AI Fixing Workplace Burnout, Emotion & Psychological Safety - Dr Nathan Jones

Can AI actually make us more emotionally intelligent instead of more robotic?
In this episode of the Digital Nexus Podcast, we sit down with Dr Nathan Jones – musician, MTV/Nickelodeon voiceover artist turned psychologist, researcher and co-founder of Mood.ai, an emotional intelligence and psychological safety platform for workplaces.

Nathan unpacks his journey from a shy minister’s kid in Adelaide, finding his voice through music and church piano, to winning development deals, doing TV promos, and then burning out on the creative grind.
That path led him into psychology, where his PhD delivered the first empirical evidence that lyrics change how we feel above and beyond the music itself – proof that words and stories literally re-tune emotion.

From there, Nathan built Mood Institute and Mood.ai, translating years of research on colour, emotion and music into tools that help employees answer a deceptively simple question: “How do you feel?” – and help leaders see patterns in psychological safety, risk and culture in real time.

We get into the current AI “branding crisis”, media fear-cycles, and why self-awareness is the real tipping point: if we don’t do our inner work, we’ll point powerful AI tools at the wrong things. Nathan shares how AI can act as a “mirror” for our emotional operating system – reminding us when we’re off track, surfacing patterns in our mood, and nudging us back toward better choices at home and at work.

If you’re a founder, product/people leader, or AI builder trying to use AI for good – to support humans rather than squeeze them – this one hits hard.

Links:
Mood.ai https://www.mood.ai/
Dr Nathan Jones Li https://www.linkedin.com/in/drnathanjones/

In this episode, you’ll learn:

How Nathan’s music and voiceover career shaped his thinking on emotion, storytelling and behaviour change

What his research reveals about how lyrics, colour and sound interact to shift emotional state

Why psychological safety is becoming a compliance issue and a culture issue – and how Mood.ai tries to bridge both with AI-driven check-ins and dashboards

How AI can spot emotional patterns (meetings, weather, relationships, sleep) that we miss, and feed that back as practical coaching

His advice for founders: building products your younger self needed, listening harder to customers, and using emotional intelligence as a real startup advantage