Nathalie Nahai

Catch Nathalie Nahai on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick 25th - 31st May 2026.

Nathalie Nahai is one of those rare thinkers who refuses to stay in a single lane. Described as "a rare polymath with deep expertise in tech and psychology," she has spent her career mapping the strange and often troubling territory where human behaviour, technology, and ethics collide and asking what it might look like if we navigated it with more wisdom and care.

Her books Webs of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion and Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience have been adopted by business leaders and universities across the world, translated into seven languages, and shaped how organisations from Google and Accenture to Harvard Business Review think about human behaviour online. She has lectured at Cambridge and UCL, spoken at SXSW and the Web Summit, and hosted the Guardian Changing Media Summit. She is a behavioural science advisor, a podcast host, and the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon - intimate curated evenings where twelve strangers gather over locally sourced food to explore how we might orient toward beauty and meaning in difficult times.

But there is another Nathalie - quieter, and perhaps more fundamental. She is an artist, musician, and practitioner of a rhythmic shamanic tradition rooted in drum, rattle, and song rather than substances. At the winter solstice of 2024, she began a thirteen-moon initiation: one shamanic journey each new moon, each yielding an image she felt compelled to paint. Halfway through, a message arrived that the process also required a song. The result - thirteen paintings and one piece of music - will be presented as an immersive exhibition, Thirteen Moons and One Song, designed to take participants through darkness, sound, and vision toward a more open and expansive state of being.

She does not see these two worlds as separate. Her deepest preoccupation is with what it means to be human in an age of artificial intelligence - not as victims of technological determinism, but as agents with the capacity to choose. She draws on indigenous thinking to argue that the real question is not whether technology will change us, but whether we will have the presence of mind, and the depth of feeling, to change it first.