The Neuroscience Of The 7 Deadly Sins | Dr Jack Lewis | Modern Wisdom Podcast 182

Dr Jack Lewis is a Neuroscientist, television presenter and an author. Why do we do the things we know we shouldn't? The 7 deadly sins have been defined for hundreds of years and yet we all still fall prey to them. Expect to learn the underpinnings of our willpower, neuroscience's explanations for why we tend toward sinning, whether we have control over what makes us sexually aroused, a justification for punching someone in the face and much more... Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Buy The Science Of Sin - https://amzn.to/2MKGRkC Follow Jack on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DrJackLewis Subscribe to Jack's YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU7CrrFGLUxTCstZkpDlGfg Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #neuroscience #sin #psychology - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hello my beauties. Welcome back to Podcast Land. My guest today is Dr. Jack Lewis, and we are talking about the science underpinning the seven deadly sins. Dr. Lewis is a neuroscientist, which means he understands how the brain works. And his most recent book looks at why we do the things we know we shouldn't. Seven deadly sins have been defined for hundreds of years, and yet we all still fall prey to them. So expect to learn the underpinnings of our willpower, neuroscience's explanations for why we tend towards sinning, whether we have control over what makes us sexually aroused, a justification for punching someone in the face, and much more.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  Do need to give a tiny warning that there is a little bit of discussion with regards to paedophilia in this podcast, and if that is something that makes you uncomfortable, go and check out one of our other episodes. I also need to give you a warning that this episode is two hours long. I was just having far too much fun with Dr. Lewis, you know, and we got a bit of a bromance thing going on, and time ran away from me. So yeah, strap yourself in. In other news, if you listen very carefully, just listen. Can you hear what that is? That is the sound of the Ultimate Life Hacks List, careering its way towards us like an articulated lorry about to sideswipe you into a world where your entire life has been upgraded.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  That's right, this Monday, the Ultimate Life Hacks List launches, and it will be free, at least next week. So don't forget, on Monday, the 15th of June, check out the pre-roll to the podcast, or head to my socials @ChrisWillX to find out how you can get your copy of the Ultimate Life Hacks List.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by Tic Tac. Lace up and get your game on because the Tic Tac lineup just got a new teammate. Dr Pepper Tic Tac. This new double threat puts two of your favorite flavors into one box of mince. And when two iconic flavors come together, the result can only be iconic. Score big. Try Dr Pepper Tic Tac today.

• 2:39Speaker 05

  There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  And now NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

• 3:09Chris Williamson?

  But for now, it's time to learn about the science of sin with the wise and wonderful Dr. Jack Lewis.

• 3:32Chris Williamson?

  We're talking about sin today, all the sins. Are you sinful today? You feeling sinful?

• 3:39Speaker 06

  Nah, I've been, I've been pretty virtuous, to be honest. I mean, lockdown sort of stops people going out and doing things that might get them in trouble. So I've been boringly virtuous.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  How sinful can you be during a pandemic, you know?

• 3:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, if you, if you take the, the drop in A and E visits, it's just, you can't even hurt yourself if you stay indoors.

• 4:09Chris Williamson?

  You put those little foam cups on all the sharp edges in your house.

• 4:13Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 4:14Chris Williamson?

  And you make sure that you take the steps carefully. That's it.

• 4:17Speaker 06

  And particularly during the period where the DIY shops were closed, it's like, I mean, how's anyone gonna chop their finger off in a bank holiday if they can't go and buy a scalpel?

• 4:26Chris Williamson?

  Limes, putting limes for mojitos. That's how.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  That's how you do it. So, talking about sin, The Science of Sin, your new book, Science of Sin, Why We Do the Things We Know We Shouldn't. So, why do we do the things that we know that we shouldn't?

• 4:46Speaker 06

  Because we're human.

• 4:49Speaker 06

  Too short an answer.

• 4:50Chris Williamson?

  No, I mean, it's just, it's just, it's a longer book than that. It's loads of, loads of pages in this.

• 4:56Speaker 06

  No, it's, you know what, I'm usually very wordy, so I've, my news resolution is to be more concise. That was perhaps too concise. No, so the thing is, humans are driven by instincts, amongst other things, and those instincts, if you take the ones that are covered by the seven deadly sins, the important thing to remember is, if you were to abolish any of those seven things, it would be curtains for humanity. We need a modicum of all of the seven deadly sins in order to function properly as individuals, as communities. It's just when any of those seven categories of behaviour go to excess,

• 5:37Speaker 06

  that they are, at its core, antisocial. Now, I'm not a religious person. I spent a lot of time sort of singing hymns at school, because both my primary and secondary school were Church of England, but I didn't really believe a word of it. I just thought, you know, I was always more inclined to sort of the scientific approach. Let's look at the evidence. If there's evidence to support it, you know, more evidence to support it than to refute a hypothesis, then, you know, you believe accordingly. But with, I don't know, there was so much stuff in the Bible that was sort of clearly outdated, that I thought, how can people still buy into this? Like, I realise it gives people a lot of hope and it gives them a sense of community,

• 6:19Speaker 06

  but, but the, the concept of believing, like a literal interpretation of the Bible in a post-enlightenment time, it just seemed bonkers. But...

• 6:30Speaker 06

  I I've I've the more I looked into it, having sort of got my PhD in neuroscience and scanned a lot of brains and sort of got much clearer on what we do and don't know in terms of human knowledge, m- modern wisdom, um, I realised that actually there's an awful lot of stuff in those ancient books of religion, Bible and and others, um, which you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, just because you don't, for me personally, just because I don't believe in the supernatural, doesn't mean that there's not something to be learned if you read between the lines.

• 7:02Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 7:02Speaker 06

  And tha- and that's what I was sort of correcting the error of my ways.

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  It's so interesting. I got this quote from Donald Kingsbury, which hits the nail on the head there, I think. Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

• 7:26Speaker 06

  Hmm. And and that reminds me of a friend of mine is, uh, she's an amazing woman. She's like an engineer and a designer and she sort of designs healing spaces, not in a hippie way. I'm talking about psychiatric institutions. Build the buildings and the parkland, the open air, so that it fosters healing, rather than a lot of, you know, let's say Bedlam hundreds of years ago, it was the opposite of a place that promoted healing. And after, so she's doing her PhD in Sweden, four and a half years into a five-year PhD, she realised that all of the answers had been, uh, reached by the ancient Greeks. So if only she'd been a classicist and read the right ancient Greek books, all of her,

• 8:08Speaker 06

  what she thought was modern discoveries, using the latest cutting-edge research techniques, it was already there. It's just, who's interested in history? We're all interested in the future and what technology can do. It's bonkers.

• 8:20Chris Williamson?

  That is, that is crazy. It is that. The Lindy effect, the fact that we always presume that newer is better. And especially given the fact that so much of our time is spent on Instagram stories or Facebook stories or whatever, that is content which has been produced within the last 24 hours. It's the least Lindy platform like by design. But yeah, so.

• 8:45Speaker 06

  But also, but also the fact that when you're consuming information so rapidly, that you're not really, you're so eager to get on to the next thing because it's more about quantity than quality when you consume social media. You're not even focusing on what you're saying. Like you get to the end of the paragraph and you're like, what, another 10 paragraphs? Nah, screw it. I've got enough. I'm going to move on to the next thing. But it means, it means everyone's knowledge is superficial and rapid and people don't bother to go deeper and deeper to get a thorough, a more thorough understanding. And but anyway, we can't fix the whole world.

• 9:20Chris Williamson?

  No, we, but we can explain to people about seven deadly sins today. So do we want, do we want to do them? Is there some part of us that wants to do these, these capital vices, which is the other term that you have, you've got the seven deadly sins or capital vices, as you call them. Like, why aren't we the masters of our own behaviour?

• 9:39Speaker 06

  Hmm. Why aren't we the masters of our own behaviour?

• 9:48Speaker 06

  It's partly because finding the right path in life is a balance. Like, there's always pros and cons. There's always pluses and minuses. There's always benefits and risks. And each individual's capacity to pick a path which finds that Goldilocks zone, that sweet spot where you're doing everything in moderation and you're not letting anything go to the extreme. It is different. Like everyone's capacity to do that is, well, decision making in general is driven by, you don't remember the last hundred times you made a similar decision, but on a sort of subconscious basis, there's a trace of

• 10:31Speaker 06

  whether it worked out well or badly when you went for the risky option that, that promised a high return compared to the low risk option that promised a low return. And so quite often, finding that balance between.

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Sort of giving that urge for immediate gratification, a little bit of airtime, but not too much. And on average, always trying to go for what's best in the long run. You can't do both. Yeah. Like quite often, so let's say, the best example, I think, is gluttony, right? Because gluttony, gluttony is overeating, overdrinking, greed is just wanting more of anything, no matter how much you've got already. And that gluttony thing was an absolute design feature back in, you know, hundreds of thousands of years of human history. If, when food was available, you stuffed your face and built up fatty deposits,

• 11:28Speaker 06

  it meant that when the inevitable lean times came, where food was unavailable for weeks and weeks and months and months, you know, this scrabble for existence was tough. We're very pampered in this day and age. Under conditions of prevailing food scarcity, you want to get fat in the harvest time so that you can survive through the winter, right? And so it's actually a logical thing to do, to shove everything in your face. And instinctively, we love like fast released carbs, sugary, bread-y, cakey stuff. We love fatty stuff, of course we do, but we're not designed to eat every day. Our metabolism can't cope with eating that stuff every day.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  And then, so you've got the forces of advertising saying, hey, don't buy all that expensive kind of nutritious food. It's much more affordable, let's appeal to the cost effectiveness, to get a family deal, you know, get a bucket of fried chicken, you know, get in the habit, getting trained in the habit of eating takeaways or sort of microwave meals every single day without fail. Now, a little bit of that stuff is fine, but doing it every day screws you up. So. The instinct to overeat used to save lives in that people could live for long enough to reach sexual maturity, to have sex with someone, pass their genes on to the next generation. Like by hook or by crook, every single one of your listeners, you and me, we have an

• 12:54Speaker 06

  unbroken chain of ancestors who managed to live for long enough to reach sexual maturity and shag and have a baby. It's astonishing. Without that propensity to overeat, that wouldn't have happened.

• 13:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 06

  So those humans who didn't have that propensity to overeat, they didn't live, you know, their ancestral line petered out.

• 13:13Chris Williamson?

  They were outcompeted.

• 13:14Speaker 06

  So the point is, when you fast forward to 2020, the environment is now defined by food overabundance in the vast majority of places in the world, in the developed world at least. You know, the shops have, even in strange times of social isolation, the shops do run out, but there is plenty of food available, you know, so no one's, there's very few people starving to death in the UK right now, right? And so that means that that whole gluttony urge is now a design flaw. We're battling against it in order to sort of stay in relatively good shape.

• 13:50Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Okay, so how do you define the deadly sins?

• 13:54Speaker 06

  They are, well, how do I define the deadly sins? They are perfectly natural human urges which in extreme cause absolute havoc in one's social relations. It makes you vastly unpopular with other people if you take more than your fair share, greed. If you don't, you know, pull your weight in a collective endeavour, that, you know, teamwork kind of thing. We can get so much more done as a team than we can individually, but if one person's shirking their duties, then they become very unpopular. You know, lust causes all sorts of havoc in that people end up having relationships

• 14:35Speaker 06

  outside of the person that they might have dedicated, you know, their life to. And then once people feel betrayed, it's very hard for them to trust again. And you go through every single one. In moderation, we need a Bit of lust, otherwise you don't pass on your on your genes. We need a bit of greed so that when um if you if you've accumulated a bit of an excess. Then when you hit tough times, you can endure them more easily. Every single one of those things, it's like in moderation, it helps us. Um but in in in excess, it it makes people push us away. It makes it people think, you know, I don't wanna hang out with that person anymore. Because they're so aggressive, you know, at the drop of a hat, they're kicking off and I just don't wanna be around it anymore.

• 15:16Speaker 06

  And and what the point I just wanna quickly get to is, social isolation is, they're literally deadly. These seven deadly sins, because if you're socially isolated, you die earlier. And whilst you're alive, you have a higher in in in uh higher incidence of things like depression. Anxiety disorder, personality prob uh personality disorders. So so you die of cancers and cardiovascular disease to to uh much earlier if you're lonely.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  It's an all all cause mortality risk, isn't it loneliness?

• 15:46Speaker 06

  Yes, and and this has been known since nineteen eighty eight, right? Something was, you know, we we we mentioned this earlier, that that a lot we we're sort of, if we'd only. Look more keenly at what was already written down, we wouldn't have to, I wouldn't have to look at all of the. F M R brain imaging data to figure out what makes people do these things, you know, it I could just. Like, I'm I'm glad that I went through that process, because for me personally, I'm benefiting hugely from having a clearer understanding of. The role that the seven deadly sins play in my own own life as an atheist. And I pay much more attention to them now, having written that book. And by making sure those seven behaviors don't go to extreme.

• 16:26Speaker 06

  I'm not falling out with my friends and family and coworkers, you know, to the same degree as if I was oblivious to it all. I just carried on being selfishly narcissistic and kept taking treble. Extra servings and leaving other people with not enough to eat, you know, like, I am quite a greedy, gluttonous person, and it's made me think differently about it.

• 16:46Chris Williamson?

  It's so interesting when you see this, the ancient wisdom then get reshown in modern science, man. Like it, it's so funny. It just reminds us how highly we hold ourselves in regard and modern science and modern wisdom. You know, we hold that. Obviously, the podcast's fantastic, but the, you know, the actual itself. And then you realise, you're totally correct. Like, just read a bit of Seneca. Like, Seneca and Epictetus had that sorted out, mate, or whatever it might be. So what I find really interesting about the seven deadly sins and the way that you put it together was that you said it's common categories of human behaviour that cause people to fall out. And what that suggests is that if you

• 17:28Chris Williamson?

  were like an island, if it was just Chris or Jack, and you went through your, some of these sins, that it wouldn't cause as much of a problem. But when there's other people around, that increased friction, the work between you and those around you, that it kind of magnifies the problem. Is that?

• 17:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm totally with you. I think that's a very reasonable thing to say. The one thing, the one caveat is, no man is an island. And I think what we don't realise is the degree to which friends aren't just nice to have, they are absolutely essential to our wellbeing. And that's not about having 500, you know, friends on social media. You can have one or two really reliable mates that you can talk things over with. Like, the human brain generates lots of hypotheses, lots of potential explanations for why things are happening. Some of those notions absolutely start gravating bonkers. And you need your mates and your family members or the people around you to reflect back on whether the

• 18:33Speaker 06

  parts of what you're saying that add up and make sense in their objective view, and the parts of what you're saying that are just pie in the sky, you know, bonkers. And that's what people who are socially isolated don't have that. And they end up doing their head in with getting hung up on some of those notions that go round and round in their head. Confirmation bias. They've got no one to sort of... Push back and and and and say, no, no, no, I disagree with that. But that's the most useful thing someone can do. When when they honestly say to you, I disagree completely for the following reasons. Because it makes you aware of a different perspective that we simply. It's very hard to have multiple perspectives when you're looking at the same pair of eyes. Listening through the same pair of ears each day.

• 19:16Speaker 06

  So those other people in your life help you to go through all of your notions and beliefs. And sort of what hopefully, so long as you're not in an echo chamber of people who think the same thing.

• 19:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 06

  And gi- give you a bit more balance. And and it's the same thing with this modern wisdom, ancient wisdom. There's a lot of nonsense written in the ancient wisdom. The nice thing about looking at it from the context of modern science is it helps you to separate the wheat from the chaff. You know, it helps you focus in on those pearls of wisdom that were bang on the money. Whereas like Plato thought that the brain was just sort of, you know. They thought that the spirit was in the heart and the brain was just a radiator for losing heat. You know, so they might they might have been good at philosophy, but they got their anatomy completely upside down.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  They needed to do a little bit of work on that, didn't they?

• 20:04Speaker 06

  So what I'm saying is like, we can't just rely on ancient wisdom, but but looking at it through the lens of modern science. I think you can start, you know, working out what bits to focus on and and and really. Put your weight behind and what bits just to just to just to let go, ignore it. Like, I worry about people who worry about the fate of their life. Sorry, fate of their soul in the afterlife. Because there's a lot of people who, you know, like the Catholic guilt thing. People beat themselves up. People are hard on themselves because the expectations of certain people in society, in the society that they're raised in. Hold them to such like high standards, impossibly high standards.

• 20:45Speaker 06

  Like, the concept of being able to steer clear of the seven deadly sins your whole life is is is poppycock. Because they are driven by fundamental, basic human instincts. Like, you know, they're related to the very fundamental instincts that are involved in the drive for survival. So and some people are going to do well at being disciplined. Some people are going to be bad at being disciplined. But I would argue those people who are overly disciplined are missing out on life. They're they're they're postponing everything for the afterlife, which may or may not exist. So why not just make a heaven of life on earth?

• 21:22Chris Williamson?

  It's a very good argument, man. I don't know. I mean, increasingly, as I get exposed to books like yours and more evolutionary psychology, and as I start to wrap my head around how we operate and why we are the way we are. The concept of who, what is natural to us seems to become more and more both clear and muddy at the same time. Does that make sense? Like, you don't, when you start to strip away ego and predisposition and you're the way that you've dealt with your trauma and your genetic heritage and all this sort of stuff. When you start to strip that away, you're like, well, hang on, how much of this do I do before I'm no longer me? But how much of that do I need to get rid of to be more of me?

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  And again, Seneca's got this concept which is called the virtuous mean. And it's not a vice of excess, nor a vice of

• 22:15Speaker 06

  Too little?

• 22:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, whatever, like, not enough.

• 22:18Speaker 06

  Denial or something.

• 22:19Chris Williamson?

  That middle section, that middle bit, right? That's what we're, we're kind of touching on today. So let's, let's get into them. Pride, first thing, pride. Isn't pride a good thing? I want to have pride. I've done some well.

• 22:31Speaker 06

  You should be proud of yourself.

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  Yes, you should be proud of yourself. So why is it, why is it, why is pride a sin?

• 22:37Speaker 06

  It's confusing, isn't it? You should take more pride in your work. How many times were we told that at school? So the positive side of pride is it's a natural human emotion, kicks in during childhood. And it rewards, an infant feels proud of themselves when they do what mommy or daddy tell them to do. And then when they get positive feedback and they get smiles and claps and, you know, like body language and vocalizations that make the kid realize that they've done good, they beam with pride. Because it's reinforcing when, when, when the world tells you that what you've done is good. In moderation, it's good because it makes you more likely to repeat that positive behavior.

• 23:17Speaker 06

  But the trouble with pride is when you take it to excess, you end up with essentially narcissism. The, the sin of pride, what, what the ancient religious thinkers thought was negative, bad about people who are overly prideful is almost indistinguishable from what science and medicine these days thinks of as narcissism. So it's things like feeling like you don't need other people. You're completely self-efficacious. It's all about me, me, me, me, me. I don't need anyone else. Being very vain.

• 23:49Speaker 06

  Thinking that you're better than other people, pretty much everything, even in the sort of face of stark evidence of the contrary. You just, you just can't, you can't believe that you're not just brilliant at everything. Um, so the average narcissistic person is the kind of person that's really gonna rub other people up the wrong way. Like, they're always drawing attention to themselves, um, and a lot of narcissism seems to be to do with, uh, poor self-esteem. And, and that can either come from neglectful parenting or, or overly attentive helicopter parenting. Both of which can lead to what, what psychologists describe as an undifferentiated sense of self. Like, so their sense of self doesn't develop properly early on in life.

• 24:34Speaker 06

  Which means they don't really know where, if you take the helicopter parenting example, the kid doesn't know where they end and their parents begin, there's no dividing line. They just, because they have their parents' views forced on them the whole time, they don't know what they think. They just mimic parrot fashion, what the parent would say in all situations and carry on doing that through life. So those kind of narcissists need to work on that to sort of basically stand on their own two feet, ego-wise, if, if you like. Um, and, and although they seem, narcissists seem like they're so full of themselves. They're constantly looking for reassurance, positive feedback from the rest of the world, which is why they're such a nightmare to be around.

• 25:16Speaker 06

  Like, anyone who does something good, oh, I'll, I'll take, I'll take responsibility for that, I'll get all the praise, even though it wasn't my idea. But I convinced myself it was my idea, so now all the praise should be showered in my direction. And then if you don't give them that praise, they get really aggressive, they get really wound up and they're, they're just a social nightmare. So narcissistic people almost always end up alone, e- even those in relationships. They choose relationships which are basically yes men, yes women, to, to constantly give that positive reinforcement. And that's not really a relationship. Relationships involve gi- give and take, so they're still an island, even when they're in relationships. So narcissism is, is, is the queen of all the deadly sins, as far as.

• 25:59Speaker 06

  Saint Gregory the Great was concerned and and he's the guy who basically invented the concept of the seven deadly sins. He took some, there were so many sins before his time in the sixth century. Um, that that it was hard to keep track of all the things you shouldn't do. But he sort of narrowed it down to, look, these are the seven most important things to keep your eye on, you know? There are lots of other things that are gonna prevent you from going to heaven in his view of the world. Um, but I think he was bang on the money to to to sort of refine the list down to a more easily manageable seven. Because then we've got a fighting chance of remembering them. Like our our capacity to hold information in mind is limited to around about seven items.

• 26:42Speaker 06

  So expecting someone, particularly, you know, hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago. To rec- to bear in mind when they're considering, should I, shouldn't I do this thing? Ten different like commandments.

• 26:55Chris Williamson?

  Can't even read or write, but they've got forty five different commandments they've got to try and remember.

• 26:59Speaker 06

  But but like you say with the ten, by the time you get to the eighth commandment, you've forgotten what the first and the second one. So so Christianity would just had expectations that go beyond the limits of the brain's capability. So I think I think Saint Gregory smashed it by by bringing it down to seven.

• 27:16Chris Williamson?

  Why did he say queen? What's that mean?

• 27:19Speaker 06

  Probably because he's a massive sexist. Um, so so I I think the idea was. And and I'm I'm just, I'm I'm I'm presuming that it was along the lines of, he could have said the king. But because queens, you know, from the perspective of a religious man. Who had, you know, devout, he's married to God, he doesn't do women. Women are the temptresses who who make men think about lust, you know? Lust is one of the.

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  I I thought you said that pride was the queen.

• 27:48Speaker 06

  Pride, so so the idea is that once pride has seduced you.

• 27:54Speaker 06

  You will be much more likely to fall foul of the all of the deadly sins.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  Including greed, including gluttony.

• 28:02Chris Williamson?

  It's the pride, the buy-in, it's the on-ramp, it's the.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  It's the gateway, the gateway vice that leads to all the others. So those, I mean, whether or not he was right in that regard, I don't know. But the most interesting finding from the neuroscience stuff was actually to do with scanning the brains of people who are high in narcissism in an MRI scanner. And then compared their brain responses to social rejection to those who are low on the narcissism scale. And a part of the brain that lit up much more strongly was a brain area involved in in creating our perception of pain, whether it's physical pain or psychological anguish. This brain area, which is called the DACC, it's a bit of a mouthful, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.

• 28:50Chris Williamson?

  Love it.

• 28:51Speaker 06

  So it's like, it's where the two halves of the brain meet in the middle. Just above and to the front of the band of neurons that connect the left and right side of the brain. This big bundle called the corpus callosum. It's just, it's just a patch of brain tissue that's a little bit above and in front of that particular structure. DACC. And yeah, and that brain, so basically, what does that mean? What that means is when a narcissistic person is socially rejected, they feel the pain of that social rejection more acutely. And so what I took from that is perhaps that explains why they're such dreadful people in a social, in a social circumstance. They're incredibly touchy, they're very easily offended.

• 29:37Speaker 06

  You know, so any amount of offence that someone in the group, in their neighbourhood, in their family might cause them. You know, one unit of intended offence causes 10 units of pain. Which presumably they will then ruminate about and plot their revenge, you know. Aggression, envy and wrath, two of the deadly sins I'm sure we'll chat about later. They often inspire thoughts of plotting for revenge, you know. Getting your retribution for what normally boils down to hurt pride.

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, everyone that's listening knows or has a friend. There's someone in the circle, they might not be in it anymore, who makes everything about them. It's Jay from the Inbetweeners, you know, it's like, he's just the epitome of the guy that's, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I did this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I did that." Carol Dweck's fixed mindset human, what, you know, pick the avatar that you want to talk about this. But, um, yeah, I, I, I feel for these people, man, like, people that have that excess pride and are super narcissists, like, it makes me feel bad because I can watch their programming at play. And that's not to say I'm fucking immune. I watch my own programming at play as well.

• 30:55Chris Williamson?

  And I feel bad for myself, which is like a, a whole second circle of hell that you can descend into. But you watch these people do it and I'm like, fuck, man, like, you're, you're a cool girl or guy. You don't need to do all this. You don't have to have the show. I, I'm perfectly happy being out at dinner with you or going to the gym with you or doing whatever, without this whole game, you know?

• 31:19Speaker 06

  You, you just preempted absolutely beautifully the conclusion of the entire book, which is that that's the best way to deal with these people. Bit of compassion, you know, talking about the ancient wisdom. Buddha's been banging on about that forever, you know, two and a half thousand years. Buddha, Buddha's teachings that suffering is inevitable. And, and that the best way you can deal with people in the world or creatures or anything in the world is to be compassionate, you know, to think of, to, to be more mindful of other people's suffering. So it doesn't matter which of the seven deadly sins you're talking about. I found evidence for that brain area involved in generating psychological anguish, inner turmoil.

• 32:02Speaker 06

  It, it's, it's, it's on a hair trigger in four out of the seven deadly sins. And probably in the other three too, you know, the relevant, the relevant neuroscience studies haven't yet been done, like any neuroscientist who wrote, wrote a sort of a, a request for funding for research, he said, "Yeah, I'm going to study the seven deadly sins." They'd be laughed out of the room, right? I, I got lucky that there was enough neuroscience to work with to try and estimate what these brain areas do. But, but you, this bang on the money, I thought, I got, I got to the end of writing the book and I thought, well, what can people do with this knowledge? Like, like, is that, is? How can it guide them on how to live a better life? And I've got a nice little anecdote about how I actually failed to put it into practice myself.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  This idea of the best way to deal with people who are falling foul of letting the seven deadly sin type behaviours go to the extreme and causing social chaos everywhere they go. Best way to deal with them is to be more mindful, just to think about how much extra inner turmoil they're dealing with than the average punter. And I, when I finished writing the book, I went back to the place where I was inspired to write the book, which is Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. You know, for us Brits, it's, and in fact in the world, it's the home of freedom of speech. And, and it's been that way since eleven eighty-six. And, and it was sort of put into law in the nineteenth century because back in the day when people were going to be hung from the neck

• 33:29Speaker 06

  for some kind of crime, they'd get a chance to say a few words. They're going to be dead in a few minutes, but you know, doesn't really matter what they say. And I love that in Britain, we had this tradition of letting people who were doomed, say their piece. It seems like a very reasonable thing to do. Anyway, so I used to go down there a lot because I'm born and bred Londoner. I love roller skating, one of the best places to roller skate in the whole of London is up and down by the Serpentine. And when I got tired, all the way through my teens and twenties, I'd, I'd just go around to Speaker's Corner and have a little listen to all these usually men up on their ladders preaching away about whatever they wanted. It was invariably about religion.

• 34:06Speaker 06

  I remember thinking, it's such a shame that all these people, like, like I love that they are vehemently preaching their beliefs and a lot of them errant beliefs in my view, but they had a place where they could speak their beliefs. And there's something very liberating about having the freedom to express yourself, even if you're completely wrong. And I thought, it's just a shame that science doesn't get a look in. And it was there where I, where I'd sort of listen to them, I'd go, well. Ten percent of what you said was bang on the money and I can learn from that. But ninety percent was supernatural poppycock, you know. It was mostly people arguing over whose religion is best. There's quite a lot of people from one faith having arguments with people from other faiths. You know, stress testing and going around in circles.

• 34:48Speaker 06

  But anyway, I went back there and I got up on my own soapbox and I preached from my own book. And I sort of, I said, I thought people would be interested, you know, passersby. Oh, who wants to hear about the scientific perspective on the seven deadly sins? And it's up on YouTube. If you go to sighofsin.com, I made these little videos. I've got a friend to film it and there's little six-minute snippets of the hour long talk I gave. Now, about twenty minutes from the end, this is like eleven thirty on a Sunday. This bloke just came, wandered over like a bottle of cider in his hand, absolutely hammered, homeless guy. Just shouting abuse at me, non-stop for twenty minutes. And I didn't know how to deal with him. Like I blanked him for five minutes, that didn't work.

• 35:33Speaker 06

  I brought him into the conversation a little bit, trying to sort of use him to make some points. That didn't work. He was just drunk and belligerent. Anyway, I'm not proud. I edited it out, so there's no evidence of it. But I gave him a piece of my mind. I was rude to him. I got angry. I let him get to me and in front of a crowd of about fifty people, I said a few quite unkind things, which didn't help matters, but nothing else had worked. Fast forward four months, I went back to the same spot. I gave a talk again, because I thought you can't just do it once.

• 36:05Speaker 06

  And I told the story of how I had failed to be compassionate with that man. And I was slightly embarrassed that I didn't put my own, you know, I basically did do as I say, not as I do. And I thought, you know, if I get the chance, I'd love to make amends. You won't believe it, ten minutes from the end of that talk, I saw him coming over from the background. I saw him wandering towards, I leapt off my soapbox, I ran over to him. And I was like, so great to see you again. I'm really sorry for what I said last night. I threw my arms around him and gave him a hug. Now, this guy is, you know, a lot of homeless people are mentally ill is a very high proportion. I did it on instinct because it felt like the right thing to do, obviously unplanned. And at that moment of embracing him, I thought, is he, is he going to stab

• 36:50Speaker 06

  me? Like, you know, I could end up getting hurt here. What an idiot. On the contrary, he melted. He was tense. And then when he like, I held him for about five, 10 seconds, and I felt him relax into my arms, which is weird, right? And he was good as gold. For the whole rest of the talk, he did not disturb once. Whereas before he'd been going, you're not an effing neurologist, you're a looney. You know, he was good as gold. And then at the end, he came up to me, he's like, I actually listened to you this time. And I come down here to disturb these people. So I think these religious zealots are nuts, and they shouldn't be telling people to follow God. I think everyone should make their own decisions in life. And that's why I've come and be disruptive. He's like, now that I've listened to you, I agree with every word you said.

• 37:35Chris Williamson?

  Man, what a cool.

• 37:36Speaker 06

  Which was nice.

• 37:37Chris Williamson?

  What a cool story. So having been on the front door of more nightclubs than I can remember, I know the pain of dealing with someone who's drunk. And when, when people have got alcohol in the man, there's just no, you're not talking to them. You're talking to the blood alcohol point 10 or whatever it is. That's what you're talking to, right?

• 37:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, definitely. What I really enjoy doing, and I'm enjoying doing it increasingly now, is breaking the fourth wall of a conversation in that sort of a manner. So if someone's doing something, if someone is being driven by their programming, or they have a response to something, I'll ask them about the response, not about what they said, but like, hang on a second, man, like, why, why did you say that? Or why, why were you so sort of self-effacing there? Like, why did you have to kind of caveat what you were going to say and say that, oh, well, I know that it's just shit, but it's this thing. It's like, why didn't you just say it? Oh, well, uh, huh, huh. And you can see people, the cognitive dissonance starts to fire.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, the programming just, it doesn't want to accept the fact, I should have just said the words. But increasingly, I think, you know, doing it with compassion, not doing it to show off, doing it to say, look, like, you don't need to be over or under you, that kind of the virtuous mean in the middle is exactly where you can be. And I think calling people out on that, it's, as you said at the beginning, you want to be friends with people that want the best for you. Not people that want, that tell you what you want to hear, not people that decide to be too mean and kind of, use you as a punching bag for their own kind of emotional challenges. But man, that's, that's a really, really cool story. I'm super glad as well that you managed to get some closure and,

• 39:25Chris Williamson?

  and kind of finish that loop off because I imagine it must have felt very, very satisfying also, obviously.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  That's very empathic of you because it ate away at me. I pride myself on not being a hypocrite. I tried to not be a hypocrite.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  And not being a dick, I'm going to guess as well.

• 39:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I try. Yeah. Um, but that, that kind of thing, it, it does, you know, there, there are other things that, like I mentioned one in the book about Roth, where this, um, this guy, I got, I was doing some filming in Brighton and I got to the end of the line. And I was, I was actually writing Science of Sin, uh, you know, I was researching and writing and I had my papers over. It took ages to tidy everything up. And the, the train conductor like went through the carriage and said, you've got to get off. And I was like, yeah, yeah. And I was hurrying to get my stuff, but you know, I was basically dithering. And he, and he locked me in the carriage. And then I went up to the next carriage, that one was locked too. He had me running halfway up the length of the train before I could actually get off. And I'm like, mate, what are you doing?

• 40:22Speaker 06

  He saw me there. I went absolutely mental at him. So, you know, the homeless guy, that guy, you know, literally enraged, like my blood alcohol level was super high and I'd felt like my pride was wounded, but. I spent weeks, like I just, it kept popping into my head examining it. Why did you react like that? Why did you do that? And, and I think that's one thing that this sort of new modern wisdom inspired pursuit of like, let, let's use all this psychology research and this better understanding of why we do the things we do to try and make ourselves better. I think, I think one of the main things that offers us is the opportunity to not be so hard on ourselves.

• 41:03Speaker 06

  And what I liked about your anecdote is it sounded like you give reflections to people that help them

• 41:11Speaker 06

  catch when they're going into set piece behaviours, where they're kind of either beating themselves up too much about something that they did, or writing off their potential to potentially be better. Because it's easier. If you don't try, you can't fail, you know? And I think a lot of people who, who are a little bit stuck in their ways from an objective perspective, it's like they're worried about trying to be different because if they try something new and it doesn't work, then that could end up giving their self-esteem a bit of kicking.

• 41:41Chris Williamson?

  Bro, I love, I love trying to bring people up like that. There's some people that, as far as I'm concerned, are just lost causes and that's more from a time efficiency perspective. There's certain people I know that have excess pride and I'm just, dude, like you're, you might, you might figure it out, you might not figure it out. Maybe you stumble down the right YouTube rabbit hole or start reading the right books, or maybe you don't, but it's, this isn't my fight. I'm, I'm leaving you to it.

• 42:04Speaker 06

  But also you're not quite, with respect, you're not qualified to do that. I'm not qualified to do that. The only people who can really help those people are ones who can go, you know, train professionals,

• 42:14Chris Williamson?

  unpack all of this stuff from back in the day.

• 42:16Speaker 06

  Who just, let's go back through and work out where all this came from because it's like, I guess I'd imagine, my mum's a therapist, so I've got some insight into what the process involves, not that I've ever gone through it myself, which is one of my long lasting hypocrisies because I know I should do it, but I still haven't yet got around to it. Yeah, it's, it's, it's working out. What life experiences led you to certain set piece behaviours that aren't good for you or other people because it's it's not a sort of zero sum game wellbeing and happiness like we can all together lift ourselves it's not like one person's happiness detracts from your

• 42:55Speaker 06

  own envy wise if someone else seems really happy it can emphasise your own relative lack of happiness so so quite often people don't want to be around perpetually cheerful people for that reason um but ultimately you need professionals to help you understand why you just keep doing things that rub people up the wrong way um neuroscientists can't really help you uh well intentioned podcasters but you know like if you did the course I'm sure you'd be brilliant because you have I would argue on the basis of what you've shown so far in the last forty minutes you've got it man like you you've got enough of an overview of what makes people tick probably from all the time you spent on the door dealing with

• 43:39Speaker 06

  every different type of person under the sun but you've got that life wisdom that means that once you had the I mean maybe you're a psychotherapist I don't know but if you if you don't have that training if you got that knowledge that official training on top of your life experience you'd literally you know change people those lost causes would be found again but mate that's a long journey who am I to say

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  I know so I'm I'm good friends with Charlotte Fox Weber who's the head of psychotherapy for the School of Life in London and I had her on the podcast and she was telling me psychotherapists need to have five years of consistent um sessions on themselves not that they give it it's like that that's like saying you as a PT you're not allowed to be fat and also you've got to be really fit before you can be a PT I thought I thought that was really really cool

• 44:30Speaker 06

  my mum blew me away when she said it's impossible to be an effective counsellor if you don't have counselling yourself because your own neuroses come out in the way you did you're trying to be objective but those set pieces that your unconscious plays on you will end up interfering with your ability to help them

• 44:48Chris Williamson?

  I love that terminology I've never heard it before set piece behaviour

• 44:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's just I'm thinking autopilot, autopilot behaviour.

• 44:56Chris Williamson?

  It makes me think, because what happens with a set piece in a sport, right? Is that first the guy runs this way, then this person goes that, then the ball comes in, then this guy goes back across, then this is gonna happen. And it's the fact that it happens, this kind of iterative, like staccato game of it's like, first this, then that, afterwards this, and then it finishes up here. And sometimes it might go well, and sometimes it might go bad. And that's what a set piece is, and that's what happens when you see people who are part of this, that animus possessed, you know, they're just part of that programming as it goes. Look, let's get back, we have six sins remaining. Gluttony, gluttony is up next, and we touched on it earlier on, right?

• 45:39Chris Williamson?

  Fitness enhancing, we have, it's the only time in all of our human evolutionary history where we're in a situation.

• 45:45Speaker 06

  It's so funny that you say that, I'm sorry, the ice cream van is literally.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  Just one cornetto. Perfect timing.

• 45:56Chris Williamson?

  Jack, if you go outside and get us a 99 flake now, I'll pause the, no.

• 46:00Speaker 06

  I hate that guy, because literally, I think, I know, I must sound like such a.

• 46:06Chris Williamson?

  Dick.

• 46:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, but whenever, whenever they come past, I think, you're just there to make fat teenagers fatter.

• 46:13Chris Williamson?

  I don't like mine, so mine goes past the end of my, I don't like mine because he always does it when I'm recording content, and it's always on the take where I've nailed it, you know? And I've had the auto queue running for ages, and then it's the what, and then.

• 46:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. But at least he's got the just one cornetto music, because for a couple of years, he had some god awful nursery rhyme, so, you know, we've got to be grateful for the little thing.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  Stuff of nightmares. So, yeah, gluttony, fitness enhancing, for a long time, we were in a situation where food was scarce, we didn't know when the next meal was coming. Now, the world's changed, and we're in this abundant surplus of food, but apparently, if we still, if we eat too much of it, it's a vice, why?

• 47:05Speaker 06

  Because it's really, really bad for you. If you're, so there's been some quite interesting research done with looking at the white matter integrity. So the white matter in the brain is like the neuronal cabling. You know, like there's billions and billions of wire, brain wires, sending electrical information from one end to the other, reaches the synapse, spills a bit of neurotransmitter into the gap, travels across to the next neuron in the chain. And then that one becomes a little bit more or less likely to send its own electrical messages. So it's got this, the reason it's white matter rather than the grey matter is because there's a go faster wrapper called myelin around the outside to accelerate the speed of that electrical message

• 47:50Speaker 06

  so that it can get where it needs to go super, super fast. So when you talk about the integrity of the white matter, it's basically how good is that go faster wrapper? Is it, is it in good shape or is it in bad shape? And if you look at the brains of people who are obese, as far as their BMI is concerned, and you compare them to the brains of people who are lean, as far as BMI is concerned. If your average 50 year old, if you're obese, the white matter looks like what you'd get for your average lean 60 something year old. You know, so it ages the brain by 10 years. There's lots, all sorts of kind of cognitive capacities that are reduced. So this is obviously, it's not vice from the perspective of heaven or hell. We're getting away from that entirely.

• 48:34Speaker 06

  Advice in terms of making a hell of your life on earth compared to what it could be. You know, I have the greatest sympathy for people who struggle not to overeat because I overeat hugely.

• 48:46Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 48:46Speaker 06

  I have done my whole life.

• 48:47Chris Williamson?

  I love it. It's satisfying.

• 48:48Speaker 06

  I've always been a sports person and since childhood I had tremendous excessive energy. And that, that wasn't my choice. In fact, it caused my parents, like I, I never stopped. I was constantly running around, climbing up things. I wanted to do every sport that was available on the planet. I just wouldn't stop. So all I've done is continued doing that. Even though I keep up the same level of sport, I've still found that I have to constantly focus on eating less, increasing the gaps between my eating so that I don't end up, you know, eating something just before I go to bed and then eating as soon as I get up in the morning. I'm trying to extend that period where I'm fasting. And it's a, it's a constant battle and it's weirdly only now that instead of, because I can't go to

• 49:32Speaker 06

  the gym, I can't do anything else. It's only now by doing, um, we're back to the hypocrisy thing again. I was a little bit overweight BMI wise and it's only doing 10K twice a week instead of doing 10K once a month and my normal like playing gym and football once a week, where I've, where I've, I've lost four kilos and I've got down into that healthy BMI for the first time in about 15, 20 years. So I'm, I'm not, I'm not a fat basher because if, if I had a different metabolism, if, if, no, if I had an injury that prevented me from doing sufficient work, I struggle to regulate my eating and, and, you know, like as, as much as the next person. But the consequences, if you do allow yourself

• 50:15Speaker 06

  to become obese in terms of your brain health are, are, are, are pretty serious.

• 50:20Chris Williamson?

  Bro, the, the quality of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, as far as I'm concerned. As the quality of my thoughts have improved, the quality of my life has improved linearly. Actually, no, it probably increased exponentially. It's probably that my life has got better by a factor of how much better my thoughts have got. And, um, Don McGregor from Social Change said to me on our first ever podcast, he's a big sobriety advocate, as am I, elective sobriety, just for people that want more time and money and calories to spend on shit they care about. And he was like, bro, everything in your body is made from the stuff that you put in your mouth. Everything. I was like, hang on a fucking, you're right. I can't, I can't build anything in my body if I don't first

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  put it on a plate or in a wrapper or whatever, and then put it in me and I look back, I look back to me at uni and I think. What was, what was I eating at uni? Like, wake up, big bowl of Cheerios, last night's Domino, Domino's Pizza, go to lectures, come back, Budweiser, Budweiser, bit of pasta, probably something, go out, vodka, you know, and you think like, that's not.

• 51:31Speaker 06

  Well, I'm glad, I'm glad you're mentioning the booze here because the word gluttony comes from the Latin glatir, which means to, to gulp. So, so it's to over, it's basically, it's not just food. People folk gluttony, they always think food, food, food. No, it's, it's drink too.

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  An excessive consumption then.

• 51:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's just, so long as it goes in through your mouth, it's, it's, it's gluttony. And, and, and it's really important to remember the huge amount of sugar that is in, um, you know, your average can of lager or, or glass of wine, not so much vodka, but the stuff you mix the vodka with, usually very, very high in sugar. And that's, you know, those invisible calories. We don't really count those calories because it's like, it's my God given, the God that I don't believe in, my God given right to de-stress with a glass of this, which turns into a bottle, you know, and because it can so easily slide from a glass of wine a day into a bottle, if you're, if you've got a big mouth like me. And it takes, you have

• 52:29Speaker 06

  to notice that one glass has turned into two on a regular basis before you can rein it in. Ideally, don't let it go that, like, when you see the slide happen, if, if you don't buy it in the shop, then it can't be on your shelf to tempt you.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  Can't eat the stuff that's not in the cupboard, man. It's the easiest way to not break your diet. Okay.

• 52:46Speaker 06

  The battleground is in the shop. It is, if you bring it in through the threshold of your front door, it will get eaten.

• 52:52Chris Williamson?

  It's going to be consumed. Yeah. One form or another. You'll snort it or put it up your bum or do something with it. It's a cookie.

• 52:58Speaker 06

  My suppository addiction is getting out of hand.

• 53:01Chris Williamson?

  Next one, lust, which was my, personally, in the book, that was the, uh, chapter that I found the most interesting. It was also the one that I can imagine triggered people the most and was the most uncomfortable. Um, but I want, if you would, I want you to, first off, actually, do people have conscious control over what makes them feel sexually excited?

• 53:22Speaker 06

  No, absolutely not.

• 53:25Speaker 06

  No one should feel guilty for feeling sexual desire towards another person because we have zero control over that. Whether or not we act upon that temptation, whether or not we act upon that attraction is a whole different matter. But the actual, you know, we can't, a gay man can't control whether his lust is triggered by looking at a man or a woman. A straight man cannot decide to be straight or bi or gay. It's just, it's just not, it's not in our control.

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  We have no conscious control over what makes us feel sexually excited, which is what I guess, looking back at the ancient way that the church dealt with homosexuality, makes that a very pernicious um way for people to have to live.

• 54:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, basically, sodomy is anything that isn't having sex with the intent of making a baby.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay.

• 54:27Speaker 06

  So, any sexual activity that isn't aimed at making a baby is sodomy in the eyes of Christianity, at least the original, you know, uh, back in the days of Christ.

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  That would include the withdrawal method, well timed withdrawal method.

• 54:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And masturbation and, you know, all sorts of things which

• 54:45Chris Williamson?

  Everyone that's listening.

• 54:47Speaker 06

  are very innocent.

• 54:48Chris Williamson?

  Everyone that's listening is a sodomite.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 54:51Chris Williamson?

  If you're not a sodomite, if you're listening and you're not a sodomite, I want to, I want to meet you because you're interesting.

• 54:56Speaker 06

  But that's even in the context of, that's even in the context, if you're going to be really strict about it, and let's not bash religious perspectives because, you know, there are different, there are different interpretations of this is the, this is the original guidance back in the day that inspired the concept of lust being a seven, one of the seven deadly sins, right? Like, this is, this is the, the antecedents to this belief were all around that. But even that, that would be even in the context of, of a married couple, you know, married in a church, um, if they have sex just for fun, that's sodomy. Like, if you have sex with a condom on, that's sodomy.

• 55:35Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 55:35Speaker 06

  It's bonkers.

• 55:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is. Um, so can you take us through the Burns and Swirlo tumor study?

• 55:43Speaker 06

  Can you remind me what that is? There were a lot of studies.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  So it's the one, it was the one about the married man who was having sex, paedophilic sexual urges.

• 55:53Speaker 06

  Sure, sure, sure. Yes, so um.

• 55:57Speaker 06

  He's a guy who was, to all intents and purposes, a responsible man. He, he was a teacher. He, he, you know, held down jobs well. He was liked by, you know, not the most popular bloke in, in, in the school, but he was um, uh, you know, stand up member of society. He started developing sexual urges towards his stepdaughter. His stepdaughter mentioned this to her mother and.

• 56:20Chris Williamson?

  Who was fourteen.

• 56:21Speaker 06

  Who was fourteen. Um, quite rightly, um, that had a word, you know, and with, with the law. And he got banged up for paedophilia because he'd made advances on his stepdaughter. Um. He then complained of a banging headache, um, whilst, whilst incarcerated. And so they duly took him for a brain scan and found a massive tuna, tumor pressing on a part of his brain. And they removed the tumor. He then claimed said that all of his paedophilic fantasies had disappeared. Um, he no longer wished that he could still have his, you know, like when, when he was in prison, he still was hankering for his

• 57:06Speaker 06

  uh, collection of paedophilic um, material.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  He was going after the um, the nurses as well, or like the assistants that were in the recovery facility he was in as well. It was like, there was anyone that he was going to make an advance at, right?

• 57:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And then, so, so they let him out because they believed that the removal of this tumor had removed his paedophilic tendencies. So the idea was, it was like disinhibition, like, I think people who have those urges, it, it's, it's not whether, it's not that the urges went away, it's his ability to, to suppress them, his ability to do right by the law and do right by not harming other people. But then once the tumor grew back when he was out of prison, the paedophilic tendencies came back, presumably because he, he lost his capacity to resist those urges. And then he ended up back in prison again. So the reason it's a really fascinating case is because

• 57:57Speaker 06

  it's so rare to have a case where the, the paedophilic tendencies were switched on and offable according to the presence or absence of a tumor. That's why it's fascinating.

• 58:07Chris Williamson?

  Dude, it, that study. Blew me away. It reminded me, I can't remember the particular gentleman's name, but the guy who was in the bell tower that was shooting people, shot his family, shot himself and then said, you need to do an autopsy on my brain, found out it was a huge tumor pressing on the area of the brain, which is to do with aggression. And he just felt this like unrelenting aggression. But I mean, even that man, like, we don't have conscious control over what makes us feel sexually excited. We do have conscious control over whether or not we act on those urges. That's what we've got. But that, that brings up, there's a big section in the book about pedophilia, which I think is a fascinating topic. And ever since I was seeing a girl at uni, and one of her housemates went to go and give a talk, a lecture theatre, saying

• 58:52Chris Williamson?

  that we need to treat people with pedophilia with more compassion. Because do you think that these people want to be attracted to children? Given the choice of all of the different things that they could be attracted to in the world, do you think they want to be attracted to children? Ever since then, I've, I've been, stuff like this absolutely fascinates me. The thought, how do we think about it philosophically? How do we see it societally, you know?

• 59:19Speaker 06

  Well, let's think of it from the perspective of what's best for society, right? We want to reduce as much as possible the incidence of paedophiles making advances on children, because obviously that scars children for the rest of their lives, and it causes huge, huge problems. So what's a pragmatic way of dealing with that problem? It's certainly not to make them feel vilified. So the minute they accept it, everyone in their life turns away from them. When they, if they were to go to a doctor, you know, they would, they would worry, probably quite rightly, that they might get reported to the police, because I'd imagine, I don't know for sure, that your average GP has a duty, or might feel a duty to report this, because that

• 59:59Speaker 06

  person, even if they say, I'm controlling it, but these urges are there, well, do you really want to take the risk that they're saying one thing and doing another? Of course not. So, but the thing is, if you or I were a paedophile, Where would we go for help? And that's the bit that I think we need to focus on. If there's no one to turn to, where do you go? You hide it, you suppress it. Is that a good way to deal with problems? Invariably, no. You know, if you bottle it and pretend it's not there, it's likely to grow, you know? Can get worse and worse, you need help. But where can these people go for help? So I think what's happened over the course of, you know, all time until now.

• 1:00:40Speaker 06

  Because they're so vilified, they're considered evil, wrong, broken, beyond redemption. And they know full well that the only people who are gonna, they're gonna get a sympathetic ear from are other paedophiles. And so then it's gonna go from entertaining thoughts to, oh shit, have you checked out this website?

• 1:00:59Chris Williamson?

  Catalyzes the situation, doesn't it?

• 1:01:01Speaker 06

  Or twenty years ago, like, oh, I can get hold of some videos and, you know, VHS videos or DVDs or whatever. And then, and then it circulates and then it goes underground. And that's the bit that concerns me. Society's quite understandable attitude of disgust towards paedophiles only serves to drive them underground. And it's such a hard problem to deal with. I think most people just like, oh, I don't wanna think about this anymore. And then they, they probably don't think about it until it comes up in the news again. But I think we need to address it. It's just who's gonna do it? Like, I certainly thought twice about putting, I thought it was important to include that information. But on a number of occasions, I thought, maybe I'm gonna take it out. So I don't wanna sound like an apologist. That's absolutely why I'm not.

• 1:01:44Speaker 06

  Um, but at the same time, you've got to discuss it because it happens in the world. And, you know, there's a, there's a proportion of people who have those tendencies. And pretty much all of them in the UK, as far as I know, don't have anywhere to turn to get help, to get therapy, to get, be taught the tools of how to deal with it in a way that doesn't ruin their quality of life or that of anyone else's.

• 1:02:06Chris Williamson?

  I think you said there's a. Call line, special call line that 50% of the calls are unanswered due to the call line not being sufficiently well manned. And I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, I'd be interested, the people that are listening, I'd be really interested to hear what you think. Like, give me a DM or comment below or whatever. Because it's a really fascinating topic. And, you know, anyone that wants to say, oh, this is making, this is an apologist thing for paedophile. Like, fuck off, man. Like, you don't know what you're talking about. This has got nothing to do with that. It's to do with how can we have an effective society which helps to bring everybody along with it. And at what point do you make someone culpable for the thoughts that are in their head? Like, are you actually going to make someone culpable, not only for

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  thought crime, but for thought crime that by definition in neuroscience, they do not have conscious control over?

• 1:02:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Which, which is, and the evidence that is-

• 1:03:00Chris Williamson?

  Holy fucking shit.

• 1:03:00Speaker 06

  Some of your listeners won't have read it, right? Almost by definition. And the bit that really made me think differently about it is this thing called a plesismography, one of the hardest words to pronounce in science.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  Say it again.

• 1:03:12Speaker 06

  Plesism, bastard. Plesism, oh, you got me. Plesismography. So you basically put a collar around the base of the penis. And so you're measuring whether or not the person gets an erection, right? It's completely objective measure of sexual arousal. There's a similar thing in women called photoplasmography, which measures the lubrication of the vagina. Essentially, when female genitalia become aroused, it lubricates. When male, well, it changes shape somewhat, and lubricates, and the male, you know, the penis becomes turgid. So you can put the rod inside the hole. It's, you know, biological and simple. But especially, so

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

  what I'm talking about is the sexual arousal thing is something that we have no control over. And in some of these studies that came out of a lab in Canada, the interesting thing was, in order to make sure they had a population of purely paedophilic people, they, and then they compared them against purely non paedophilic people. Because obviously, some people, there'll be overlap. They showed both parties- Children porn and adult porn and the paedophiles got no response from the adult pornography, whether it was gay or straight or anything else. They exclusively got a sexual response from the paedophilic content, which is why they're included, and vice versa.

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  They had to make sure that those who were turned on by, you know, adult consenting, we hope, pornography, that, you know, they weren't also a little bit turned on by the paedophiles. In order to make sure that you really are comparing apples and oranges, that you are, you know, you're getting the populations purely paedophilic and purely non paedophilic. And so the fact that they bothered to do that is quite interesting in and of itself. But the fact that these people are incapable of becoming sexually aroused to anything other than children. It's like, you wouldn't wish that on your worst enemy, right?

• 1:05:12Chris Williamson?

  No, man, and that's the thing as well, especially when you roll the clock back and you realise that for a very, very long time, as soon as a girl was fertile, she would be pregnant. In fact, there's even

• 1:05:23Speaker 06

  She'd be married often.

• 1:05:24Chris Williamson?

  There's even a term for the period between her first period and when she becomes fertile. I can't remember the word for it, but there's a medieval term for that period. Because it was so commonly used by the waiting male for this, well, I don't know, what, 13, 14? Probably for most girls when they start puberty, I don't know.

• 1:05:47Speaker 06

  Juliet and Romeo and Juliet was around about that age.

• 1:05:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, fucking Game of Thrones, there you go. Daenerys, but you get my point.

• 1:05:55Speaker 06

  Speaking of made up drama.

• 1:05:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Right, two more things, two more things in lust that I really, I really thought was cool.

• 1:06:03Chris Williamson?

  I didn't realise that the female orgasm has a reproductive function. What is it, the cilia, is it called?

• 1:06:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, the little hair like, hair like extensions that reach out into the fallopian tubes.

• 1:06:16Chris Williamson?

  The waft.

• 1:06:16Speaker 06

  It actually wafts. The sperm into the correct, you know, there's two fallopian tubes. And it wafts it into the one that the egg will be found in.

• 1:06:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Speaker 06

  Over and above the one that didn't produce an egg.

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  I've, is that selective from an evolutionary sense?

• 1:06:33Speaker 06

  Sure. I mean, I don't see how else it could have occurred.

• 1:06:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay, cool. So woman enjoys sex, someone that she has an emotional and physical connection with equals more likely to orgasm. Equals more likely to direct the sperm through this Mexican wave of little sillier, sillier things down. I mean, that even just learning that, bro, like the fact that.

• 1:06:54Speaker 06

  And conversely, do you want to know a bit that I didn't put in?

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  Hit me.

• 1:06:57Speaker 06

  Do you know what the male, male foreskin does in practical, physical terms?

• 1:07:02Chris Williamson?

  Uh, acts as a little helmet and.

• 1:07:06Speaker 06

  It's one of its functions that it, it does the job well, whether it was designed for that purpose or not, is, is, you know, very difficult to discern. But it, it extracts the previous deposit of semen. So that your semen makes it to the finish line.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  I know. I thought that was, is that not to do with the, like the coronal head shape of the penis itself that creates a suction inside of the vagina? Is that not how that works?

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  I think it's a bit of, I think, I think like that, but then in order for it to, in order for it to, I'm doing a.

• 1:07:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. So it's, it's catching it as it goes. Oh dude, that's so disgusting.

• 1:07:46Speaker 06

  But it's funny, isn't it? Like if, if that's true, and I don't know for sure whether it's true. I've just read some papers that suggest.

• 1:07:52Chris Williamson?

  I've heard, I've heard it as well.

• 1:07:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. But, um, you know, the, the concept of us being historically, biologically, um, uh, monogamous is slightly dubious if we've evolved.

• 1:08:04Chris Williamson?

  We're the only mammals on the planet. We're the only mammals on the planet, if that's the case. Final thing, final bit in lust. Fidel Castro had sex with 35,000 women. Bro.

• 1:08:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Chris Williamson?

  What's going on?

• 1:08:18Speaker 06

  That's, that's, um, slightly shocking.

• 1:08:21Chris Williamson?

  If that's not lust.

• 1:08:24Speaker 06

  That's lust, that's out of control lust. That's probably out of control.

• 1:08:29Chris Williamson?

  Probably linked in with a lot of pride, probably linked in with a lot of envy, a lot of wrath.

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  Agreed. Absolutely, I don't, I, I, I tried to go off on a tangent of sin bundles. Like, you know, men who aren't happy with having two or three kids, but in some cultures, you know, they'll have, they'll have twenty, thirty kids with multiple wives. It's like, why? Why? Why do you need to do this? Like, that's not just lust. That's, that goes way beyond lust. Like you said, it's greed, it's pride, um, so many other things.

• 1:09:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  Envy, like the desire to cause envy in others.

• 1:09:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, yeah, which is in itself of a kind of a way of pride as well, isn't it? Yeah, dude, it's so interesting how these all, how these all interplay. I think kind of to, to footnote the lust category, it's one of the most binary categories, I think, here, that because of the way that typical relationships are formatted. Like, there's not really a line when you say that someone's being greedy and not being greedy, right? It's like, oh, well, if you accrued this much wealth, there's your greed threshold.

• 1:09:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:43Chris Williamson?

  And over that bracket, you're a-

• 1:09:44Speaker 06

  It's all relative, right?

• 1:09:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, or, or you, you, you ate this much food, but you're not allowed to eat this much food, you're officially a glutton or whatever.

• 1:09:50Speaker 06

  I, I think, I think if there were a threshold, it's if your excess leaves others without.

• 1:09:58Chris Williamson?

  It's a good way to put it.

• 1:09:58Speaker 06

  But that's a hard thing to measure.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  It's a lot less hard than you cheated on your partner.

• 1:10:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Chris Williamson?

  Uh, or you had sex with thirty five thousand women.

• 1:10:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:08Chris Williamson?

  That's like, Fidel, look, it's been, it's been two thousand five hundred women. Let's leave it there, you know? Let's just, let's call it a day, mate. Are you not tired?

• 1:10:17Speaker 06

  It's funny, isn't it? Um, so many people have blamed their profligacy on sex addiction. But sex addiction isn't even acknowledged by the psychiatric world, like-

• 1:10:29Chris Williamson?

  Do you think it will become?

• 1:10:33Speaker 06

  Don't know. I mean, well, it's all about whether there's sufficient evidence to support it. If that evidence comes along, then yeah. If not, no, it'll never make it into, it become, but it's funny, isn't it, that people bandy it around, left, oh, I'm a sex addict, oh, yeah, he's just, he or she is a complete sex addict. It's like, but it's not a thing. It's just, it's just, it's

• 1:10:51Chris Williamson?

  Not yet. But then depression, depression wasn't categorized as a, an official mental health disorder, I don't think, until only fairly recently.

• 1:11:01Speaker 06

  Hmm. And you're not employed today.

• 1:11:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, true. Okay, so envy, next. You say envy is the least fun of all capital advices. What makes envy different to the other ones?

• 1:11:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, I mean, when you feel envious, it's unpleasant, isn't it? But when you snap at someone who's doing your head in, wrath, it's quite fleetingly satisfying, even if you might regret it in the long run. You know, if you win at poker and you end up winning all the money and the other 11 people or whatever around the table don't get it, that's fleetingly satisfying until the next time you go back and play poker and lose it all again. So envy is, you know, there's benign envy, which is good, which is where you compare yourself to other people. Usually it's people who had a similar start in life that this works with, like grew up in a similar part of the world, similar level of education,

• 1:11:54Speaker 06

  similar opportunity, similar start in life, yet one person, the other person, has gone way beyond you. And it can make you feel, you can respond to that in different ways. Benign envy is where you examine them, you work out, what did they do that I didn't? And you learn from them. And you work out gaps in your sort of toolkit of ways to manage your life and deal with the world. And you maybe, you know, think, I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn how to do that. Or I'm gonna start moving in more influential circles so that I can maybe get some of those trappings too, you know? We, envy helps us realize when we're lagging behind other people in our social group, and we're not getting as much

• 1:12:36Speaker 06

  as they are. So it can alert us to possibilities, to potential. The dark side of envy is malicious envy because there are two ways you can even the gap out. You can either pull yourself up by your bootstraps in order to get to a similar level to the person you're envious of. But there's also the other way of circulating malicious gossip and bringing them tumbling down. So quite often people respond to their feelings, perfectly natural feelings of envy, by wanting to bring about the downfall of that other person by any means necessary. So the envy can inspire awful behaviours, incredibly antisocial behaviour in some people in some circumstances.

• 1:13:20Chris Williamson?

  I love the way that you put it. You said envy has a sense of injustice at its core. That's a really nice-

• 1:13:29Speaker 06

  It's unfair, isn't it? Why have they got all this and I've got nothing? Why are they da da da? Why are they da da da? You know, it's the old refrain, isn't it? The other bit is, go on.

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  Just envy being useful, motivating you to compete makes sense. It also makes sense from an evolutionary, a fitness enhancing perspective, right? You think like, oh, well, this is my get up and go. And so much of this is in, it's your own ability to take yourself out of yourself and see someone that's doing really, really well. Or even not see someone who's doing badly but kind of just slowly creeping up on you and not seeing it as a threat, not seeing it as a zero sum game.

• 1:14:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. The interesting thing about envy is it's one of the, one of the four where that, that brain area, DACC, that's involved in pain. At the moment, people feel envy when they read about someone else from their childhood doing really, really well, much, much better than them. That brain area kicks in hard at that moment you feel envy. You know, it's sort of- Inner turmoil is what inspires a lot of unpleasant behaviours. You know, that's often the first link in the chain that leads to unpleasant antisocial behaviours, which I was shocked that I kept finding this brain area.

• 1:14:56Speaker 06

  Because I have to admit, when I set out on this project, I hadn't done the research before I wrote the book proposal. I found out what I found and then I reflected on it and then wrote a book about it. So I couldn't believe how lucky I was getting four out of five. And actually, gluttony was one of the ones that this brain area didn't kick up in.

• 1:15:17Chris Williamson?

  How would that have operated? Would that be when you are going to have the food and you don't have the food and you feel pain?

• 1:15:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's when you're trying, well, funnily enough, I can't remember the exact study, but a couple of months after the book was published, a study did come out suggesting that in people that have problems with overeating, that at the moment they make that choice to give into it, it's almost like the emotional turmoil of the self-loathing of, oh god, here I go again, my resolve is crumbling. From memory, this was a year ago.

• 1:15:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:52Speaker 06

  But I remember thinking, oh, if only I'd delayed by another six months, I could have included this.

• 1:15:57Chris Williamson?

  I could have got another one in there, yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 06

  Then it would have been six out of seven, but I had to discount lust. The DACC was the most, like, across, there's so many studies done showing people porn in MRI brain imaging tubes. And the DACC comes up again and again and again and again and again. But I had to discount it because it's also a brain area that deals in all sorts of conflict. And if there's one thing that you're told over and over again in the MRI tube, it's don't move, don't move, don't move. And I think that produces huge conflict when, under normal circumstances, when people are watching porn, they do move a certain part of their body. You catch my drift?

• 1:16:35Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:16:36Speaker 06

  But to not be able to touch yourself when you're watching porn might be the thing that was causing the ACC, not the porn in and of itself.

• 1:16:43Chris Williamson?

  The, the, the pain of having to withhold your, uh, hands from touching yourself.

• 1:16:51Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, which isn't really what the-

• 1:16:53Chris Williamson?

  That's not the, yeah, you can't isolate it, right?

• 1:16:55Speaker 06

  I guess, actually now I'm reflecting on it again, you could say that that's involved in the urge of doing something you know you shouldn't, it's just in the case of doing it for the sake of science.

• 1:17:06Chris Williamson?

  Because there's a lady watching you in an FMRI machine, that's definitely something that you know you shouldn't.

• 1:17:12Speaker 06

  I, I met, I met this guy, uh, at the Society for Neuroscience Conference about 10 years ago, who, who did some of the early FMRI studies, um, he, he's in Groningen in, in the Netherlands, and he said it was really, really hard to get radiographers to come and support that research because they thought it all sounded a bit dirty and seedy. So in the early days, it was really hard to get, because in, in that context, he wasn't showing people porn, he was getting couples to come in and do sexy time. You know, one person stays really, really still and their partner would manipulate them in the scanner, bring them to ejaculation.

• 1:17:46Chris Williamson?

  That has to be a very challenging situation. You've got one person, I mean, anyone that's ever been in an MRI machine, like-

• 1:17:55Speaker 06

  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:17:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's not, it's hardly the most sort of seductive, it's not the, the candles and the Barry White aren't, aren't quite playing, are they?

• 1:18:05Speaker 06

  No, it's not, but then I guess, something, hey?

• 1:18:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we, we, we understand that, we understand that envy is this comparison mechanism that's going on. I guess that's got to be exacerbated in a world where social media shows us a, a shop window into the best of everybody's lives.

• 1:18:23Speaker 06

  Correct. Be careful who you envy, because quite often, the people that-

• 1:18:29Speaker 06

  The others that people typically envy project success and that everything's great. But actually, behind the scenes, are they really great? You know, is life really as gravy when they're back home as when they're on the sofa, on telly, you know? Quite often, it's not the case, but we don't look into the backstory behind these people. There's loads and loads of people in the public eye who, when they, when they, when they roll out on stage, when they roll out on the, in front, in the studio, in front of the lights and the TV cameras, they put, they put on a face that just exudes success. But actually, behind the scenes, they've got a crushing, horrible existence that they carefully hide from everyone.

• 1:19:13Speaker 06

  It's not, it's not, it's not the case with everyone, but it just seems such a horrible shame that people are like, consumed with envy, wishing they could have the trappings of, let's say, this reality TV star who's just, you know, gone from nothing to having an awesome life, seemingly. If actually, behind the scenes, they, they, they wish none of it had happened because they were happier before.

• 1:19:37Chris Williamson?

  But, bro, I mean, you won't know, I'm guessing, based on the world that you come from and the sort of content that you consume, but I was on, I was the first person through the doors of season one of Love Island.

• 1:19:48Speaker 06

  No way!

• 1:19:49Chris Williamson?

  And I've done Take Me Out, I've been to Fernando's, I've seen Paddy McGinnis, all that full work. So I'm full Bluteck wanker, right? I, I, I've seen both sides of this fence and I couldn't agree more. Some of the most miserable, least fulfilled, least actualized people that I know have the most followers. Um, and there's this video that me and Dean, video guy Dean, uh, will finish very soon. It's based around this Naval Ravikant quote, right? And it says, "You cannot take part of someone's life, you have to take the whole." We look at people and we presume that we can pick apart certain elements, certain characteristics of either their life or their success or their makeup and have them piecemeal.

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  You don't get to have it piecemeal. This isn't a fucking buffet. This is all or nothing. You look at Elon Musk and you think he's so successful. He's got this amazing work ethic. He's like PayPal mafia billionaire, super fucking genius Tony Stark guy. But you don't know what Elon Musk's relationship with his body is like, what he thinks when he looks at himself in the mirror. You don't know the thoughts that go through his head. When he, when he hits a pillow on a night time for three hours this night, you don't know if he can't ever speak to his father because he's destroyed his relationship with his father. It's like, what is the price of being Elon Musk? Like, are you prepared to pay that price to be Elon Musk?

• 1:21:10Speaker 06

  I think you're bang on the money.

• 1:21:11Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the time, man, I, I don't think that people are. And this is, be careful who you envy is a lovely way to phrase it, man. And, you know,

• 1:21:20Speaker 06

  Can I rephrase it? Because it's like, you, you can't help when the envy kicks in. It's a bit like luck. Yeah, you can't, you, you like, you either feel envious or you don't, you, you don't summon it. It just comes, right? It's a, it's a, it's a natural emotion. It's, it's one of, one of the natural human emotions. But once it has arisen, I think it's important to evaluate whether or not that person is worthy of your envy. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't want people to feel, oh God, I've got to stop envying that mate from school is really rich and that mate from school has got an awesome relationship and is constantly posting brilliant stuff on social media. Like, like, don't, don't beat yourself up for feeling the envy, but examine the likely cause of that envy

• 1:22:03Speaker 06

  and compare that to the realities. Like, do some research, find out, is it, like, I remember being blown away when one of my female friends says, oh, I always know when my friends are having a crisis in their relationships because they post amazing photos of, look where my husband took me. Look at the wonderful meal we're having. Look at the incredible view. But like, I always knew there was something funny about that. But I didn't realise that some people use it as a diagnostic tool to work out when to pick up the phone and, and, and, and be in it.

• 1:22:33Chris Williamson?

  Hayley, is everything okay? I've seen a lot of coupley photos over the last couple of weeks.

• 1:22:38Speaker 06

  And I was like, oh my God, that's incredible reverse psychology. Like, that's brilliant.

• 1:22:42Chris Williamson?

  That's clever.

• 1:22:43Speaker 06

  It blew me away. Cause I remember thinking, when I see that stuff, I always think, Why do you need to do that? Like, I also find myself doing something awesome and thinking, "Oh, maybe I'll take a photo of this and put something up on social media for the first time in three months." And then I think, "No, I don't want to make other people feel envious of the, like, one month in the last three years when I've done something really great."

• 1:23:03Chris Williamson?

  When I've looked cool. Yeah, exactly. But the bizarre thing of that is that envy, causing envy, inducing envy in other people, is a signaling technique that allows you to reaffirm your position in the dominance hierarchy, right?

• 1:23:20Speaker 06

  I thought of that, it's true.

• 1:23:22Chris Williamson?

  Unfortunately, you need to play the game. I keep on talking about this all the time. Like, I love conversations like this, doing my podcast. I absolutely adore it. But I'm gonna keep thirst trapping the shit out of people on my Instagram for as long as I've got abs and a jawline. Like, I'm gonna keep on doing that because I'm gonna play the game. And if, if that is slightly less virtuous, it's like, okay, but there's only so much that you can hate the player, right? Like, these are the rules that have been set. And if the end result is that I gain X number of thousand followers per year, which I can then drive to a project which I absolutely adore and love.

• 1:24:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. Play in the game in order to realise, um, uh, greater, greater benefits in the long run.

• 1:24:10Chris Williamson?

  I hope so.

• 1:24:10Speaker 06

  Short-term, nasty behaviour for long-term good behaviour.

• 1:24:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, but then maybe I'm just fucking pulse-talking the shit out of it and I'm just full of bollocks.

• 1:24:19Speaker 06

  Chris, I know exactly what you mean. I know exactly what you mean. And I, I've probably gone the other way. By not playing the game, I've probably undersold myself.

• 1:24:26Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:27Speaker 06

  Like, my worst nightmare when I started presenting TV stuff, I've presented half a dozen shows over, over, over a decade. BBC, Sky, Discovery, Science, TLC, I even did some stuff on MTV. Like, I've done loads and loads of stuff. But my absolute worst nightmare was, I really hope I don't become, like, recognisable in the street because I, I enjoy my privacy and I, and I, I've seen the pain in celebrities' eyes when... People come up and ask them for autographs. I say, oh god, here we go again. I can't go anywhere without being bothered by people like that. That's my worst nightmare. But in not playing the game a little bit and not trying to raise my profile, it's got to the point where the BBC don't call me to present the brain stuff.

• 1:25:07Speaker 06

  They call Michael Mosley and they call the Van Tolken Twins. I think they're all great, but I am not getting the calls.

• 1:25:14Chris Williamson?

  Not playing that game.

• 1:25:15Speaker 06

  I've made my peace with it because I write books and I present at conferences, or at least I did pre-COVID. You know, I was doing okay and I felt I didn't need the fame, but by not playing the game because I'm trying to be like ridiculously virtuous. I've probably sold myself short. I haven't got as far as I could be. So I'm absolutely not judging you and I didn't mean it when I said do nice things in the short term to achieve great things in the long run. It was just shorthand.

• 1:25:41Chris Williamson?

  I know, I get it, man. But I use this example all the time. I've never had someone come out of one of my club nights and say, hey, man, I was on the the verge of despair. I was having this existential crisis. I feel alone. I feel lost. And then when I went in and I had one of those one pound Jäger bombs and heard those banging tunes, man, you know, you just really turn my life. I've never had that. But I get that now like

• 1:26:03Chris Williamson?

  three, five times a day, a DM from someone that says, bro, this, and I've got this big gallery of like a folder on my iPhotos that's like every message I've ever received. It's like hundreds of messages now, right back from two and a bit years. But the fact that like, if that's the price that I have to pay, right? If I need to pay a little bit of discomfort of perhaps being more transparent in order to then create a platform for that to happen. And the thing is, and this is something that might be interesting for you to consider is like

• 1:26:40Chris Williamson?

  if by you doing that, people come to you and they come up to you and they want your autograph or they want to get a photo with you, but they say, Jack, man, I really want to find out a little bit more about that Burns and Madlos study about the guy that did. That to me, like when someone says, dude, I'm watching episode 34 from the 10th of May. 2018 and in it, some guy watched the second and third episode back to back while he was painting his house the other day and asked why the camera was in the same position, but we changed T-shirts. Did we film it in the same night? And I was like, holy fucking shit. Like, dude, that's so cool that you watched both of the episodes and realized that I got

• 1:27:22Chris Williamson?

  everyone to take a change of clothes, but I didn't move the camera or the lamp. So you rumbled the fact that I got two episodes out of one sitting. And like, that's really fulfilling to me. Like, I love the fact that you have like, people that care about what you do, you know? So, I don't know, man, like,

• 1:27:40Speaker 06

  The thing is, so I don't, the envy was pricked when you mentioned that you get, I was anticipating you say, I get, I get three or five a week, because I was extrapolating from my one a month, if I'm lucky on Twitter. But, but, but, but my point is, um, it's, I always try and think of it in order to not think, oh, why don't more people say this? For every one person that bothers to say something nice about how one of my books really spoke to them and they felt a benefit from it. There's 999 people who thought it and didn't bother.

• 1:28:15Chris Williamson?

  Didn't do it. Man, 100%. Well, dude, you, you absolutely correct. Like, the, the silent listeners, and this again is something, I've been throwing this terminology around since the start of the year, gas your friends up. And, um, it's like, just something I saw. And it really made me think, like, there's so many times that my mates do cool stuff. I'm fortunate that I have a circle of people that just make amazing, cool things. And, um, there's so many times that I see them do cool shit. And for a long time, I wouldn't, I just wouldn't reach out. Not that I was envious, not that I just, you know, passive least resistance, like, you don't message them. And now I use that as a trigger. And it's such a good habit to get into a few things, actually. Firstly, if you ever miss your friends, the second

• 1:28:58Chris Williamson?

  that you think about missing them, text them. Text them and tell them, hey, man, hey, man, I've been thinking about you. Yeah, you know, like, I've been thinking about you, dude, like, hope that you're good. Or like, if someone releases something and you Watch half of the YouTube video, you see that they've invited you to like the new business. Bro, love that you're doing the new business, like real good, good luck. I'm super excited to see what happens. Like the more that you drill that, and if you can make it almost instinctive, like it must, some of my mates must fucking hate me because I'm just like, I'm so not needy, but overbearingly.

• 1:29:32Speaker 06

  Supported.

• 1:29:32Chris Williamson?

  In touch, yeah, at times, but I, I love it. It really, really fulfills me. And this is why I think people reaching out to their content creators. It's the virtuous good side of social media that you have a direct channel between you and the people that make the things that you enjoy consuming, right?

• 1:29:47Speaker 06

  And also you don't have other people telling you what you can and can't do in terms of your content. You get freedom to do what you feel is the right thing to do, which I think is huge. And that's what I love about podcasting and YouTube being that anyone can do it. If they're inspired to follow in your footsteps, they can, they might not end up with your level of success, but I always say, you know, there's a lovely German phrase, which is um. Der Weg ist das Ziel. The, the, the, sorry to any German speakers, that terrible pronunciation, but it means the journey is the destination. Meaning you get, you can get huge amounts of um implicit reward, sorry, intrinsic reward as opposed to extrinsic reward.

• 1:30:33Speaker 06

  From the process of doing something that you enjoy. You've said a number of times how much you enjoy doing this podcast and, and it just gives like, you're giving a lot. You're giving a platform for other people like me to say the stuff that they're excited about, but it's um.

• 1:30:49Speaker 06

  The way you described it suggests that you get implicit pleasure from having these interactions and enlightening, getting feedback from your listeners and so forth. So, but the point is it doesn't even matter if you're successful in your endeavor. If you enjoy the process of doing the endeavor, that, that hugely promotes your wellbeing. So I am, I am the proud owner of a YouTube channel that I present like every week I do something. And I, I get less than, you know, I get 10, 12, 14 viewers.

• 1:31:18Chris Williamson?

  Link in show notes below. Go and subscribe to Jack's channel now. Link will be in the show notes below. Go and, go and hustle him on his next.

• 1:31:23Speaker 06

  Great man VR. Please someone watch it. But I don't really, my mates are like, why'd you do this? And, and I'm like, because I just really love doing it. In a way, I don't really care. Like, it might be that two or three years down the line, people are like, oh, look, here's someone who's not 18 reviewing VR games. That could be cool. And it might be that, there's always the promise that it might become a success later, but I learn so much from one month to the next of doing these weekly things. Uh, like they're used to last an hour. That's bonkers. Now they're half an hour episodes. You know, I used to review multiple games in one, I now do one at a time. And I'm, and I reckon when I get to the year point, I'm gonna take them all down, re-edit them so they don't look so bloody awful.

• 1:32:06Speaker 06

  And the, and the same footage will suddenly potentially get some traction. But the point is, pursuing your hobbies. Hobbies are great because they never end. Like if you finally complete one painting, you can start the next one. If you master one instrument, there's always more music to learn. If you, or, or more instruments to learn, like. That's the stuff that we get happiness from, satisfaction and wellbeing. But it seems so normal and average and boring, like hobbies, so unexciting. But it's tremendously satisfying to pursue multiple hobbies. Because the whole point is you're not trying to get anywhere apart from forwards.

• 1:32:42Chris Williamson?

  No one talks about them anymore, you know? No one like, you don't get asked the question, what are your hobbies? Like, what, what do you do as your hobbies? It's what do you do? Um, Gary V's hustle and grind mentality. Have you got your K Swiss with the words tattooed on the bottom of them on? Like all that, all that stuff. Like, did you only sleep four hours last night? All that bullshit. Like. I do doing things for the sheer enjoyment of them, speaking as someone who only did things for commercial gain for a decade.

• 1:33:12Speaker 06

  This year, right.

• 1:33:13Chris Williamson?

  All I was bothered about was the success of the business and making money and being well regarded in a world of people who are all drunk and.

• 1:33:22Speaker 06

  What was the turnaround point? What was the moment of realisation?

• 1:33:25Chris Williamson?

  Just after, just after Love Island, man. So I went on to Love Island and spent my time. I had a borderline existential crisis just after and during Love Island. And it didn't manifest on TV. No one would be able to see what was going on. Basically, I spent my time around a bunch of people that were really the persona that I had been pretending to be for 10 years. And I was delivered a fatal dose of contrast between the person I thought I was and people who truly are that. And I realised, holy fucking shit, like that guy there, bottomless charisma, endless extroversion, like he's a lad about town and he does this, that and the other. And I realised that I'm this. I'm the person

• 1:34:06Chris Williamson?

  that the listeners have heard for the last 170, 180 episodes, 300 plus hours of me talking to all sorts of different people. This is what I want to do. I want to nourish myself, like involve my curiosity, like just satisfy my curiosity. And I would do it if no one listened. I've always said the same.

• 1:34:23Speaker 06

  And you feel better now?

• 1:34:25Chris Williamson?

  Oh dude, I'm, I'm, this is the year of, maybe not the year of transcending, but it's definitely the year of actualising. 2020 is like the year of actualising for me. Like, I've never felt mental wellbeing so much. I've never felt so fulfilled. I feel connected to the project. I feel connected to the project that I do. I'm getting, yeah, there's some reward from the audience and stuff like that. But dude, I'd do, I'd do it if no one listened, you know? And it's fixing a lot of the other things as well. It's helping me to bring other people up, even outside of the podcasting world, because I don't care about envy anymore. I'm like, oh dude, awesome. You got a new business that did super, super well. I'm, I'm, I'm going to talk to this guy that understands the neuroscience

• 1:35:07Chris Williamson?

  of the seven deadly sins this evening. I'll see you later on. Like, that's what I want to do.

• 1:35:12Speaker 06

  Because you've got your own stuff going on and you're not in direct competition.

• 1:35:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So looping it back to envy, man, that's.

• 1:35:17Speaker 06

  But can I just say, it's amazing that I never would have thought that Love Island could deliver such a positive benefit in someone's life.

• 1:35:25Chris Williamson?

  Only, only person that was catapulted into a life of virtue and integrity from Love Island.

• 1:35:30Speaker 06

  That's what I mean. It's like, it's amazing.

• 1:35:33Chris Williamson?

  I'll take that. I'll take that title. Look, we have two. We have two deadly sins remaining. We have greed. Greed first. Greed seems pretty natural.

• 1:35:43Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:35:43Chris Williamson?

  Modern capitalist society. Is it? Is it just resource acquisition gone awry? What is it?

• 1:35:49Speaker 06

  Gone bonkers. Yeah. So

• 1:35:54Speaker 06

  pure greed is pretty nasty because for the individual, this isn't even the antisocial consequences of it. But if you think of the consequences of, let's say, successful greed, no matter how much you've got, you want more. You've got this burning desire, like you've made a six-figure salary, you want your first million. You've got a million, you want tens of million. You want to be a billionaire. Like, I always think of that guy in Silicon Valley. The Three Comma Club.

• 1:36:22Chris Williamson?

  I've not watched it.

• 1:36:23Speaker 06

  Oh, mate, you've got to watch Silicon Valley. It's a very, very funny. Well, for a geek like me, it's a very funny comedy. But yeah, it's whenever people go up that pillar towards greater and greater riches. What's their instinct? To protect their wealth from other people. They end up in gated communities. They end up, you know, driving in a fat car into an underground car park so that they don't have to come across the riffraff. Like, they actively socially distance themselves from other people. They end up socializing in corridors, in environments and communities where no one really likes each other.

• 1:37:03Speaker 06

  They're just competitive over who's got more money, you know, like if you look at the plight of the super rich. There is a much higher incidence of psychological problems, psychiatric issues, because they all end up being somewhat isolated. So that's like the extreme of greed, like the absolute super rich, like you mentioned Elon Musk earlier behind the scenes. Who knows whether he's happy or sad, but.

• 1:37:26Chris Williamson?

  He's selling, sorry to interject there, he's selling all of his possessions, including all of his houses.

• 1:37:31Speaker 06

  All right.

• 1:37:31Chris Williamson?

  And everything except for a couple of cars.

• 1:37:34Speaker 06

  And what's his explanation for that?

• 1:37:36Chris Williamson?

  He thinks that possessions are an attack vector.

• 1:37:42Speaker 06

  Wow. Interesting way of phrasing it.

• 1:37:45Chris Williamson?

  Bro, his most recent, his most recent Joe Rogan, you would adore it. And I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts about why his motivations are the way they are. The particular terminology that he uses, he's obviously a man that lives in a world of mental models a lot and has multidisciplinary thinking and is probably a fucking freak savage polymath, but has this very, very particular way of looking at the world. And it sounds to me at the moment like somebody that is on his haunches, waiting for, for, for a predator to come around the corner, just a little bit. But yeah, he's selling all of his worldly possessions, which

• 1:38:26Chris Williamson?

  again is, that's just if there was ever a, a marker in the ground of the fact that someone's concerned about greed. It's like, I'm so, I'm so eaten up by the concern of greed that I have to do the thing that is the complete antithesis of greed.

• 1:38:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, right. Well, no, I mean, maybe he's just pursued the, the, you know, the world tells us that the more material, you know, advertising tells us the more material goods you can afford, the happier you are. Look at the people you're hanging, all the beautiful people we hang out with, the amazing places you'll be going to, money's the best thing in the world. But like, actually, money, look at, look at your average lottery winner. They end up falling out with everyone in their life because everyone, quite understandably goes, thinks to themselves, well, you used, you used to not have a pot to piss in, now you've got shitloads. Can you lend me a grand? Well, could you give me a grand? Like, you've got a million, could you give me a grand? It's not a lot of money. That's not an unreasonable proposition, but the person on the receiving end of that request is probably going to

• 1:39:27Speaker 06

  say to themselves, well, well, hang on, would you do that for me? No, no, hang on, wait. And it just always, it becomes about the money. Like, if you look at people who've been greedy and managed to accrue lots of resources, their kids end up fighting over the inheritance, you know, like families fall out over money, money, sort of excesses of money are crazy. And then I always think of that, that, Economic study that showed the relationship between salary and happiness levels, like your overall contentment with life. And there is, of course, there is a relationship between income and happiness when when you're low down on the scale. Because if you don't have enough money to get the basic necessities of life, a roof over your head, food in your belly, being able to live in an area where you feel safe and secure, you know.

• 1:40:11Speaker 06

  If you can double your salary, which means you can move to a better area and you can make sure that you have good, healthy food to eat, you know. It will, earning more money will, you know, like a little, a modicum of greed, as always, a little bit can benefit you. Because it can motivate you to do more, to work harder, to fight against sloth, to actually get something done, earn more money and pull yourself up. But beyond a certain point, this endless pursuit of more is is the antithesis of reaching a point of contentment and satisfaction. Like, there's an argument that humans aren't designed to be happy for longer than a few minutes, a few hours, a few days at a time, and then we go back to feeling just normal, right?

• 1:40:53Speaker 06

  No one is perpetually happy, apart from maybe that bloke you mentioned on Love Island. But yeah, so

• 1:41:01Speaker 06

  pursuing more ad infinitum doesn't make anyone happy. It can look like it from the outside relatively, but actually with money comes responsibility. Once you've got something that you could lose, then the anxiety, the baggage of shit, what happens if I lose this? It's it's great, I think, to be slowly incrementally on the way up. But you never want to go down again, you know, that's crushing. So if you, I I I have nothing but sympathy for people who go from nothing to absolute vast riches and notoriety. Because once you reach a pinnacle, the only way is down and you live your whole life worrying.

• 1:41:45Speaker 06

  Then, and and then even if you are happy and you manage to maintain it, when you have a down day, how do you explain that? You've got all the money, you live in a great place, you've got, you know, you've bought all the great things. You could, you could, how how do you deal with the fact that you're feeling miserable for no reason at all? If you if you're living a normal life, then it can sit more comfortably. The acceptance of the inevitability of sometimes feeling glum for no particular reason, it's just easier to accept. If you're not. In possession of all the things that society tells you guarantees endless happiness. Like, it's just, it's just insane. Like, I, I look at the people around me, like, some of my mates are super rich, self-made people.

• 1:42:29Speaker 06

  Some of them don't have a pot to piss in, but are doing something with their life that they enjoy. There, there is no rhyme or reason, like, there's no one set, one, like, some of them are happy and others are hap-. No, there's no, the riches don't make them happy. The, the riches, rich people can be happy, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that, like, greed guarantees that you'll be unhappy, but greed neither guarantees nor, you know, in, in either words, towards or against ultimately feeling content and happy in your life beyond a certain threshold. Um, if you're living a humble existence, but you enjoy what you do and you feel like what you're doing is, is worthwhile and it's satisfying.

• 1:43:11Speaker 06

  That's like the pot of gold that really counts.

• 1:43:15Chris Williamson?

  I get it, man. Being rich won't make you happy, but being poor can make you miserable. That's the, the dichotomy that I was taught by Morgan Housel, who's a, a finance expert who's been on the podcast twice. And he, he identified wealth as being able to do what you want with who you want for as long as you want, when you want, with no one being able to tell you otherwise. Everything over and above that is more money, more problems, as far as I'm concerned.

• 1:43:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:43:42Chris Williamson?

  I've just realised that I totally jumped over sloth, so we're going to learn about sloth. Why are we, why are we lazy or apathetic? Is it just that we're trying to reduce our caloric expenditure? Is it just fitness enhancing again from our evolutionary heritage or what's going on?

• 1:43:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, um, sloth is, in moderation, is really useful. If, if you look at people who are overly motivated, they let their levels of stress burn so high that they end up burning out. You know, um, they have, they don't, some people won't stop until their, their bodies are literally incapable of continuing and they make themselves very, very ill, so. A little bit of laziness each day helps to sort of clear the mind, getting you ready for the next bit. A little bit of laziness each week, at the weekend, having a lazy Sunday, it's good for you. You, you need a day of rest, you know, the human biology, body and brain, needs to take rest. We can't perpet- although, like, try turning that to a teenager or someone in their twenties, like, when you've got seemingly perpetual energy.

• 1:44:42Speaker 06

  But if you continue that kind of ener- hyper energetic behaviour through your thirties and forties and fifties, you simply wear yourself out earlier than you would do otherwise. It's really important to, uh, not every time you go on holiday, pack as much in as humanly possible. In terms of stress control, there is nothing better for the, i- i- in terms of doing some deep cleaning and maintenance and repair in your brain than having completely dull as dishware, a boring holiday. Boring is cleansing. Boring is cleansing, because if you're bo- so if, bo- boredom is the absence of stimulation. And stimulation requires energy to process. Yep, okay. So, so what I'm saying, I'm not saying every time you go on holiday, do nothing.

• 1:45:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. I'm saying beware every day's holiday you get, packing as much as humanly possible into it. It's important to give yourself downtime, in the short term, day to day, in the long term, year to year. And there's different levels of deep cleaning that can take place when you take a ten minute break before you start another round of work, uh, in any given day, and where one of your four weeks holiday a year, you just do nothing. It's, it's, it's cleansing, it's good, it's healthy. The extreme of sloth, when you never pull your weight, what, why should you get paid the same as everyone else if you do half the work everyone else does? Back in prehistory, why should you get a fair share of the spoils?

• 1:46:09Speaker 06

  You didn't come and hunt this food, you didn't go out gathering, you, you do nothing around the house, why should you? Obviously, these are the kind of accusations that are typically levelled at teenagers. And a teenager's brain is halfway between immature child brain and a fully mature adult brain. They're flip flacking between the two. They don't count. I'm talking about adults here. Lazy teenagers aren't sinful. There's a reason they sleep for hours and hours and hours. Their brain development needs them to sleep 10 hours, 11 hours, 12 hours.

• 1:46:38Chris Williamson?

  Are you hearing this, all of the parents out there?

• 1:46:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, let them off. Teenagers, they learn better if they're allowed in the schools that allow them to start school an hour later. Their scholarship goes up. Not hugely, but incrementally. Everyone does a little bit better. But yeah, it's logistically tricky to have one set of school hours for the younger kids and another set for the others. So there's a lot of teachers out there probably going, "Bah, I spend enough time at school. You don't want to be there an hour later."

• 1:47:11Chris Williamson?

  Dude, have you read, have you read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker?

• 1:47:17Speaker 06

  Yes, I have. Love that.

• 1:47:18Chris Williamson?

  Did you see the study that he done in there about the reduction in car crashes they'd done by doing the same thing?

• 1:47:24Speaker 06

  That bit of micro sleeps scared the living hell out of me. I hadn't thought of that, that when you're, when you have a micro sleep, it might be very, very brief, like half a second, but you are completely unconscious during that time.

• 1:47:37Chris Williamson?

  Atoms junction.

• 1:47:38Speaker 06

  I hadn't, yeah, right. When the light turns red.

• 1:47:41Chris Williamson?

  I think I've just lost your video, bro.

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:47:44Chris Williamson?

  Have you turned your video off?

• 1:47:45Speaker 06

  There you go. I don't know why it switched off.

• 1:47:48Chris Williamson?

  There you go. Hi again. So, yes, okay. Sloth, chilling out. We need to not have too much because then we're getting dragged along by everybody else, but we need to ensure that we have some. I know there's a lot of people listening that are type A's, go-getters. I'm one of them. I've had mini breakdowns, millions and millions and millions of times, where I just presume that I can up-regulate my productivity and down-regulate my sleep to fit in however much work is that I need to do. And really that. The only reason that that's not seen as the vice is that the only person you end up really hurting in that situation is yourself.

• 1:48:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:48:27Chris Williamson?

  But it is.

• 1:48:29Speaker 06

  But also if you're supporting other people, like quite often, you know, the benefits of sloth should be focused upon by those whose sort of chief aim in life is to help others, whether it's teachers teaching their kids or carers caring for people or whatever, supporting other people. If you don't give yourself the opportunity to recover with a little bit of downtime, then you can't be as good a person when you're trying to support others, whether it's in the context of a relationship, a personal relationship or a working relationship. You need to get those eight hours as often as you possibly can in order to be the best version of yourself when you, when you get back into the fray the following day.

• 1:49:07Chris Williamson?

  Man, Aubrey Marcus on this podcast dropped the bomb of all bombs where he said, you do not serve others from your cup, you serve others from the saucer which overflows around your cup.

• 1:49:20Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 1:49:20Chris Williamson?

  Absolute like knee slapper and it's true, it's true. If you don't look after self-care, you can't be everything that you need to be to those around you. Same reason why when you're in a plane crash, when you have the oxygen decompression.

• 1:49:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, put your one on first before you put the kid.

• 1:49:35Chris Williamson?

  Put your one on before you try and help someone else because if you're suffocating, you're of no use to anyone else. Final thing, final round, wrath. Is it the most immediately damaging sin that we've got?

• 1:49:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, immediately damaging. Um, yeah, I suppose it is. Um, we're all entitled, again, modicum of wrath. We're all entitled to feel angry. It's, it's a perfectly natural.

• 1:49:59Chris Williamson?

  Why is a modicum of wrath? Why is a modicum good?

• 1:50:03Speaker 06

  Well, as in if every time you get angry, frustrated, you feel that aggression, you beat yourself up for doing it, like that's, that's, that's not, that's not right. So for example, if other people are taking advantage of you physically, mentally, you have a right to verbally push them back if they're being physically abusive, you know, it's embedded in the law. The, an eye for an eye is all about. Your comeback, if someone attacks you, your comeback needs to be equivalent. You know, you can't go, if someone prods you on the shoulder, you can't punch him in the face. If someone punches you in the face, you can't shoot them with a gun. That's all eye for an eye means, right?

• 1:50:44Speaker 06

  Um, it's about whatever, whatever ill has been done towards you. You need to be measured in your response. You can't be disproportionate in your response. If you are, you're gonna go to prison. If you're proportionate in your response, then you might not go to prison. You know what I mean? Like i- i- in the case of a violent conflict. Um, so we all have a right to get angry with other people when they're mucking us about. But we don't have a right or, or, or to physically repel people who are physically aggravating us. Within reason, we have a right to do that. It's just when aggression is given free rein, obviously. Like the drunk guy coming and harassing me at Speaker's Corner. Like he was aggressively abusing me.

• 1:51:30Speaker 06

  And I had a right to furtherly abuse him back. I wasn't proud of it because I was trying not to, but I had a right to do that.

• 1:51:39Speaker 06

  Because you, you know, verbal, it's basic aggression can be like a verbal, a physical discouragement from further aggravation. But, but when it's, the, the problem is, again, just going back to that DACC area, the Dorsa Anterior Cingulate Cortex. I love the study that showed this brain area kicking in in the context of Roth. Because uh, they got people wired up with electrodes so that they could deliver electric shocks to each other inside the scanner.

• 1:52:10Speaker 06

  And they've got a dial and they can crank up the voltage of how much pain they're delivering through that electric shock. And they found that in a tit for tat exchange where one person zaps and go, ow! That hurt. And then you zap him back, it's like, ow, that was much harder than the one I gave you, you know? And you go, it escalates as it always does in these tit for tat retaliation. Up and up and up and up and up. They found that the DACC brain area kicks in, in a manner that was positively correlated to how much they cranked up that voltage. So the the the feeling of inner turmoil of pain drove the amount of revenge they wanted

• 1:52:51Speaker 06

  to get. And it's it's when you kind of get into the realms of people fantasizing about the retribution that they're going to take, the revenge they're going to exact to punish someone for a perceived wrongdoing, that's when it starts getting dark. That's when people start getting murdered. That's when people start, you know, maybe an individual, maybe loads of them. And it doesn't even have to be causing another person's death. It could just be causing horrible traumatic injury to someone else on the basis sometimes of just, you know, wounded pride.

• 1:53:24Chris Williamson?

  All of us have been in that situation, man, like in my least gracious moments, you know, when you think about what you would have said or could have said or would have to, ah, right, well, if he, if they say, man, like, and the cathartic pleasure that you take from imagining the thing, like, dude, there's, there's Facebook debates from a decade ago that I still rue not writing the response that I think I should have said.

• 1:53:57Speaker 06

  That would have been good, but never, never type angry. At least you honored that particular guidance.

• 1:54:02Chris Williamson?

  Maybe. I think I might have just not had, had enough caffeine in me. So I couldn't reach the level of like vitriol that I was trying to get. I wonder whether that was, I was restricted by my blood caffeine content rather than by virtue. I couldn't believe, this is a stat that you dropped, 90% of all murders are committed by men. Does this show that most aggression is biologically rooted rather than socialized?

• 1:54:30Speaker 06

  Um, it's impossible to know for sure because.

• 1:54:35Chris Williamson?

  Boys are socialized different to girls.

• 1:54:38Speaker 06

  There you go. But like, you know, and there are conditions where females have, you know, very, very, very high levels of testosterone, for other reasons, like women have testosterone too, right? It's just that men produce this extra payload in their gonads. Some women can biologically produce an equivalent of a male level of testosterone, and they are as aggressive as men are.

• 1:55:03Chris Williamson?

  Testosterone's the aggression drug then?

• 1:55:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, so testosterone drives the bodily changes of male sexual characteristics, but it's also involved certainly in aggression. It's just, it's a bit tricky because if you, like, one study they did was looking at people who were taking testosterone as an anabolic steroid, and, you know, were they more aggressive than others? And it, it's just never a clear cut answer. It would be really nice to go, yeah, testosterone's to blame. But testosterone maybe promotes aggression, but then there are other brain areas that can rein it in to more reasonable levels.

• 1:55:44Speaker 06

  And so it's always an interplay between the drive building up, becoming greater and greater, and then other brain areas that are putting the brakes on those fundamental drives. And is it because there's too much drive? Or is it because there's too much lack of the ability to apply the brakes? And it's just not as clear cut as you'd like. One study will say, yeah, it's all about the testosterone that makes men so aggressive. And then other studies will go, no, it's going to have to do with the testosterone, it's something else entirely. So it's just hard to give a clear cut explanation.

• 1:56:16Chris Williamson?

  That's an interesting one, man. Right, my final question to you, which I haven't prepped you for, so sorry about this, is, is there something missing from the seven deadly sins? And if there is, what do you think would rank at number eight? Or perhaps what could be a contender?

• 1:56:34Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:56:35Chris Williamson?

  To add in there? Did you consider this?

• 1:56:37Speaker 06

  No, no, because I was happy to learn from ancient wisdom. I didn't really.

• 1:56:42Chris Williamson?

  Think about upgrading the sages of our day.

• 1:56:46Speaker 06

  I was just so delighted that the science had actually tallied with the religious kind of beliefs that, I really didn't, I was hoping for it, but I wasn't banking on it. But I didn't really, I didn't really go beyond. I was thinking, what can people do with this? If there was.

• 1:57:07Speaker 06

  Who am I to go beyond the greatest thinkers of mankind's history? Because it's not just Christianity that came up with these seven things. So many other religions have pointed the finger at pride. Excessive pride, excessive aggression, excessive envy. It's just these are universally recognised as antisocial forces. So is there an eighth antisocial force that isn't captured by them?

• 1:57:34Chris Williamson?

  I'm just asking you to try and undo 3,000 years of work and then perhaps build on it in the space of 15 seconds live on a podcast.

• 1:57:44Speaker 06

  I like a challenge.

• 1:57:45Chris Williamson?

  No small feat.

• 1:57:47Speaker 06

  The problem is, I reckon anything I say, you'd be able to argue that it's a combination of those seven, almost axiomatic, slightly problematic tribes. Because I was thinking along the lines of now we've got this new player, technology. You know, this overconsumption of technology is in play and...

• 1:58:08Chris Williamson?

  Like a gluttony of information almost.

• 1:58:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, and also there's so much. So for example, there's a few things on that topic that are pertinent here. Like if you know that the information you've just looked up is up there on the internet and you can go back and look at it any time, you won't remember what you read a day later. Like people's memories are rubbish. We don't retain information anymore because of the context where we know we can just look it up. I think how many conversations are ruined by everyone like, oh, I wonder if the... It used to be that you can spend half an hour discussing the likelihood of whether it's this or that, or what is the explanation for that? You know, why do they call it a pot to piss in? You could spend ages trying to work it out.

• 1:58:54Speaker 06

  Now you just go online and go, oh, it's because people used to sell their wee if they were really poor and if you didn't have a pot, you couldn't even sell your urine, you know? Like... You just, you can just look it up now. But then quite often, people look it up. And then a month later, the same thing comes up. Oh, yeah, I knew the answer to that. And they can't remember what. Which I don't think is good for the individual or for the masses. It's things like, if you, people that are always looking at their phone, they're not so good at empathy. Like, any task that involves empathy, if you're not looking at someone's face and body language, you're not really absorbing the cues that are emanating from them that give you the subtext of how they're really feeling about what's being discussed. If everyone's head down, looking at their screen, they are by definition not looking at other people's faces.

• 1:59:39Speaker 06

  And you need to look at people in order to take in that body language, to run it through the empathy circuits. Um, so there's a bit, and this is all early evidence, but I feel like the seventh, the eighth deadly sin would be along the lines of technology delivers clear benefits, you know? Labor saving, enlightening. You know, this technology, your listeners, you are using technology to communicate with me across the vast, you're up in Newcastle, right? Across the length of a country, opposite ends of a country. And then, and then you're packaging it, and then you're digitally street, you know, giving it to people all over the world. Without technology, our, our knowledge would be vastly, vastly limited.

• 2:00:24Speaker 06

  But too, like a, an, an, an ill-disciplined consumption of technology, never asking yourself how much is too much? Of, like, is social media, on average, making me happier after I've used it? Or sadder? Am I starting to feel less motivated? Am I, am I starting to feel deflated every time I look at it? Because it's such a source of envy, malicious, negative envy. Because everyone's falsely showing their, their, their, their, their showreel of the best things in their life and completely ignoring the negatives. Creating this false perception of how great everyone else's lives are compared to our own. So, so, yeah.

• 2:01:03Speaker 06

  The excessive use of technology to the detriment of your, of the interests of your wellbeing.

• 2:01:10Chris Williamson?

  That's the new gateway.

• 2:01:12Speaker 06

  That would be my eighth deadly sin of the modern age.

• 2:01:15Chris Williamson?

  I think that's a really good shout, man. Whatever the, I'm trying to think of the word that is the opposite of boredom or a fear of boredom. A fear of being alone without the input of other minds or information.

• 2:01:28Speaker 06

  I mean, the thing is bad. I don't want to leave, I don't want to leave your listeners with the idea that boredom is bad. Boredom is great.

• 2:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, dude.

• 2:01:37Speaker 06

  Because, because into the boredom, into continuous boredom, the human brain hates it. And into that vacuum, crazy ideas, but like the crazier, positively like eccentric, unusual things. The notions about what might be fun to do to ease that boredom. Like without boredom, a lot of the greatest human strokes of insight would never have come because you need to quieten a mind sufficiently to hear those ideas bubbling up from your subconscious brain processes. If you're constantly consuming stuff, you're never, you're never quietening your brain enough to hear what's, what's gently bubbling up to the surface of your consciousness.

• 2:02:20Speaker 06

  Cause there's music and conversation and, you know, like internet and TV and films and consumption Netflix. Tick five, four, three, two, one, next episode, next episode, next episode. Just give in. Give in to the torrent. No, switch it off for a whole day, bore yourself to death and then see what emerges. See what weird things you decide to go and do. Not all of which will be great, but a few of them will change your life. So, sorry, the antithesis to boredom, I would say is being incredibly stimulated by the outside world.

• 2:02:54Chris Williamson?

  And a desire for that is perhaps somewhere in amongst this new eighth sin that we've got. Look, Jack, man, we.

• 2:03:01Speaker 06

  Thanks, man. You, you helped me have an original thought, maybe.

• 2:03:04Chris Williamson?

  We did, we did a thing, me and you did a thing. And if you do a sequel and it's the, the eighth sin, I'm, I'm a do, you know, like how Robert Greene did that, like the 50th law and, and 50 cent came in. And it was just like purely all Robert Greene and then 50 cents just like, yo, what's up in the club? And then. That's me. I'm the, I'm the guy that just gets his name on the book because, because I'm a famous rapper. But uh, look dude, uh, tell us, tell the listeners YouTube channel, Twitter, where, where do they go? Link to buy the science of sin. I highly recommend that you go and get it. It's really cool. There's so much stuff that we didn't go into and it will be available in the show notes below via Amazon and all other booksellers.

• 2:03:49Chris Williamson?

  But what else? Where, where else should people go?

• 2:03:51Speaker 06

  On Twitter at DR Jack Lewis, at Dr Jack Lewis. Uh, what else? Oh, my website. Um, www dot Dr Jack dot co dot U K, D R J A C K dot co dot U K. I write a, a blog every month. I've been doing that for over a decade. So there's a lot of stuff there. Um, what else? Oh yeah. My, my silly little YouTube channel, which I love doing, even though.

• 2:04:16Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna go check it out, man. I'm gonna go.

• 2:04:18Speaker 06

  It's called Brain Man VR. And if you're in, I think that virtual reality has, even though it's been around 40 years, it hasn't even scratched the surface of its potential. Um, I think virtual reality is so good. I spend half the time in my, in my YouTube channel saying, don't overdo it. This has got such huge potential to be addictive, but I don't want you to lose interest in the real world. Cause when I first started doing it, right? Some people, when they do VR, they don't use a good headset and they write off VR saying it's not as, you know, it's all hyped up. It's rubbish.

• 2:04:53Chris Williamson?

  I've only used an Oculus Go.

• 2:04:56Speaker 06

  Right. Rubbish. When you use a high-end one, the experiences that can be offered are so different.

• 2:05:02Chris Williamson?

  What's the, what's the spec of whatever you're rolling with at the moment?

• 2:05:05Speaker 06

  I, I, I got before they even launched it, I bought myself an HTC Vive. Um, so much, so it's, it's, it's almost obsolete now. I've had it for four years, but it's, it's one of these ones where you're tethered to a powerful graphics PC. You know, you need that graphics power to update what your eyes are seeing enough so that when you look around, it shows your eyes exactly what you would see if you were in that virtual world. But the thing is, it's like, it transcends games and experiences and documentary and, um, like it's.

• 2:05:39Speaker 06

  And it's only limited by human imagination. But every day, I think, when Covid happened, I turned Beat Saber, where you're sort of slashing, you're using lightsabers to hit boxes that fly at you through the air. I made my own version of it called Covid Slasher. And it was like, in the week that they saw what Covid looked like, they released an image of what Covid looked like. I modeled it and had it so that you're cutting in half all these Covid viruses that are coming towards you from all directions. And it was sort of, it was so cathartic because there was nothing else to do. You felt a bit helpless, like what can you do? There's nothing you can do. You just have to wait for scientists to do their wonderful work over the course of years and make the bloody vaccine.

• 2:06:22Speaker 06

  And in the meantime, you might as well just get your frustration out. And it was great.

• 2:06:28Chris Williamson?

  Slash some Covid.

• 2:06:29Speaker 06

  I woke up in the morning with a crazy idea because I was bored. And by the morning of the next day, I'd made it.

• 2:06:35Chris Williamson?

  It's a virtual world that you can now inhabit.

• 2:06:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, and that's just copying other people's games. Like, there's loads of things that you can do in VR, which are basically taking a concept that's been done over and over again in other world, in other media, whether it's flat screen, computer gaming, or cinema, or whatever, and then just redoing it in a 3D environment. It's rubbish. There's loads of stuff that you can do that's completely unique to VR, that you can only do in VR. And so that's why I'm sort of, well, ultimately, what I'm going to do is build VR things, which are really fun games to play. But secretly, I mean, your listeners will know, you know, and I know, but I'm not going to advertise it. In the background, it's going to be improving your cognitive capabilities.

• 2:07:18Speaker 06

  Because there's so many games out there that people pour loads of time into, that has no potential to improve their brain power. And it's just a matter of designing the game right to actually improve people's attention, working memory, decision making, multitasking capabilities, blah, blah, blah. I'm just going to have it all built in. And then the dream is, measure people's capacities covertly as they start playing the game. Measure them again a year, a month later, a year later. Hopefully, they'll keep playing, keep playing. And then just show them retrospectively, your working memory has improved by four or five points. Your attention span has increased from 30 seconds to, you know, like, and just show them, it's a good thing you played this game because now your brain's better.

• 2:07:59Chris Williamson?

  Bro.

• 2:07:59Speaker 06

  That's the dream.

• 2:08:01Chris Williamson?

  That is so cool. I mean, the... Oculus Go that I got was off an X misses and then we split up and I sold it. So there's no danger of me going back to one that's that's super lame. But that sounds that sounds awesome. I don't know whether you know Paul Stamets, the guy that does a lot of stuff into like my mycology is like a big mushroom supplementation, also psychedelics, but not just that, like lion's mane and all manner of mad shit. And he did a similar thing with a dosing, a micro dosing protocol. And you were to do, take an app and do like finger tapping, the speed of your finger tapping and other, other, other like micro movements and other bits and pieces. And they tracked it through this quantified self app.

• 2:08:46Chris Williamson?

  So that's kind of like a more upfront version and probably a lot less fun, like just tapping away, although micro dosing, micro dosing and then going into VR, I mean, that's, no one needs to do that. There's enough, there's enough going on already.

• 2:08:59Speaker 06

  It's funny you should say that because like I'm super excited. I finally got it set up that I listened to a podcast that talks a lot about latest developments in VR and this bloke in some cabin in the middle of Nova in Canada spent the last six years creating what he calls a technadelic. It's a VR experience that can simulate a psychedelic experience with the idea that psychedelic experiences sometimes can go badly, but quite often can give people new, fresh perspectives on things in their life that, that they maintain that healthier perspective long after the drug has left their system, you know? And he wants to create the same thing using, using light and sound and to try and simulate

• 2:09:41Speaker 06

  those trippy experiences in order to hopefully give people the positive impacts on their wellbeing, but without the danger of their psyche.

• 2:09:50Chris Williamson?

  That's so cool.

• 2:09:51Speaker 06

  So I'm literally gonna get stuck into that as soon as I get off here and then I'll report back.

• 2:09:56Chris Williamson?

  I look forward to it. Look, Jack, man, this is one of the longest episodes I have done in a while, but I've absolutely loved it. And there's still so much that I could go into. So

• 2:10:06Speaker 06

  It's been a pleasure. Well, having met you, I'm now going to listen to your podcasts from beginning to end.

• 2:10:10Chris Williamson?

  Oh, dude. Well, if you notice the fact that the camera angle doesn't change, but that we swap T-shirts between episode life hacks 101 and life hacks 102, then you'll know exactly now. And so, so does everyone else. Look, listen, like, share and subscribe. You already know what to do. All the links to everything that we've gone through. Jack's cool YouTube channel where he does stuff on VR and the book, The Fantastic Science of Sin will be linked below. But for now, Jack, man, thank you so much.

• 2:10:35Speaker 06

  Good to meet you, bro.

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 2:11:05Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death. That's what.

• 2:11:09Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 2:11:13Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and under 18 without parent.