those successes. And it's just good that you've got this sense that rather than giving up or throwing in the towel or you know, you've actually tried to make positive change out of it. I think contentments something that just comes slowly, and it's comes through balancing, balancing all these complexities and not giving up on those initial goals and motives, but just finding a way to be a bit softer on yourself. I mean,
self compassion, I think is so important. I guess I'm
spinning my wheels here. I don't really have a clear a clear out that's good, But I think you know what you're describing I can resonate with I haven't had the same sort of success in most respects, probably, But yeah, I think you sort of you find that the things that were working for you in your thirties and forties, the sort of drive you think, well, that didn't actually give me everything I thought I was going to get out of it, but maybe along the way over quite
some other sort of wisdom, and now I can sort of relax and have a bit more perspective on things. And I think often, especially with guys, probably a lot of what you've done in the first half of your life is sort of building for yourself and maybe sometimes not saying this is about true about you neglected your connection to others, and maybe it's a time to sort
of reconnect. And the same way that sometimes you find the reverse pattern about women, where there's been more giving towards others, and later in life there's a sort of find that I can sort of invest in myself a little bit more. But you know, I think contentment's always an achievement, and it's always provisional, and it doesn't always laugh. And this idea that you somehow you reached this plateau of everlasting happiness is a big illusion. At least that's been my experience.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that. I interviewed an English lady who had a really traumatic experience. In nine ninety seven, she moved to Batan. She became the first Western woman to be ordained in as a Buddhist nun. And she's gorgeous, like just the nicest person. And I interviewed her yesterday and I said, and she almost got grumpy at me when I asked her this question, as grumpy as she could get, which is not grumpy. I said, essentially, what
does Buddhism have to say about happiness? You know, like the human experience and happiness. And she's like, happiness is not a natural state. It's like your brain's job isn't to make you happy. And I'm like, yep, and it was. It's really interesting because we I just wait, that's so true. You know. It's like you it's to you know, whatever protect you or predict danger and all of those things.
But yeah, it's like, happiness is not it's not our default setting, is it, But we kind of think it should be.
Yeah, And look, I think it's it's really hard if you're pursuing happiness to find it. In fact, I think pursuing happiness tends to be counterproductive. And I think what I like about some of the sort of well being science that's out there at the moment, and I think a lot of it's more philosophy and theory than science. But that's just my take is that you know, really you can choose to some extent according to your life philosophy. What are you trying to maximize? Are you trying to
maximize happiness? If so, probably seeking it won't get you there. But or are you trying to maximize meaning and purpose? You know, are you trying to you know whether or not you're you're happy or unhappy? Do you have a sense of you know, what I'm doing matters what I'm doing and who I am matters to other people, or matters to some sort of transcendent goal I have? You know,
have I had a life that was meaningful? But then I think newish work by a psychologist in the US called shige Ishi says you can also separate from that have value of life that's just rich, doesn't need to
be meaningful, but just has diverse experiences. You could pursue a rich life, not necessarily a meaningful life, not necessarily a happy life, and all of these things, what are you whether you're trying to maximize richness, meaning or happiness leads to sort of different approaches to what you do in your experience. And if you're pursuing the rich life, you probably will have more misery than if you're pursuing
the happy life or the meaningful life. But it'll maybe add up to something sort of which on your deathbed you'll think, Wow, what a life that was.
Yeah, yeah, can I be really rude? How old are you? Prof? Sixty two were the same? I'm curious where? Yeah, how's your brain working?
I think it's working as well as it ever has to be honest. I mean, I think my partner might disagree on that and point to a very large number of failings. But it's actually as sharp as it's ever been, I think, you know, And that's partly because I had positions of leadership within the university which really are just warm me out and which just consumed all my energies
and to basically crushed my curiosity. And now I've sort of come out the other end of it, and I've got time to think and read I'm not overburdened with responsibilities. I can choose the sort of activities that I enjoy. I mean, I'm the taxpayer is getting good money for value for money. I should say, I'm not just sciving off, but I'm actually choosing the things I want to do in a kind of mindful way and loving it and being super productive in the in the sort of things
that academics are meant to be productive in. I think it's as good as ever. So yeah, high idea that I think it's all cognitive decline from the forties, I'm not buying it.
Yep, you and me both. Hey, I have to talk to you forever. We're going to say goodbye our fair But before we go, is there anything you want to draw our attention, our listener's attention to books, websites, research, anything that you want to push or promote or make people aware of.
I think nothing that I've got necessarily, but I think there's some terrific work out there. There's a book I just recommended on the Conversations you know Best Books of twenty twenty five British neurologists called Susann O'Sullivan called the Age of Diagnosis, which I think is a really fascinating book about the role sometimes negative I would say, about our increasing willingness to diagnose ourselves with anyumber of conditions. So I think that's really something I think is a
very weird thing worth publicizing. Or just look up my wad, look at my website and find some of my papers. If you want help sleeping.
We'll say goodbye fair but for the minute, Professor Nick Haslm, thanks so much for your time, Yeah, and your generosity. It's been really nice. Thank you.
Thanks Greg, I really enjoyed myself. Thank you.