Something You Should Know - How Self-Confidence Really Works & One Thing You Can Do to Be More Careful Online

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Some foods get a bad rap – and undeservedly so. This episode begins with a list of foods you probably think are unhealthy but really aren’t all that bad according to science. http://www.businessinsider.com/foods-people-think-are-bad-unhealthy-that-arent-2017-3/ When you have too little confidence, that can be a real obstacle to success at anything. Then again, having too much confidence can mess things up as well. So how do you have the right amount of confidence and use it to your advantage? Here to discuss that is Don Moore, professor of management at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and author of the book Perfectly Confident (https://amzn.to/3cuzZTr). Do cats really care about humans or do they just tolerate us because we feed them and give them a place to live? Listen and hear some fascinating research. http://people.com/pets/study-your-cat-probably-loves-you-more-than-it-loves-food-take-that-dogs We have all heard the advice that when you are online you need to be careful and use common sense to protect your privacy and personal information. So what does that really mean? Aren’t most of us doing that? What more should we be doing – if anything? Listen to my guest Martin Keith. He is a professor of Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London where he has worked in cryptographic research for thirty years. He is also author of the book, Cryptography: The Key to Digital Security, How It Works, and Why It Matters. (https://amzn.to/3bBzXbr) This Week's Sponsors -Better Help. Get 10% off your first month by going to www.BetterHelp.com/sysk and use the promo code: sysk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The truth is, fooling yourself into being more confident can actually undermine your success if that feeling of confidence leads you to be less motivated to invest in the effort that actually increases your abilities to perform. form. Also, do cats really care about people, or are they just pretending? And how to be safer online, because you're probably not safe enough. Here's the analogy, I suppose. You step outside your front door. You're aware someone could break in, so you're very careful about shutting that door. You make various decisions as you move down the street about who you'll talk to. We have this kind of all instinctively, but we don't have any of that often in cyberspace. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell

people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation.

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Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know.

In our house, and I suspect in a lot of other people's homes over these last several weeks, there's been a lot of emphasis on food. We've been cooking more food. We've been eating more food. We've been thinking a lot about food. And I came across this. This is interesting that there are a lot of foods that people think are bad that really aren't. For example, sugar-free Red Bull. Besides having only 10 calories and no sugar, it only has 80 milligrams of caffeine, which is about a third of the amount that's in a tall Starbucks drip coffee. The other ingredients, B vitamins and something called taurine, are considered to be safe.

Gluten. People think of gluten as being bad, but if you don't have celiac disease, and only 1% of the population does, there are no benefits to going gluten-free. There's nothing wrong with gluten. Eggs. Eggs have been demonized quite a bit because they're high in cholesterol, but your cholesterol level is not determined by the cholesterol you eat. Caffeine. According to the Mayo Clinic, the average adult can safely consume up to 400

milligrams of caffeine daily. Most standard cups of coffee contain between 90 and 120 milligrams. Salt. Everyone knows that eating salt can raise your blood pressure, except that there's actually no strong proof that that's true. The American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that reducing your salt intake decreased people's risk of heart attack, stroke, or death, even in those people who had high blood pressure. And that is something you should know. Confidence is a tricky thing. In the right amount, confidence is very attractive in other people. But too much confidence can be a problem, and too little of it can be a problem.

And it's interesting how you can be quite confident in one situation and with some people, and much less confident in other situations with other people. And something I've always wondered about, are successful people confident because they're successful, or are they successful because they're confident? Don Moore is a professor of management at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, and he is an expert in confidence.

He has a new book called Perfectly Confident. Hey, Don, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks. Great to be here. So what is confidence? How do you define it? What does it look like? Confidence is about your belief in your abilities, your prospects for the future, your comparison with others, or your certainty that you're right. And where does it come from? Are people born confident and we become less confident? Are people born less confident

and they earn their confidence? How do we get it? Good question. My research documents the ways in which different situations elicit different sorts of confidence from us. There's remarkably little consistency from one time to the next within person. So, some people are confident in some aspects of their life and not very confident in others. There are some types of confidence where most of us appear overconfident and other circumstances in which you can count on most people to be underconfident. Can you give me some examples of that? We tend to think that we're better than others on easy tasks where most people perform well. Most of us think we're better drivers than others. Most people think that they're more honest than others. On the other hand, when I pull my students and ask them to rank themselves relative to the rest of the class,

they think that on average they're below average jugglers. They think they know less than their classmates about Latin, and they expect to save fewer lives than their classmates. Well, that's interesting. Well, it doesn't surprise me that someone would say they're, if they've never juggled, they're going to say they're worse than the average juggler because they've never juggled. When you know you're bad at something and you're not so sure about others, there's the temptation to think, well, maybe one of my classmates had a previous career in the circus and I'm going to be worse at juggling than they are. And that points the way to the circumstances under which all of us are prone to underconfidence. The imposter syndrome, when we encounter some challenging task and we're tempted to think,

maybe I'm not cut out for this, maybe I'm not good enough. And the truth is that everybody else is suffering exactly the same challenges and exactly the same hits to their self-esteem. What about just in everyday life? How common is it for people to, you know, sit at their desk or wherever they work and sometimes think, what am I doing here? I don't belong here. I'm way out of my league. Is that normal or is that unusual? I think everybody has had those feelings and we're most prone to have them when we experience some private challenge and are tempted to think, oh, this is so hard. Surely it's not so hard for other people. One example that most of us are painfully familiar with is writing. Writing well is hard. I believe it was the writer Eudora Welty who said, writing's easy. We just sit and stare at a blank piece of paper until droplets of blood appear on your forehead. These days, you sit and stare at a blank screen until

droplets of blood appear on your forehead. Writing well is difficult for everybody. And when you're suffering its challenges, it's easy for you to think, oh man, I'm so bad at this, not realizing that it's hard for everyone. I've always found it interesting how the same person can be very confident in one situation and not in another. You're really confident at work and on your job, you're top of your game, and then you come home and at home your kids are a mystery and you don't know what you're doing. Confidence is really domain specific. And whether your beliefs are accurate or whether they lead you to be overconfident or underconfident really depends on what information you have at your disposal and the specific details of the task or domain or what sort of feedback

you've gotten recently. Obviously, if things have just gone wrong at home and your kids have misbehaved or responded in some way that made you unhappy, it's easy for you to think of all the ways in which that part of your life is going wrong and lose confidence in yourself. But it does seem to bleed over a little bit. Like if you're feeling unconfident about something, it kind of has a dampening effect, I think, on everything to

some extent, don't you think? It can. Yep. Yep. Those feelings bleed over and often in completely misleading and uninformative ways, right? So we'll feel, we'll mess up on something in particular, a writing assignment, we forget an appointment, and there's a temptation to overgeneralize and think, oh, why am I so incompetent? Why am I so forgetful? Well, the truth is you're remembering lots of other things and overgeneralizing from that one instance is a mistake. How big a role is confidence or lack of it or too much of it? How much does it actually help or hurt you perform? That is a great question and a topic that I've thought a lot about because there's so much advice out there about getting confident,

staying confident, figuring out ways to boost your confidence as if confidence were the ultimate cause that led to your success. And I think people are prone to confuse correlation with causation. We observe all around us confident people succeeding, confident athletes more likely to win, confident politicians more likely to get elected, confident business people more likely to succeed. And it's easy to neglect the important abilities that lead to both confidence and success. We observe the confidence and think, oh, I want that sort of confidence. The truth is, fooling yourself into being more confident doesn't necessarily translate to success and can actually undermine your success if that feeling of confidence leads you to be less motivated to invest in the effort, practice, and hard work that actually increases your abilities to perform. Well, so when I see that, you know, a confident, successful businessman,

is he successful because he's so confident or is he confident because he's so successful? The evidence that I know is more consistent with the latter. That is that success leads you to feel better about yourself and display more confidence. Now, of course, there have to be circumstances in which the causal direction goes the other way. Feeling capable leads you to enter the competition. And as Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Sometimes you just have to have the courage to enter the competition to be eligible to win. But that by itself isn't enough. And there are plenty of circumstances in which being overconfident can get us into trouble, entering competitions that we can't win, or setting ourselves up to look like idiots when we are so assured of our success

that we fail to prepare and therefore increase the chance of failure. In relationships, professional or personal relationships, people who have that confidence are attractive. And I think in part they're attractive because they seem to know what they're doing. They seem comfortable in their own skin, in the situation. They seem like they've got it handled. And there's something not only appealing about those people, but there's something appealing about that quality and wanting to have it. Beware of your attraction to people who are alluring at the beginning. Their confidence is so attractive. After 10 years of marriage

with someone who is often in error, but never in doubt, their confidence will drive you crazy. Yeah, but if you don't see that confidence in people, you may pass them over. You may never get a chance to see how their confidence drives you crazy because if you're not attracted to them in the first place because they have no confidence, it does seem that confidence helps in romance, in business, it helps in everything to at least get your foot in the door. That is true. It is the confident

pitch that attracts investors, that can attract employees, that can attract customers. And as the person making that pitch, you will be strongest. You will be most confident. You will be most persuasive when you have the goods to back it up. It is a brittle confidence that puffs itself up without substance or product to actually deliver on the promises you're making. We are talking about confidence today. My guest is Don Moore. He's a professor of management at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and he

is author of the book, Perfectly Confident. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone.

So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe

to Supernatural then and now. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Don, there is this idea, though, that there are a lot of very competent people who could do better if only they had the confidence,

if only they could let the world see how great they are. But, you know, it's like the quintessential nerd who's brilliant but doesn't really have the social skills and the confidence to go out and be successful with their brilliance because they lack that confidence. Amen. Yeah. And what that I think poses the problem of collecting accurate information about ourselves and our potential in order to portray ourselves honestly and to be able to calibrate our own decision making. It's a profound challenge and it's really hard to get perfectly calibrated,

but it's a challenge worth striving for, for all of us. And you do that by doing what? Questioning your assumptions, listening to others, asking yourself why you might be wrong, both in your overestimate and in your underestimate of how good you are. Being willing to be self-critical and thoughtful, asking what others who disagree with you know that you don't know. These are all useful tools for helping you get closer to the truth and getting accurate information. Is there value, though? How often have people been told, you know, we're going into this meeting, act confident, be confident.

And if you're not feeling it, is there any value in trying to act it? Fooling yourself and others into being more confident when you lack the substance to back it up comes with real risks. On the other hand, bucking up your confidence so that you can outwardly portray the substance, the accuracy, the strengths that you truly possess, that is wisdom. And calibrating that right means getting closer to perfect confidence, which as I said is always a challenge, but always worth striving for. But isn't the lack of confidence not only not having the goods to back it up, it's also you might have the goods to back it up, it's also, you might have the goods to back it up, you just don't have that self-worth or that belief in yourself as a person. You may have all the evidence to make your case, you may have invented the next best

mousetrap, whatever it is. This is a personal problem. This is a personal issue that has nothing to do with how good you are. Your question makes me think of a story that the psychologist William James tells in an essay that he wrote, in which he imagines himself on an alpine journey stuck at a spot where he's got to leap over a crevasse. And he imagines two possible scenarios, one in which he's got the confidence in himself to know that he'll make it. He jumps, he makes it across and lives to tell the tale. In the other scenario, he imagines that he lacks confidence and apprehensive,

fearful, he attempts the jump but fails it and falls into the crevasse. He advises, in such a situation, I would be a fool not to believe in myself. Yes, there are some circumstances in which your faith in yourself will help you jump a little bit farther. If the fearful, apprehensive William James could only jump a five-foot crevasse, and the bold, confident James could make it across a six-foot crevasse, and the crevasse is actually six feet wide, then he should believe in himself and he should go for it. But it does not follow from that argument that you should always believe in yourself. If the crevasse is 20 feet wide, no amount of self-confidence will help him make it across. And deluding himself into the belief that he could make it, while admirable, if it leads him to jump to his death,

still qualifies as a mistake. Okay, well that's fair. I get that, I get that. And I would imagine that the same is true on both sides of that, that confidence is a delicate balance between not being underconfident and not being overconfident. Exactly. And finding that balance requires figuring out how good you are and what your potential actually is. Wait a minute, I want to stop you there. I want to stop that good at figuring out how good I am that it really needs to come from someone else's opinion because I'm too close to myself to actually objectively determine how good I am at anything? Yeah, there are lots of biases that interfere with our ability to evaluate ourselves.

We want to feel good about ourselves. We prefer to attend to affirming messages and praise. And so, it takes real courage to actively seek out honest information, truthful feedback, and advisors willing to criticize us for our weaknesses and point out ways that we could get better. If you do that too much, though, I always think that, you know, if you're always looking for people to tell you what you could do better, it starts to wear on you that, gosh, I'm really not very good because all these people keep telling me what I did wrong and how to fix it. I do worry that the advice I'm giving could be taken as a recommendation to lower your sights or to aspire to less. And that's not what I intend at all.

That would be a mistake if I make you underconfident. The truth is all of us have vast untapped potential. And being able to take advantage of that potential and the real magnificent opportunities before us require appreciating what we're capable of. So yes, grabbing opportunities with both hands, believing in yourself when you can succeed, imagining a better world that to try, more willing to allow themselves to make a fool of themselves, to give it a shot, try new things, tend to be more confident than people who don't. Yeah, and that causal arrow goes both ways, right? So people who start out with a little bit more faith in their ability in some domain, they're just more likely to give it a try. But it's also the case that people more willing to give it a try often figure out that the things that they had been afraid of, fear of failure, fear of embarrassing themselves,

that's not such a big deal. And the potential upside of trying some new activity and finding out that you love it, that's huge. I think everybody's probably done that. And it's a real rush. It's a real great feeling to realize, hey, I've got some talent here. This is pretty cool. Is being underconfident equally bad as being overconfident? Or if you're going to be one, is it better to be a little overconfident than a little underconfident? Or it's just too situational to say? Yeah, it really depends on the situation. Overconfidence will lead you to commit errors of commission where you do something that you subsequently regret.

Underconfidence is more likely to result in errors of omission where you fail to take action that you subsequently wish you would have. It's easy to think of leaders who were overconfident and led their organizations or their countries into situations that wound up being disastrous. But it's also the case that near the ends of their lives, the things that people regret most is not errors of commission, where they did something that they were subsequently embarrassed about, but errors of omission, the things that they wish they'd tried, the jobs or risks that they wish they'd taken, that they then subsequently regret having missed out on. Well, I've heard that. Yeah, that that's, you're better, you're better off giving it a shot because, you know,

and plus nobody's ever going to remember forever that you tried something and failed. And I often look at people who try and fail and think, good for them. I mean, at least they gave it a shot. And I don't think ill of them. And so why do we think people will think ill of them. And so, why do we think people will think ill of us if we do the same thing? Yeah, yeah. There's that distinct asymmetry in how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others. And reflecting on that, appreciating how others see you, can help you get better insight into

yourself. Well, confidence is one of those things I think people think about a lot. You know, do I have enough? Do I have too much? I wish I had more. And it's good to hear what the research says about it. Don Moore has been my guest. He is a professor of management at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, and his book is called Perfectly Confident. You'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Don. Pleasure talking to you.

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where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. would like us to be. I think in some ways we'd like to think that we have, or that we should have, this online privacy thing licked by now. Sure, it's a problem, but the world keeps spinning and life goes on. So where are we really with this?

Do we need to step up our security concerns? Or is it pretty well handled? Well, here to answer that and shed some light on this very important topic is Keith Martin. Keith is a professor of information security at Royal Holloway University of London, and he's author of the book Cryptography, the Key to Digital Security, How it Works and Why it Matters. Hi, Keith. Welcome. Yeah. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

So I think there's this kind of bafflement confusion that people have where we hear that, you know, your information, you go to a website and it says, you know, you can feel confident shopping here, give us your information, it's encrypted and no one can get it. And then later you hear about these companies with these big data breaches and now somebody's got a hold of your data. But then again, they've never gotten a hold of my data. And so there's kind of this, what are you going to do?

Where are we? What's the state of affairs of all of this? Gosh, the state of affairs is messy in this, really. I mean, I think the point is to realize there's two parties in any conversation. There's, in this really i mean i think the point is to realize there's two parties in any conversation there's in this case you and there's whichever businesses you're doing dealings with and i guess you've both got responsibilities when you come to exchanging information you have an amount of control over your information um you have much less control over what happens to the

information when it goes over to them. And I don't share your confidence that you've never lost your information because you possibly don't know whether you have or not. Yeah, well, I actually have. But as it turns out, it was my fault. I mean, you know, I fell for a phishing scam from what looked like my bank. And but it wasn't that somebody had, you know, surreptitiously stolen it. I gave it to them. So that wasn't too cool. But when you see that, when you see that on a website that your information is safe, and in fact, if you go to a store, the clerk could actually steal your credit

card information and that this is actually safer, is it? It's difficult because we can make judgments over what information we give away. So your example was a good one. And I think one of the biggest problems in cyberspace at the moment is that we give stuff away. And so we've got to learn to stop doing that. The problem at the other end, you don't have a lot of control over who does things with your information when you've given it away so you're so the only thing we can do is really be cautious about who we're dealing with which organizations we're communicating with who we do business with and in much the same way we're probably cautious about that in the normal world but then again it's those big companies that you're

supposed to feel confident about that we hear have these big data breaches. Yeah, that's true. And we can't do a whole bunch about that unless we as consumers, you know, decide to do our business elsewhere. But sometimes you've got absolutely no choice. And I think that's where your governments and regulations are getting tougher in this space to put the obligations on these big companies. And it's becoming more and more of an embarrassment as a big organization if you lose data in this way. And that's a great thing because that's going to up the game. I have frequently heard the advice that for people to be safe online, they have to be careful and use common sense. And it's kind of like, you know,

when somebody tells me to be careful crossing the street, I don't know that I crossed the street any differently if the person hadn't said to be careful, because I don't really know what that means to be careful crossing the street. I mean, I'm usually pretty careful crossing the street. So when people tell me to be careful online, I think I am careful online. And I do use common in. So you're very careful about shutting that door or locking that door. I mean, you make various decisions as you move down the street about who you'll talk to, which store you'll go in. Is it safe to cross the road? And we have this kind of all instinctively inside us as human beings, but we don't have any of that stuff often in cyberspace. So, I mean, there's a few things. For instance, valuables, we don't know what the valuables are. So what are your valuables in cyberspace? That's a good place

to start. But also, how cautious are you before you do things in cyberspace? And a lot of people are pretty gung-ho because we sort of seem to drop our reserve and things like that. And I think the other big thing in cyberspace is you've got to keep things up to date, keep them current. So installing software patches and things when they come around. But the question is why? And I think maybe when people don't understand why, they sometimes don't develop that common sense. So but what is the checklist of absolute must-haves that maybe I don't have? You're talking about we need to be more careful, we need to develop common sense. But specifically by doing what?

Well, I think you should ask questions, actually, of yourself. So when you engage in using any technology or you're interacting with a website online, just pausing for a moment and thinking, okay, how does this work a little bit? For example, you're asked to create a password when you register on a site. Why? Why am I doing this? Why is this needed? And what kind of, what effort should I put into that task? Because obviously some websites will ask you to generate a password for almost no reason at all they simply really want an identifier probably to track you as you visit the website next time and you don't need to provide a very strong password in that case even if sometimes

they try and persuade you to on the hand if you're banking you've got to think this is this is a really valuable item i'm creating here when I create a password or security questions that are going to access my bank. And so start thinking rather than just reacting when someone says, you know, create a password or look after this token or, you know, what is the impact, for example, if I lost this? Or how might somebody else represent me falsely in cyberspace if I'm not careful and start just beginning to construct in your head a better risk model, I suppose, as to what is it important to look after? What is it less important to look after? When should you just click on a link and go? And when should you think, hang on a second, I better think more carefully about doing

so? That's kind of what I mean about common sense. And I don't think I do dramatically many more things than you probably do, but maybe you just sort of accept things, and I question things. I think more people should question things. I think, though, that people are confused about the specifics. And you say, you know, have a risk model and be careful and common sense. But I'm still trying to get to, like, by doing what? But do you need to have antivirus software?

If you do, do you need to have anti-malware software? If you do, are you safe to go on a public Wi-Fi? Very specifically, not in the general sense of be careful, but be careful because you do what? There are lots of common sense tips around of the type you're talking about. And I suppose what I'm trying to get to is get people to ask why. So should you have anti-malware software? Absolutely. So what is it that does? That's obviously a sort of a filter. It's a protection

mechanism, if you like. People are going to try and insert unpleasant code on your machine, and this thing will try and help you detect if this stuff's coming in. But nothing, no security measure is bulletproof. And so the question is, why should I be doing this? Well, you should do this. It's well-publicized advice, and it's going to give you a layer of protection. Am I now completely safe? Absolutely not, because you are the one who's probably canvassing this unpleasant software to come onto your machine, maybe by going to a website you shouldn't have been on, or maybe by clicking on a link out of curiosity that maybe you shouldn't have clicked on. And so it's a kind of a, this advice is there, and you should follow most of the standard advice,

but maybe it would be worth finding out why this kind of advice has been given. What is it being offered to you in terms of, for instance, malware protection? the standard advice, but maybe it would be worth finding out why this kind of advice has been given. What is it being offered to you in terms of, for instance, malware protection? But also, does that mean you're safe? No. What else should you do? And that's where I'm saying, being cautious, thinking carefully before you click on things, open things, pass things around. But the bad guys are always like one step ahead. They can make things look very innocent, very inviting, very looks like it's from my friend kind of thing that you like almost get ready to click on and go, oh, wait, no, wait a minute.

This, wait a minute. This doesn't look exactly right. But you have to have that mindset of being skeptical rather than, oh, it's from my friend Bob, so I guess it's from my friend Bob, so I guess it's fine. Absolutely. Upping the game on being skeptical, I think. Upping the game on being skeptical. Our curiosity is we're desperate to explore things, click on things. But I mean, I would be more cautious than you, I think, in these situations, perhaps. I mean, I don't know

how cautious you actually are. When something is sent in from a friend and they say check this out i'm going to be very reluctant to press that unless i've got some other information that suggests this is okay like that like they've already emailed me and say i'm about to send you a really cool video you know this is just the funniest thing i've ever seen i've watched this and they tell you where they got it from or something like that. Now, we are always very keen just to click and look and stuff and do new stuff. But we have to be more skeptical. And the point is that most attacks that come in, the phishing attacks you refer to, they are very spotable.

Very few of them don't come with some kind of weirdness like misspellings or I wasn't expecting to get an email on this topic from this person. On the other hand, at the other extreme, if someone really wants to get you through a trick, they will get you and there's nothing you can do about that. But most attacks are not going to be that clever. And so common sense, in this case, caution, skepticism is going to be very, very helpful. Yeah, well, the thing that I referred to earlier that happened to me was I went on my bank site, the site for my bank. And instead of my bank's homepage coming up, this fake homepage came up that looked exactly like it, but it asked me for my password to confirm it. But it wasn't like an email thing. It was some sort of something got on my computer so that when I went to my bank,

instead of my bank coming up, this came up. Now, that's pretty sophisticated stuff, it would seem. It is. That's sophisticated stuff. But I still think you could be cautious here. Because if you start thinking about what are your valuables, in this case, whatever you use to log into your bank is extremely valuable, because that's the thing that determines you from the other 7 billion people on the planet. You don't want to give that away to anyone other than definitely your bank. So if someone presents this offering up and asks for this, and you're thinking, well, this is not the normal way I log into my bank, or this is not the normal context, even though it seems to be my bank, they don't usually give me a page that looks exactly like this,

or they don't normally ask me for this at this time, then that's the kind of point at which I would stop, hesitate. And you can always get in touch with your bank. You could phone them up and say, hey, I've just received this. What's the kind of point at which I would stop, hesitate. And you can always get in touch with your bank. You could phone them up and say, you know, hey, I've just received this. What's the deal? If, of course, the thing is perfectly like your normal bank login, there's very little you can do. But most of these things are not, and they're coming at an unexpected moment.

And no organization ever asks you really to reset your security credentials over the web. So anyone asking you to do that is almost certainly up to no good. It's just not a normal request. So you can pick up the phone and speak to the bank and just be cautious. Yeah. Well, I do now. I'm probably more skeptical than most of all of them. In fact, it just happened the other day

where i i got a thing that says you know click here for your encrypted message i said well wait why don't you just put the message in the email why would you make me click and it turned out it was legitimate it was um a legitimate thing i called and they said yeah you you have to click on that and download it to read it but it looked fishy to me but it turns out it it was real so yeah but i would argue you have done absolutely the right thing in that case because um that's exactly the right response just a bit just just a healthy skepticism do do you can you go to a website just and by being there, bad things can happen? Or do you have to actually do something, click on something?

You can just go to a website. The act of getting there alone can be bad because it's not that you have to do something. It's the fact that you've connected to this. And things can be happening without you even being aware. And a lot of the worst malware, which is the generic word we use for software that causes all sorts of problems in the background, this kind of stuff can get on your machine and do all sorts of things and you've absolutely no idea. So a lot of stuff goes on in the background. So we don't want to get involved in that kind of stuff.

So sure, that's a risk. I had heard that in the traditional way, there's almost no more viruses, that it's all malware related more than it is virus and that antivirus software that's looking for viruses is missing the big problem, which is malware. I wouldn't make that separation. I think viruses are part of malware. There are different types. Viruses is one type. And I think a good anti, we use the word antivirus software because that's kind of got stuck in the lexicon, but it's really anti-malware software. And a good security software of this type that you get now will be detecting different types or looking to detect

different types of malware, including viruses. What about some of the, you know, we've heard like don't connect to a public Wi-Fi. Is there really somebody in that coffee shop looking for my stuff? Or do you think that's a real problem? Or if you really need to get on there, it's probably okay for a minute. Yeah, I mean, this is what I mean by common sense, right? So obviously, in an ideal world, a security person would say, oh, no, you must always be on an encrypted Wi-Fi connection. And in the future, public Wi-Fi connections will be encrypted. So this problem will be going away. But at the moment, they're not necessarily. And there's a utility versus security issue. So security people will tell you, don't do this, don't do that, don't do this. But of course, we want to do this and do

that whenever we get an opportunity. And so I think, you know, sometimes you just need access to the Internet. So sometimes you sit in an airport. Well, if you can get into an airport these days and you connect to the public Wi-Fi because you just want to. You've got something urgent you want to do. But the question is, you are in an insecure environment now. It is possible that information you're passing on that network could be being picked up by somebody um who knows what the risk is you don't really know i don't know but you should hesitate as always and think well i need to get access to this file or i need to access the

web to read this article but but but should you do your online banking at that point um and i think it's just a case of again applying a bit of common sense because obviously we don't want security to stop everybody having fun but be careful when you're not in a safe space and I think that would apply to a public Wi-Fi network because if I did my online banking on a public network what's the worst that could happen the very worst that could happen was a lot will depend on what how your online bank connects with you I mean the very worst that could happen is that that whatever represents you that whatever is being used digital information is being used

but to represent you when you try to access your bank is picked up by somebody else, is observed by somebody else. And then, of course, they could try and pretend to be you. Now, most banks will be being a bit more clever about this. And most banks, hopefully, are encrypting the connection through to your computer. So it's unlikely to be sniffed, if you like, on this public network. So in that case, hopefully, nothing bad should happen. But you don't know. And it just seems a very risky sort of environment doing this over an insecure network. But of course, some banks may not be being as careful. I mean, I can't speak for the entire banking industry, but certainly most banks here in the UK have got pretty good security. Banks

have always been at the forefront of public security. And hopefully nothing bad can happen. But the very worst that can happen is someone else can become you and, I guess, in theory, drain your bank account. Do you see a day coming where all this trouble disappears that we're not going to need to be so vigilant that somehow it's just all gone? Not quite. I see a day when we have a lot better security by default. I think at the moment, users, you and I, we're expected to do stupid things, I think. I mean, we're expected to generate all these ridiculously annoying passwords. And I mean, this is clearly almost instinctively, we know this is a bit silly.

It doesn't seem like a good way of providing our security. And it's a bit messy. And I do see a day when a lot more of this is inbuilt. And I mean, if you think about cell phones at the moment, you know, there's pretty good security there. And you don't have to make any decisions at all. It's all already in the product. It's already sorted out for you.

And I think this has got to be a way to go. So in one sense, yes. But I don't see a day when we're not in cyberspace. This is just what I feel a big phase of our future is more and more stuff happening more and more electronic stuff happening and this common sense thing i'm talking about we're still human beings interacting in this world and i can't imagine a point where we're not part of the decision making and deciding what to do deciding what things to connect with i can't see that going away. I can only see that

almost getting even worse because I sort of imagine a future where we ourselves are sort of computers because we've got embedded technology and we're going to see this with medical sensors and stuff like that. And I really do not see that world going away. So I'd like to feel more stuff by default, better security by default, but increasing our onus on us also to know what's going on and to be sensible. Well, I know it's a topic that is important to everybody and that we're supposed to be concerned about it. I'm not always sure that people are as concerned about it as we're supposed to be, but it's interesting to hear what's really going on from an expert point of view.

Keith Martin has been my guest. He is a professor of information security at Royal Holloway University of London and author of the book Cryptography, the Key to Digital Security, How it Works and Why it Matters. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Keith. Yeah, pleasure talking to you, Mike. Anyone who has a cat has wondered at some point, does this cat really care if I live or die?

Unlike dogs, cats often seem aloof, as if they don't care about people at all. And there is some evidence for that. Studies have found that your cat might not be purring out of love, but rather manipulating you for food. And cats who allow themselves to be petted actually show higher stress hormone levels afterwards. However, an interesting study at the University of Oregon

showed that given a choice, cats would prefer to hang out with humans more than even food, although food came in second. Half of the cats in the study, about 45%, chose to interact with the person in the room instead of the food or toys it had shown a preference for earlier. This suggests that cats do occasionally see people as more than just a meal ticket. And that is something you should know. I'll bet you know people who have some extra time on their hands and say they're bored, and so maybe you could tell them about this podcast and share it with them. They'd appreciate that, and so would I. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper.

In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family.

But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network

called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.