Modern Wisdom - #182 - Dr Jack Lewis - The Neuroscience Of The 7 Deadly Sins

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

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 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 - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 is 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. Do you need to give a tiny warning that there is a little bit of discussion with

regards to pedophilia 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 runaway 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 the side swipe you into a world where your entire life has been upgraded. That's right, this Monday, the ultimate life-axleist 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 at Chris WillX to find out how you can get your copy of the ultimate life-axleist. X to find out how you can get your copy of the Ultimate Life Act's list. But for now, it's time to learn about the science of sin with the wise and wonderful Dr. Jack Lewis. We're talking about sin today, all the sins. How are you sinful today, you feeling sinful? No, 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. How sinful can you be during a pandemic you know? Yeah I mean if you take the drop-in

A and E visits, it's just you can't even hurt yourself if you stay indoors. They put those little foam cups on all the sharp edges in your house. Exactly. And you make sure that you take the steps carefully, that's it. And particularly during the period where the DIY shops were closed, it's like, I mean, how's anyone going to chop their finger off in a bank holiday if they can't go and buy a scalpel? Limes, that's how. Putting limes for mojitos, that's how.

That's how you do it. And 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? Because we're human. Okay. No, I mean, it's just human. Oh, take it short on that. No, I mean, it's just a longer book than that. It's a slew of little pages in this.

No, you know what, I'm usually very wordy. So I, 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 that they are at its core anti-social. 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 of it's 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. But I thought, how can people still buy into this? Like, I don't know, there was so much stuff in the Bible that was sort of clearly outdated. But I thought, how can people still buy into this? Like, I realize it gives people a lot of hope and it gives them a sense of community. But the concepts of believing, like a literal interpretation of the Bible in a post-enlightenment time. It's just seen bonkers. But the more I looked into it, having sort of got my PhD in neuroscience, the scandal of brains, and sort of got much clearer on what we do and don't know in terms of human knowledge,

modern wisdom. I realized that actually there's an awful lot of stuff in those ancient books of religion, Bible and others, 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. And that's what I was sort of correcting the error of my ways. 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. Mm.

And that reminds me of a friend of mine, who'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, bedroom hundreds of years ago, it was the opposite of a place that promoted healing. And after, so she's doing a PhD in Sweden, four and a half years into a five year PhD, she realized that all of the answers had been reached by the ancient Greeks. So if only she'd been a classist

and read the right ancient Greek books, all of her, 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.

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 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 by design. But, yeah.

So. But also the fact that when you're consuming information, so rapidly that you're so eager to get onto 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 gonna move onto the next thing. But it means everyone's knowledge is superficial and rapid and people don't bother to go deeper and deeper to get a more thorough understanding. And by any way, we can't fix the whole world. No, we can explain to people about seven deadly sins today. So, what do we want to do them?

Is there some part of us that wants to do 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? Why aren't we the masters of our own behaviour? Why aren't we the masters of our own behaviour? It's partly because finding the right path in life is a balance. There's always pros and cons. There's always pluses and minuses. There's always benefits and risks. Each individual's capacity to pick a path which finds that goalie look 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 whether it worked out well or badly when you went for the risky option that

promised a high return compared to the low risk option that promised a low return. And so quite often finding that balance between giving that urge for immediate gratification a little bit of air time, but not too much, and on average, always trying to go for what's best in the long run. You can't do both. Quite often, let's say, the best example I think is gluttony, right? Because gluttony is overeating, over drinking, 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, 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 at 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-release carbs, sugary, bread-y, cakey stuff. We love fatty stuff. Of course we do. But we're not designed to eat it every day. Our metabolism can't cope with eating that stuff every day.

And then you've got the forces of advertising saying, hey, don't buy all that expensive kind of nutrition as food. It's much more affordable. Let's appeal to the cost effectiveness to get a family deal, get a bucket of fried chicken, get in the habit, get in train in the habit of eating takeaways or sort of microwaved meals every single day without fail.

Now, a little bit of that stuff is fine, but doing it every day is crazy up. So, the instinct to overeat used to say lives in that people could live for long enough to reach sexual maturity, to have sex with someone, pass their genes onto the next generation. Like by hook up by crook, every single one of your listeners, you and me, we have an 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. So those humans who didn't have that propensity to overeat, they didn't let that, you know, their ancestral line peed it out. 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 developed world at least. You know, the shops have even, even in strange times of social isolation,

the shops do run out, but there is plenty of food available. So there's very few people starving to death in the UK right now. And so that means that that whole gluttony urge is now a design floor. We're battling against it in order to sort of stay in relatively good shape. Got you. Okay, so how do you define the deadly sins? 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 pull your weight in a collective endeavor

that 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. Lust causes all sorts of havoc in that people end up having relationships outside of the person that they might have dedicated their life to.

And then once people feel betrayed, it's very hard for them to trust again. You go through every single one in moderation. We need a bit of lust, otherwise you don't pass on your genes. We need a bit of less otherwise you don't pass on your genes. We need a bit of greed so that when 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. But in excess, it makes people push us away.

It makes 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 the heart, they're kicking off and I just don't wanna be around it anymore. And what the point I just wanna quickly get to is social isolation is, they're literally deadly, the seven deadly sins, because if you're socially isolated, you die earlier and whilst you're alive,

you have a higher incidence of things like depression, anxiety disorder, personality disorders. So you die of cancers and cardiovascular disease much earlier if you're lonely. It's an all cause mortality risk, isn't it loneliness? Yes, and this has been known since 1988, right? Something was, you know, we mentioned this earlier that a lot of, we 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 FMRI brain imaging data to figure out what makes people do these things, you know, I could just, like, I glad that I went through that process, because for me personally, I'm benefiting hugely from having a clear understanding of the role

that the Seven Deadly Sins played in my 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, I'm not falling out with my friends and family and co-workers, you know, to the same degree as if I was oblivious to it all, I just carried on being selfishly narcissistic, kept taking treble extra servings and leaving other people with not enough to eat, you know, but I am quite a greedy gluttonous person and it's made me think differently about it. 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 it ourselves in regard in modern science and modern wisdom. You know, we hold that, obviously the podcast fantastic, but the actual thing on itself. And then you realize, you totally correct, just read a bit of Seneca, like Seneca and Epic T,

it's had that sort of out, mate, or whatever it might be. So what I found 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 behavior that cause people to fall out. And what that suggests is that if you were like an island, if it was just Chris or Jack, and you went through you 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? 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 realize is the degree to which friends aren't just nice to have. They are absolutely essential to our well-being. And that's not about having 500 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 are absolutely start graving bonkers. And you need your mates and your family members of the people around you to reflect back on whether the parts of what you're saying that add up and make sense in their objective you and 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 say no no no, I did I disagree with that

But that's the most useful thing someone can do it 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 are listening through the same pair of ears each day. 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, you'll think the same thing. And give you a bit more balance. 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 shaft. 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 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 have been good at philosophy but they got their anatomy. And that's immediately up to now. Yeah they needed to do a little bit of work on that didn't they? So what I'm saying is like we can't rely on ancient wisdom, but looking at it through the lens of modern science, I think you can start working out what bits to focus on and really put your weight behind and what bits just to let go, ignore it. But 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, like the Catholic guilt thing. People beat themselves up, people are hard on themselves, because the expectations of certain people in society that they're raised in hold them to such like high standards, impossibly high standards, like the concept of being able to steer clear of the seven deadly sins your whole life is poppycock because they are driven by fundamental basic human instincts. Like, you know, they're related to the very fundamental instincts that are evolving the drives for survival. So some people are going to do well at being disciplined. Some people are going to be bad 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 postponing everything for the afterlife, which may or may not exist, so why not just make

a heaven of life on earth? It's a very good argument, man. I mean, increasingly, as I get exposed to books like yours, and more revolutionary 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, but what is natural to us seems to become more and more both clear and muddy at the same time. Does that make sense?

Like, when you start to strip away ego and predisposition and the way that you've dealt with your trauma and your genetic heritage and all these sorts of stuff, when you start to strip that away, you let me 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?

And again, Sena has got this concept, which is called the virtuous mean, and it's not a vice of excess nor a vice of... Too little? Yeah, whatever, not enough. Denialism. That middle section. Middle bit, right?

That's what we're kind of touching on today. So 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. Shouldn't have. Pride, first thing, pride. Isn't pride a good thing. I want to have pride. Add some, well, shouldn't have. You should be proud of yourself. Yes, you should be proud of yourself. What about God?

Why is pride a sin? It's confusing, isn't it? You should take more pride in your work. How many times will we tell that at school? So the positive side of pride is it's a natural human emotion, kicks in your 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've been with pride because it's reinforcing. 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 behaviour. But the trouble with pride is when you take it to excess, you end up with essentially narcissism. The sin of pride, 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, me, I don't need anyone else. Being very vain, thinking that you're better than other people, pretty much everything, even in the sort of face of stark evidence of the country.

You just can't believe that you're not just brilliant at everything. So the average narcissistic person is the kind of person that's really going to rub other people up the wrong way. Like they're always drawing attention to themselves and a lot of narcissism seems to be to do with poor self-esteem and that can either come from neglectful parenting or overly attentive helicopter parenting, both of which can lead to what psychologists describe as an undifferentiated sense of self. Like so, their sense of self doesn't develop properly early on in life, 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 you like. 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. Like anyone who does something good,

I'll take responsibility for that. I'll get all the praise, even though it wasn't my idea, but I'd convince 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 just a social nightmare. So narcissistic people almost always end up alone. Even those in relationships, they choose relationships which are basically, yes, men, yes women, to constantly give that positive reinforcement. And that's not really a relationship. Relationships involved give and take.

So they're still in Ireland, even when they're in relationship. So narcissism is the queen of all the deadly sins as far as St. Gregory the Great was concerned. And he's the guy who basically invented the concept of the seven deadly sins. He took so many sins before his time in the sixth century, it was hard to keep track of all the things you shouldn't do, but he 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 going to prevent you from going to heaven in his view of the world, but I think he was bang on the money to refine the list down to a more easily manageable seven, because then we've got a fighting chance of remembering them. Like our capacity to hold information in mind is limited to around about seven items. So expecting someone, particularly hundreds of years ago, thousand years ago, to bear in mind when

they're considering, should I do this thing? Ten different commandments. It can't even read or write, but they've got 45 different commandments they've got to try and remember. But you say you're with the ten, by the time you get to the eighth commandment, you've forgotten what the first and the second one. So Christianity just had expectations that go beyond the limits of the second one. So Christianity would just have expectations that go beyond the limits of the brain's capability. So I think St Gregory smashed it by bringing it down to seven. Why did he say Queen? What does that mean? Probably because he's a massive sexist.

So I think the idea was, and I'm presuming that it was along the lines, if he could have said the King, but because Queens, from the perspective of a religious man who had devout, he's married to God, he doesn't do women, women are the temptresses who make men think about lust. You know, lust is one of the things that... I thought he said that pride was the queen. Pride? So the idea is that once pride has seduced you, you will be much more likely to full foul of the all of the dead decent. Oh, feeding greed, including gluttony.

It's the pride's the buy in, it's the on-rump. It's the gateway, the gateway vikes that leads to all the other. 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 compare 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 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 singular cortex. So 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. It's a big bundle called the corpus colosum. It's just the patch of brain tissue that's a little bit above and in front of that particular structure, DACC. And yeah, and that brain, it's 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 that they're incredibly touchy.

They're very easily offended. You know, so any amount of offense that someone in the group in their neighborhood and their family might cause them, you know, one unit of intended So one unit of intended offense causes 10 units of pain, which presumably they will then ruminate about and plot their revenge. A aggression envy and wrath to the deadly sins, I'm sure we'll chat about later, they often inspire thoughts of plotting for revenge, getting your retribution for what normally boils down to hurt crime. 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 just the epitome of the guy that's, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I did this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I did that. Carol Dwittx fixed mindset human. You know, pick the avatar that you want to talk about this. But yeah, I feel for these people, man, like, people that have access pride and a super narcissist, it makes me feel bad because I can watch their programming at play. And that's not to say I'm fucking immune. Like I watch my own programming at play as well. And I feel bad for myself, which is like 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 a, you're a cool girl or guy. You don't need to do all this. You don't have to have the show. 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? 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, but it but but as teachings that suffering is inevitable 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 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 in a turmoil. 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 a sort of a request for funding for research, who said, yeah, I'm going to study the seven deadly sins.

They'd be laughed out the room, right? I got lucky that there was enough neuroscience to work with to try and estimate what these brain areas do. But, but just bang on the money, I thought, I've got to the end of writing the book and I thought, well, what can people do with this knowledge? Like, is it, 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. This idea of the best way to deal with people who are falling foul of letting the seven deadly sin type behaviors go to the extreme and causing social chaos everywhere they go. The best way to deal with them is to be more mindful, just a think about

how much extra inner turmoil they're dealing with than the average punter. 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. For us Brits, and in fact in the world, it's the home of freedom of speech. And it's been that way since 1186, and it was sort of put into law in the 19th century, because back in the day when people were going to be hung from the neck 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 peace. It seems like a very reasonable thing to do. Anyway, so I used to go down there a lot, because I'm born in Bread London, I love Roll 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 20s, I just go round to speakers corner and have a little listen to all these usually man up on their ladders preaching away about whatever they wanted. It was invariably about religion. I remember thinking it's such a shame that all these people like that 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 And I thought it's just a shame that science doesn't get a look in. And it was there where I'd sort of listen to them, I'd go, well, 10% of what you said was bang on the money and I can learn from that. But 90% was supernatural, poppycock. It was mostly people arguing over who's religion is best. There's quite a lot of people from one faith

having arguments with people from other faiths, stress testing and going around around a circles. 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 thought people would be interested, you know, passes by. I want to hear about the scientific perspective on the seven deadly sins and it's up on YouTube. If you go to cyafsinn.com, I made these little videos, I've got a friend to film it and there's little six minute snippets of the hour talk, hour long talk, I gave. Now about 20 minutes from the end, this is like 11.30 on a Sunday, this bloke just came, sort of wandered over, like a bottle of cider in his hand,

absolutely hammered homeless guy, just shouting abuse at me, non-stop for 20 minutes. And I didn't know how to deal with him. Like I blanked him for five minutes, that didn't work. 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 hope that it was 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 50 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. And I told the story of how I had failed to be compassionate with that man, and that 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 wouldn't believe it. 10 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, it's so great to see you again. I'm really sorry for what I said last night. I threw my arms around and we gave him a hug. Now this guy is, you know, a lot of homeless people. I'm mentally ill.

There's 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 gonna stab me? 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 like, you're not an F-vinologist, you're a loony!

You know, he was good as gold. And then at the end he came up to me, as I actually listened to you this time, and I come down here to disturb these people, because I think these religious zealots and gnats, 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 come and be disruptive.

Is I now that I've listened to you, I agree with every word you said. Man, which is nice. 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 people have

got alcohol in the man, there's just no say, you're not talking to them, you're talking to the blood alcohol point one or whatever it is, that's what you're talking to, right? 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, I'm going to second man, like, why did you say that? Or 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, I know that it's just shit, but it's this thing. It's like, why didn't you just say it? Oh, well, and you can see people, the cognitive dissonance starts to fire, 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, that kind of 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 tell you what you want to hear, but people that decide to be too mean and kind of use you as a punching bag for their own kind of emotional challenges. But that's a really, really cool, sorry, I'm super glad as well that you managed to get some closure and kind of finish that loop off, because I imagine it must have felt

very satisfying also obviously. That's very empathic of me because it aids away at me. I pride myself on not being a hypocrite. I try to not be a hypocrite. And not being a dick, I'm going to guess as well. Yeah, well I try. But that kind of thing, there are other things that, like I mentioned one in the book about Roth, where this guy, I was doing some filming in Brighton and I got to the end of the line

and I was actually writing some science of sin. I was researching and writing and I had my papers every, it took ages to tidy everything up. And the train conductor went through the car, he said you gotta get off and I was like, yeah, the carriage and said, you've got to get off. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I was hiring to get my stuff, but I was basically

dithering. And he locked me in, the carriage. And then I went out 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? You saw me there.

I went absolutely mental at him. So the homeless guy, that guy, you know, literally enraged like my blood alcohol level was super high and I felt like my pride was wounded. But I spent weeks like I just kept popping into my head, examining it. Why did you react like that? Why did you do that? And I think that's one thing that this sort of new modern wisdom inspired pursuit of like, 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 and what I liked about your anecdote is it sounded like you give

Reflections to people that help them catch when they're going into set piece behaviors, 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. And I think a lot of people 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. Bro, I love trying to bring people up like that.

There's some people that, as far as I'm concerned, have just lost causes, and that's more from a time efficiency perspective. There's certain people I know that have access pride, and I'm just dude, 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 this isn't my fight, I'm leaving you to it. But also, you're not qualified to that. I'm not qualified to do that. The only people who can really help those people are ones who can go train, protect them all of the suffragette in the day. Yeah, yeah.

But 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 working out what life experiences led you to certain set piece behaviors that aren't good for you or other people, because it's not a sort of zero-sum game well-being and happiness. Like we can all together lift ourselves. It's not like one person's happiness detracts from your own. Envy-wise, if someone else seems really happy, it can emphasize your own relative lack of happiness. So quite often people don't want to be around perpetually

cheerful people for that reason. But ultimately, you need professionals to help you understand why you just keep doing things that rub people up the wrong way. Neuroscientists can't really help you. 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 40 minutes, you've got it, man. You've got enough of an overview of what makes people tick, probably from all the time you spent on the door,

dealing with 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 don't have that training, if you got that knowledge, the official training on top of your life experience, you'd literally, you know, change people, those lost causes would be found again. But make that, that's a long journey. Who am I to say? I know. So I'm good friend to the Charlotte Foxweber, 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 sessions

on themself, not that they give it. It's like, 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 that was really, really cool. Look, 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 that you're trying to be objective, but they set pieces that your unconscious plays on you will end up interfering with your ability to

help them. I love that terminology. I've never heard it before, set piece behavior. It's just I'm thinking autopilot, autopilot behavior. I don't know. 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 out, 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 set pieces,

and that's what happens when you see people who are part of this, the animus possessed, you know, they're just part of that programming as it goes. And let's look, let's get back. We have six sins remaining. Glutiny. Glutiny is up next. And we touched on it earlier on, right?

Fitness enhancing. We have, it's the only time in all of our human evolutionary history where we're in a situation. It's so funny that you say that I'm sorry, the ice cream van is literally... I think I'm not saying it. That's one... Oh god, no, that's not perfect. Go on.

If you go outside and get us a 99 flake now, I'll pause the... I hate that guy. Because literally, I think I know, I'm my sound like such a... Dick. Yeah, but whenever they come past, I think you're just there to make fat teenagers fat. 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. Oh, oh. And then it's the war and then But at least he's got the just one connetto 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 stuff of nightmares. So yeah glutney 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? Because it's really, really bad for you. If you're, so there's been 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, brainwires, sending electrical information from one end to the other, reaches a sign apps, 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

gray matter is because there's a go-fast, a rapper called Mylin, around the outside, to accelerate the speed of that electrical message 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, rapper? 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's concerned, and you compare them to the brains of people who are obese as far as their BMI's concerned. And you compare them to the brains of people who are lean as far as BMI's concern. 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 of all sorts of kind of cognitive capacities that are reduced. So this is obviously, it's lots of all sorts of kind of cognitive capacities that are reduced. So this is obviously, it's not vice from the perspective, heaven, I hell, we're getting away from that entirely. A vice 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. I love it. I've always been a sports person and since childhood I had tremendous excessive energy and that wasn't my choice. In fact it caused my parents to be like, 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 went to the 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 eating something just for 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 constant battle and it's weirdly only now, because I can't go to the GM, I can't

do anything else. It's only now by doing, 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 lost four kilos and I've got down into that healthy BMI for the first time in about 15, 20 years. So I'm not a fat basher because if I had a different metabolism, if I had an injury that prevented me from doing sufficient work, I struggle to regulate my eating, and as much as the next person, but the consequences, if you do allow yourself

to become obese in terms of your brain health are pretty serious. Bro, 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, What? Don McGregor from Social Chains said to me, and I first have a podcast, he's a big sobriety advocate, as am I. Um, elective sobriety, just for people that want more time and money and calories to spend on shit they care about. And, uh, he was like, bro, 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, yeah, hang on a fucking set. You're right. I can't I can't build anything in my body If I don't first put it on a plate or in a wrap wrap 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 Domino Domino's pizza go lectures come back Budweiser Budweiser bit of pasta probably something go out yeah yeah vodka you know anything like that's not I'm glad you mentioned in the booze here because bit of pasta, probably something go out. Yeah. vodka. You know anything like that? Yeah.

But I'm glad you mentioned in the booze here, because the word gluttony comes from the Latin gluttea, which means to gulp. So it's to over-cute a spacey. It's not just food. People folk gluttony, they always think food, food, food. No, it's drink too. And excessive consumption then. Yeah, so as it goes in through your mouth, it's gluttony.

And it's really important to remember the huge amount of sugar that is in your average can of lager 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, because it can so easily slide from a glass of wine a day into a bottle, if you've got a big mouth like me. And it takes, you have to notice that one glass is turning to 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 you don't buy it in the shop, then it can't be on your shelf to tend to you. You're with the shop. It's not in the cupboard, man. Yeah, it's the easiest way to not break your diet. Okay, the background is in the shop.

If you bring it in through the threshold of your front door, it will get in. It's going to be consumed, yeah, one form or another. You'll snort it or put it up your bum or do something where it is a cookie. My supposed free addiction is getting out of hand. Next one, lust, which was my personally in the book. That was the chapter that I found the most interesting.

It was also the one that I can imagine, triggered people the most and was the 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. 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? No, absolutely not. 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, 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 by or gay. It's just not, it's not in our control. 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 way for people to have to live. Yeah, I mean, basically, sodomy is anything that isn't having sex with the intent of making a baby.

Oh, okay. So, the way that- Any sexual activity that isn't aimed at making a baby is Sodom in the eyes of Christianity, at least the original, you know, back in the days of Christ. That would include the withdrawal method, well timed withdrawal method. Yeah, yeah. And masturbation and all sorts of things which- Everyone that's listening is a Sodomite.

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

Yeah, it is. So can you take us through the burns and Swerdlow tumour study? Can you mind what that is? There were a lot of studies. So it was the one about the married man who was having a pedophilic sexual urges. Oh sure, sure, sure.

Yes, so he's a guy who was to all intents and purposes a responsible man. He was a teacher, he held down jobs well. He was liked by, not the most popular bloke in the school, but he was a stand, you know, not the most popular bloke in the school, but he was You know stand up member of society. He started developing sexual urges towards his stepdaughter His stepdaughter mentioned this to her mother who was 14 who was 14 Quite rightly

That had a word, you know, and with the law. And he got banged up for Peter Felia because he'd made advances on his stepdaughter. He then complained of a bang and headache whilst incarcerated. And so they duly took him for a brain scan, found a mass of tuna, tumour pressing on a part of his brain. And they removed the tumer. He then claimed, said that all of his pedophilic fantasies had disappeared in no longer wish that he could still have his, you know, like when he was in prison, he still was hankering for his collection of pedophilic material. He was going after the nurses as well

or like the assistants that were in the recovery facility he was in as well. There was anyone that he was gonna make an advance that, right? Yeah, yeah. And then, so they let him out because they believed that the removal of this chamber had removed his pedophilic tendencies. So the idea was it was like disinhibition.

Like I think people who have those urges, it's not, 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 tumour grew back when he was out of prison, the peter fill, tendencies came back presumably because 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 it's so rare to have a case where the pedophilic

tendencies were switched on and offable according to the presence or absence of a tumor. That's why it's fascinating. Dude, 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 Chema pressing on the area of the brain, which used to do with aggression.

And he just felt this like unrelenting aggression. But 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 brings up, there's a big section in the book about a pedophilia which I think is a fascinating topic. In ever since I was seeing a girl at uni and one of her housemates went to go and give a talk, a lecture theater, saying 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? And ever since then, I've been for stuff like this absolutely fascinates me the thought of how do we think about it philosophically? How do we see it societally, you know?

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 pedophiles 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, that 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 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 pedophile, 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? You invariably know. If you bottle it and pretend it's not there, it's likely to grow, you know, and 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, because they're so vilified, they're considered evil, wrong, broken, beyond redemption, and they know for well that the only people who are going to get sympathetic ear from are the pedophiles. And so then it's going to go from entertaining thoughts to, oh shit, have you checked out this website? Cutlises, the situation doesn't it by being lazy? Or 20 years ago, like, oh, I can get hold of some videos, you know, VHS videos, or DVDs or whatever, and then it circulates, and then it it goes underground and that's the bit that concerns me. Societies

quite understandable attitude of discussed towards Peter Files only serves to drive them underground and it's such a hard problem to deal with. I think most people would just like, oh, I don't want to think about it anymore. 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 going to 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 going to take it out. So I don't want to sound like an apologist.

That's absolutely why I'm not. But at the same time, you've got to discuss it because it happens in the world. And, you know, 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. I think you said there's a call line, special call line that's 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 apologious thing for Peter, 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, you're actually going to make someone culpable, not only for thought

crime, but for thought crime that by definition in neuroscience, they do not have conscious control over. Yeah. Which, which and the evidence that you're fucking shit. 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 clestismmography, one of the hardest words to pronounce in science. So you go, Pleistismography. Oh, you got me. Pleistismography. 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 photoplastismography, which measures the lubrication of the vagina. Essentially, when female genitalia becomes arous, it lubricates when male, it changes shape somewhat, and lubricates, and in the male, the penis becomes turgid. So you can put the rod inside the hole. It's biological and simple. But especially, 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 pedophilic people, and then they compared them against purely non purely pedophilic people.

And then they compared them against purely non-pedophilic people. Because obviously some people, they'll be overlap. They showed both parties, children porn and adult porn. And the pedophiles got no response from that adult pornography, whether it was gay or straight or anything else. They exclusively got a sexual response from the pedophilic content,

which is why they're included, and vice versa. They had to make sure that those who were turned on by adult consenting, we hope, pornography, that they weren't also a little bit turned on by the pedophiles, in order to make sure that you really are comparing apples and oranges that you are, you know, you're getting the populations purely pedophilic and purely non-pedophilic. And so the fact that they bother 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? Ah, man. And that's the thing as well, especially when you roll the clock back and you realize that for a very, very long time, as soon as a girl was fertile, she would be pregnant. In fact, 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. Juliet and Romeo and Juliet was around about that age. Yeah, I mean, I think they're throwing, there you go. Dinaris, but you get my point. Speaking of made up drama. Yeah, you got the hair. Right, two more things, two more things in less that I really thought was cool.

I didn't realize that the female orgasm has a reproductive function. Is it the sillier, is it called? Yeah, the little hair-like extensions that reach out into the fallopian tubes, it actually wafts the sperm into the correct, there's two fallopian tubes, and it wafts it into the one that the egg will be found in,

over and above the one that didn't produce anything. I've, is that selective from an evolutionary sense? Sure, I mean, I don't see how else it could have occurred. 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 silly,

silly things down. I mean, that, even just learning that, bro, like the fact that... Conversely, do you want to know a bit of the idea in? Do you know what the male, male foreskin does in practical, physical terms? Act as a little helmet. And... It's one of its functions that it does the job well, whether it was designed for that purpose or not, is very difficult to discern, but it extracts the previous deposit of semen so that your semen makes it to the finish line. 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? I think 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? I do think that was okay. I think like that, but then in order for it to, in order for it to I'm doing a Oh, okay, so it's catching it as it goes. Oh dude, that's so disgusting But it's funny, isn't it? Like if it if that true, and I don't know for sure whether it's true, I've just read some papers that suggest it. Oh, I've heard it as well. Yeah.

But, you know, the concept of us being historically, biologically monogamous is slightly dubious. Well, the old... Well, the old mammals on the planet, 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! Yeah.

What? That's slightly shocking. If that's not lust. That's had a control lust. That's probably out of control. Probably linked him with a lot of pride, probably linked him with a lot of envy, a lot of wrath. Agreed.

Absolutely, I don't, I try 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 20, 30 kids with multiple wives. It's like, why? Why? Why do you need to do this? That's not just lust. That goes way beyond lust. Like you said, it's greed, pride, so many other things. envy, like the desire to cause envy and others. Yeah, which is in itself a kind of a way of pride as well, isn't it? Yeah, dude, it's so interesting how these all into play. I think kind of to footnote the lust category. It's one of the most binary categories, I think, here, because of the way that typical relationships are formatted.

There's not really a line when you say that someone's being greedy and not being greedy, right? It's like, oh, I believe you crude this much wealth, there's your greed threshold over that bracket, you're a... Relative. ...or you ate this much food, but you're not allowed to eat this much food, you're officially a glutton or whatever're not allowed to eat this much food, you're

officially a glutton or whatever. I think if they were a threshold, it's if your excess leaves others without. That's a good way, but that's a hard thing to measure. It's a lot less hard than you cheated on your partner. Yeah. Or you had sex with 35,000 women. Yeah. That's like for now. Look, it's been 35,000 women. Yeah, yeah. That's like Fidel.

Look, it's been 2,500 women. Let's leave it there. You know? Let's just call it a day, mate. Are you not tired? It's funny, isn't it? So many people have blamed their profligacy on sex addiction. But sex addiction isn't even acknowledged by the psychiatric world.

Do you think it will become? I don't know. 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, but it's funny, isn't it? The people bandit around, left or wrong, sex addict, they're like, oh yeah, he's just a cute, 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 not yet. But then depression,

depression wasn't categorized as an official mental health disorder. I don't think until only fairly recently. And you're not in Freud's day. Yeah, true. Okay, so envy. Next, you say envy is the least fun of all capital vices. What makes envy different to the other ones? Yeah, well, I mean, when you feel envy, it's an unpleasant, isn't it? But when you snap at someone who's doing your head in, Roth, 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

to play poker and lose it all again. So envy is, 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, grew up in a similar part of the world, similar level of education, 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, on benign envies, 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 may be, you know, think, 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 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, the 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 behaviors, incredibly anti-social behavior in some people, in some circumstances.

I love the way that you put it, you said envy has a sense of injustice at its core. That's a really nice... But some say, why they got all this and I've got nothing. Why are they, why are they, you know, so the old refrain, isn't it? The other bit is gone. 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, 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. Yeah. The interesting about envy is it's one of the four where that brain area, the ACC that's involved in pain, at the, people feel envy when they read about someone else from their childhood doing really, really well, much, much better than them. That brain error kicks in hard at that moment, you feel envy. You know, it's sort of in a turmoil is what inspires a lot of unpleasant behaviors, you know. That's often the first link in the chain that leads to unpleasant anti-social behaviors,

which I was shocked that I kept finding this brain area, 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 on it and then wrote a book about it. So I couldn't believe how lucky I was getting for it. Five and actually gluttony was one of the ones that this brain area didn't kick up in. How would that have operated? Would that be when you were going to have the food and you don't have the food and you feel pain? Yeah, it's when you're trying, well, it's 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 people that have problems with overeating, that at the moment they make that choice to give into it, it's almost like the emotional time of the self-loathing about, go, here I go again, my resolve is crumbling. From memory, this was a year ago. But I remember thinking, oh, if only I'd delayed by another six months, I could have included

this. You could have got another one in there. Then it would have been six out of seven, but I had to discount lust. The DACC was the mic 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 conflicts. And if there's one thing that you're told over and over again in the MRI, 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. Yes. 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. The, the, the, the pain of having to withhold you hands from touching yourself. Oh, yeah, which isn't really what that's not this. Yeah, you can't isolate it, right? I guess so 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 the cause. There's a lady watching you in an FMR I machine. That's definitely something that you know you shouldn't. I met this guy at the Society for Neuroscience Conference about 10 years ago who did some of the early FMRI studies 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 that context, you wasn't showing people porn, he was getting couples to come in and do sexy time. You know, one person stays really restyled and their partner would manipulate them in the scanner, bring them to ejaculation. 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, yeah, yeah, it's not, it's hardly the most sort of seductive. It's not the candles and the barri white aren't quite playing, are they? No, it's not. But then, I guess something, hey. Okay, so 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 shop window into the best of everybody's lives. Correct. Be careful, he envy, because quite often, the people that, 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, is when they're on the sofa, on telly, you know, quite often it's not the case, but we don't look into the back story behind these people. There's loads and loads of people in the public eye who, when they roll out on stage, when they roll out in the studio in front of the lights and the TV cameras, 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. 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 wish none of it had happened because they were happier before. 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 the first person through the doors of season one of Love Island. So I've- No way! And I've done take me out, I've been to Finando's, I've seen Paddy McGinnis all that full work. So I'm full, Blutick Wanker, right? I've seen both sides of this fence, and I couldn't agree more. Some of the most miserable, least fulfilled, least actualised people that I know have the most followers. And there's this video that me and Dean, video guide Dean, will finish very soon. It's based around this Naval Ravacant 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. 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, Matthew, a billionaire, super fucking genius Tony Stark guy. But you don't know what Elon Musk's relationship with his bodies 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 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? I think you're bang on the money. A lot of the time, man, 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, the fact that I rephrase it because it's like, you can't help when the envy kicks in. It's a bit like, I love you. Yeah, you can't, like, you either feel envy or so you don't. You don't summon it, it just comes, right? It's a natural emotion.

It's 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 not 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 awesome relationship and is constantly posting brilliant stuff on social media. Like, like, don't beat yourself up for feeling the envy, but examine the likely cause of that envy 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 realize that some people use it as a diagnostic tool to work out when to pick up the phone. And and and and and be it is everything okay, I've seen a lot of couple of photos of the last couple of weeks. And I was like oh my god that's incredible reverse psychology like that's brilliant. That's clever. It blew me away because I remember thinking when I see that stuff I 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 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. When I've looked cool, yeah, exactly. But the bizarre thing if that is the envy, causing envy, inducing envy and other people is a signaling technique that allows you to reaffirm your position in the dominance hierarchy, right? I do say, I thought about it. No, 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 in a jawline. Like, I'm gonna keep on doing that because I'm gonna play the game. And 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 love. And this...

The claim that game in order to realize greater, greater benefits in the long run. I hope short term, short term nasty behavior for long term. Perfect. Well, but then maybe I'm just fucking pulsed talking the shit out of it and I'm just full of all that. Exactly what you mean. I know exactly what you mean. And I've probably gone the other way by not playing the game. I've probably underserved myself.

Like, my worst nightmare when I started presenting TV stuff, I've presented half a dozen shows over a decade. BBC, Sky, Discovery Science, TLC, even this and 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 enjoy my privacy

and I've seen the pain in celebrities' eyes when people come up and ask them for autographs, I've got here we go again, I can't go anywhere without being bothered by people. Like, 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. They call Michael Mosinium, they call the ventalkan twins. I think they're all great, but I am not getting the calls. Not playing that game.

I've made my peace with it because I write books and I present their 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 solved 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 things in a short time, to achieve great things. And long run, it was just a short hand. 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 verge of despair. I was having this existential crisis. I feel alone, I feel lost. And then when I went in and someone come out of one of my club nights and say, hey man, I was on 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 poundy Aiga bombs and heard those banging tunes, man, you know, you just really turned my life. I've never had that. But I get that now like 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 eye photos that's like every message I've ever received. It's like hundreds of messages now, right back to the tune 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, 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 Madlow's 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 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, some, I don't know, man, like, I, I, the thing is, so I don't, the envy was pricked when you mentioned that you get, I was anticipating you say, I get through your five hours a week because I was extrapolating from my one a month if I'm lucky on Twitter. But my point is,

I always try and think of it in order to not think, why do 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 999 people we thought it didn't bother I didn't do it Man, 100% what dude 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

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 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, pathively through 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 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, 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, then you miss this. 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, some of my mates must fucking hate me because I'm just like, I'm not need needy but overbearingly in touch at times. But 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 music. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, consuming, right? 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 you tubing 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, Deal Véig is that seal? The, sorry to any German speaks at a terrible pronunciation, but it means the journey is the destination,

meaning you can get huge amounts of implicit reward, sorry, intrinsic reward, as opposed to extrinsic reward, from the process of doing something that you enjoy. You've said a number of times how much you enjoy doing this podcast 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 the way you describe that suggests that you get implicit pleasure from having these interactions and enlightening, getting feedback from your listeners and so forth. 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 hugely promotes your well-being. So I am the proud owner of a YouTube channel that I present every week, I do something. And I get less than, I get 10, 12, 14 viewers. Link in the show notes below. Go and subscribe to Jack's channel now. Link will be in the show in the below. Go and hustle him on his next screen. Great man VR.

Please, someone watch it. But I don't really, my mates are like, why did you do this? 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 learned so much from one month to the next of doing these weekly things. They're used to us an hour. There's bonkers. Now they're half an hour episodes. I used to review multiple games and now do one at a time. I reckon when I get to the

year point, I'm going to take them all down, re-edit them so they don't look so bloody awful. 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 get all more instruments to learn. Like that's the stuff that we get happiness from, a satisfaction and well-being, 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.

No one talks about them anymore, you know? No, like you don't get asked to the question, what are your hobbies? Like what do you do with your hobbies? It's what do you do? Gary Vs hustle and grind mentality. Have you got your case swiss with the words tattooed on the bottom of them on all that stuff? Like did you only sleep four hours last night?

All that bullshit. Like, I do know, doing things for the sheer enjoyment of them speaking as someone who only did things for commercial gain for a decade. I was bothered about the success of the business and making money and being well regarded in a world of people who are all drunk. And what was the turnaround point? What was the moment of realization? I'm just a realization. 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 realized holy fucking shit, like that guy there, bottomless charisma, endless extraversion,

like he's a lot about town and he does this and you're there. And I realized that I'm this. I'm the person 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 had to say this. And you feel better now? Oh, dude, I'm, I'm, this is the year of, maybe not the year of transcending, but it's definitely

the year of actualizing. 2020 is like the year of actualizing for me. Like, I've never felt mental well-being 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 do, I do it if no one listens, 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 gonna talk to this guy that understands the neuroscience of the seven deadly sins this evening. I'll see you later on. Like because that's what

I want to do because you got your own stuff going on and you're not in direct competition. Yeah. So looping it back to envy man. That's what 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. Only only person that was catapulted into a life of virtue and integrity from love I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. capitalist society? Is it just resource acquisition gone awry? What is it? Gone bonkers. Yeah, so pure greed is pretty nasty because for the individual, this isn't even the anti-social 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 millions. You want to be a billionaire. Like I always think of that guy in Silicon Valley, the three comic club.

I've not watched it. 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 driving in a fat car

into an underground car park so that they don't have to come across the riffraff. 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. They're just competitive over who's got more money. If you look at the plight of the super rich, there was 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-

He's selling- sorry to interject, they're selling all of his possessions, including all of his houses. All right. Everything except for a couple of cars. And what's his explanation for that? He thinks that possessions are an attack vector. Wow. Interesting way of phrasing it.

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 multi-disciplinary thinking and is probably a fucking freak savage polymath. But 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 horn, she's 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 again, is that's just if there was ever 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. Yeah, right. Well, no, I mean, maybe he's just perceived the, you know, the world tells us that the more material, you know, advertising tells us the more material goods you can afford that have what happier you are. Look at the people you're hanging, all the beautiful people

you're hanging out with, the amazing places you'll be going to, money's the best thing of the world. But like, actually money, 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 to not have a pot to piss in. Now you've got shit loads. Can you lend me a grant? Well, could you give me a grant? Like, you've got a million. Could you give me a grant? 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 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 economic study that showed the relationship between salary and happiness levels, like your overall content with life. And there is, of course, there is a relationship between income and happiness 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 hair, food in your belly, being able to live in an area where you feel safe and secure. 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, it will, earning more money will, like a little 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 the antithesis of reaching a point of contentment and satisfaction. 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, then we go back to feeling just normal, right? No one is perpetually happy, apart from maybe that bloat you mentioned on Love Island. But yeah, so pursuing more, adding for item 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 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 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. Then, and then even if you are happy and you manage to maintain it, when you have a down day, how'd 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. I know. You can, how do you deal with the fact

that you're feeling miserable for no reason at all? If you're living a normal life, then it can sit more comfortably, acceptance of the inevitability of sometimes feeling glam 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 look at the people around me, like some of my mates are super rich self-made people. Some of them don't ever put a piss in, but are doing something with their life that they enjoy. There is

no rhyme or reason. Like, there's no one set, like some of them are happy and others are happy. No, there's no, the riches don't make them happy. The riches, rich people can be happy. You don it'll be wrong. I'm not saying that greed guarantees that you'll be unhappy, but greed neither guarantees nor, you know, in other words, towards or against ultimately feeling content and happy in your life beyond the certain threshold. If you're living a humble existence, but you enjoy what you're doing, you feel like what you're doing is worthwhile and it's satisfying.

That's the pot of gold that really counts. I get it, man. Being rich won't make you happy, but being poor can make you miserable. That's the dichotomy that I was taught by Morgan Haussle, who's a finance expert who's been on the podcast twice. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've just realized that I totally jumped over Sloth. So we're gonna learn about Sloth. Why are we lazy or apathetic? Is it just that we're going to learn about sloth. Why are we lazy or apathetic? Is it just

that we're trying to reduce our calorie expenditure? Is it just fitness enhancing again from our revolution reheritage or what's going on? Yeah. So sloth is, in moderation, is really useful. If you look at people who are overly motivated, they let their levels of stress burn so high that they're not burning out, you know, and they have, they don't, some people won't stop until 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 someday. It's good for you. You need a day of rest, you know, the next bit. A little bit of laziness each week at the weekend, having a lazy someday. It's good for you. You need a day of rest. The human biology, body and brain needs to take rest. We can't perpet, or don't like, try turning that to a teenager or someone in their 20s, like when you've got seemingly perpetual energy. But if you continue that kind of,

and the hyper-energetic behavior, three or 30s and 40s and 50s, you simply weigh yourself out earlier than you would do otherwise. It's really important to not every time you go on holiday, pack as much in as humanly possible. In terms of stress control, there is nothing better in terms of doing some deep cleaning and maintenance to repair in your brain than having completely duller as dishware of boring holiday. Boring is cleansing. Boring is cleansing because if your boredom is the absence of stimulation

and stimulation requires energy to process. So what I'm saying, I'm not saying every time you go on holiday, do nothing. 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 10 minute break before you start another round of work in any given day and where one of your four weeks holiday a year, you just do nothing. It's cleansing, it's good, it's healthy. The

extreme of sloth, when you never pull your weight, 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? You didn't come and hunt this food, you didn't go out gathering, you do nothing around the hat. Why should you? Obviously, these are the kind of accusations

that are typically leveled at teenagers. And a teenager's brain is halfway between immature child brain and a fully mature adult brain. They're flicking 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. Oh, wow. He's hearing this. All of the parents out there.

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, 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 go. I spend the last time at school. You don't want to be there an hour later. Have you read them?

I've read them. Have you read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker? Yes, I have. Love that. Did you see the study that you've done in there about the reduction in car crashes they've done by doing the same thing? That bit of micro-sleeps scared the living hell out of me.

I hadn't thought of that. That when you have a micro-sleeps scared the living hell out of me. I hadn't thought of that. That when you have a micro-sleep, it might be very, very brief, like half a second, but you are completely unconscious during that time. I had a lot of your function. Yeah, right. When the light turns red. I think I've just lost your video, bro.

Oh, you turned your video up. There you go. I don't know why it switched off. There you go, hi again. So, it switched off. There you go, I'm probably 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 Upregulate my productivity and downregulate 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 Yeah, exactly But it is, whatever.

But also if you're supporting other people, like quite often, you know, the benefits of sloth should be focused upon by those who's sort of chief aim in life is to help others, whether it's teachers, teach their kids or careers, 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 person 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 get back

into the fray the following day. 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. Ah, nice. Absolutely, like me 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 that's in you. Yeah, but you're one on first before you put it in. You're 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, Roth. Is it the most immediately damaging sin that we've got? Yeah, immediately damaging sin that we've got. Yeah, immediately damaging. Yeah, I suppose it is. We're all into, again, modicum of wrath. We're all entitled to feel angry. It's a perfectly normal.

Where is a modicum of wrath? Why is a modicum good? Well, as in, every time you get angry frustrated, you feel that aggression, you beat yourself up for doing it. That's not right. 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, it's embedded in the law.

An eye for an eye is all about your comeback. If someone attacks you about your comeback. If someone attacks you, your comeback needs to be equivalent. 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 that all eye for an eye means, right?

It's about 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 going to go to prison. If you're proportionate in your response, then you might not go to prison. You know what I mean? In the case of a violent conflict. 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 to physically rep other people when they're mucking us about. But we don't have a right,

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 reign, obviously, like the drunk guy coming and harassing me at Speaker's Corner, like he was aggressively abusing me, and I had a right to further abusing back. I wasn't proud of it because I was trying not to, but I had a right to do that because you know verbal, it's basic aggression can be like a verbal, a physical discouragement from further aggravation. But when it's, the problem is, again, just going back to that DACC area, the Dorsal Antiris Singular Cortex, I love the study that showed this brain area kicking in in the context of Rath, because they got people wired up with electrodes

so that they could deliver electric shocks to each other inside the scanner. 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 tip-for-tatt exchange where one person's absolutely get out, that hurt. And then he's asking, but it's like, that was my childhood and the one I gave you. And you go, it escalates as it always does in these tip 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 feeling of inner turmoil, pain, drove the amount of revenge they wanted to get. And 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 getting murdered. That's when people start, you know, maybe an individual, maybe the lows 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, it just, you know, winded pride. 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 imagining the thing like dude, there's Facebook debates from a decade ago that I still rue not writing the response that I think I should have said. No, but good, but never, never type angry. At least you honored that particular guidance. 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 it. I wouldn't 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 socialised? It is impossible to know for sure because... What is a socialised difference to girls? There you go. But there are conditions where females have very high levels of testosterone. very, very, very high levels of testosterone for other reasons. Women have testosterone too, right? It's just that men produce this extra payload in their gonads. Some women can biologically produce a equivalent of a male level of testosterone, and they are as aggressive as men are.

Testsosterone's the aggression drug then. 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's just never a clear-cut answer. It would be really nice to go, yeah, test osterones to blame.

But test osterone may be promote aggression, but then there are other brain areas that can rein it into more reasonable levels. 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 would go, nah, it's gone out to do the testosterone. It's something else entirely. So it's just hard to give a clear cut explanation. 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? Wow. To add in there, did you consider this? No, no, I was happy to learn from ancient wisdom.

I didn't really think about upgrading the sages of our day. I was just so delighted that the science had actually tallied with the religious kind of beliefs that I was hoping for it, but I wasn't banking on it. I didn't really go beyond, I was thinking what can people do with this? If there was, 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 recognized as anti-social forces. So is there an eighth anti-social force that isn't captured by them? I'm just asking you to try and undo 3000 years of work and then perhaps build on it in the space of 1560, or the life on a pot challenge. I like a challenge. No small feet. 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 drives, 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... Like a gluttony of information almost. 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. Like think how many conversations are ruined by everyone like you. Oh, I wonder if that it used to be that you can spend half an hour discussing the likelihood of whether it's this or that. What is the explanation for that? Why do they call it a pot to piss in? You can spend ages trying to work it out. Now you just go online and go, oh, it's because people used to sell their Wii if they were

really poor. And if you didn't have a pot, you couldn't even sell your urine. 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, I knew the answer to that. And I can't remember what, which I don't think is good for the individual or for the masses. It's things like if 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 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, and you need to look at people in order to take in that body language to run it through the empathy circuits.

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'recastle, right? across the length of a country, opposite ends of a country, and then you're packaging it, and then you're digitally giving it to people all over the world. Without technology, our knowledge would be vastly, vastly limited, but to, like an ill-discipline consumption of technology, never asking yourself how much is tumor 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 starting to feel deflated every time I look at it? Because it's such a source of envy, malicious, negative envy, because everyone's such a source of envy, malicious, negative envy, because everyone's falsely showing their show real of the best things in their life, and completely ignoring the negatives, creating this false perception of how great everyone

else is lives are compared to our own. So, yeah, the excessive use of technology to the detriment of the, of the interests of your well-being. That's the new gateway. That would be my eighth deadly sin of the modern age. 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. 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. I do. Because because into the boredom into continuous boredom, the human brain hates it and into that vacuum, crazy ideas, but like the crazy, positively like eccentric unusual things that 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 because there's me of this aircon conversation and you know, like internet and TV and films and consumption Netflix, tick five four three two three, two, one. Next episode, next episode, next episode, just give in, give in to the torrent mode, switch it off for a whole day, boy 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. And a desire for that is perhaps somewhere in amongst this new eighth sin that we've got. Look, Jack, man, we... Thanks, man. You helped me have an original thought, maybe. 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 Green did that, like the 50th law and, and 50 cent came in. And it was just like purely all Robert Green. And then 50 cents just like, yo, what's up in the club? And then, you think, that's me. I'm

the, I'm the guy that just gets his name on the book because I'm a famous rapper. But I looked at, tell the listeners YouTube channel, Twitter, 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, but what else were there? Yes, so on Twitter at drjluis, Drjjluis. Well, so, oh, my website, www.doc2jac.co.uk, drjac.co.uk. I write a blog every month. I've been doing that for over a decade, so there's a lot of stuff there. What else? Oh yeah, my silly little YouTube channel, which I love doing, even though.

I'm gonna go check it out, man. I'm gonna go and watch what's gonna be, I think. Brain man VR. And if you're inch, I think that virtual reality has, even that's been around 40 years, it hasn't even scratched the surface of its potential. I think virtual reality is so good. I spend half the time in my YouTube channel

saying, don't overdo it. This has got such huge potential to be addictive that I don't want you to lose interest in the real world because 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 easy as it's hyped up, it's rubbish. I've only used an Oculus Go. Right, rubbish. When you use a high-end one,

the experiences that can be offered are so different. What's the spec of whatever you're rolling with at the moment? I've got, before they even launched it, I bought myself an HTC Vive. So it's almost obsolete now, I've had it for four years. But it's one of these ones where you're tethered to a powerful graphics PC. 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 like it's only limited by human imagination. Like every day I think when COVID happened I turned Beat Sab Saber where you sort of slashing, you using

lightsabers to hit boxes that fly 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, 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 come into words 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. And in the meantime, you might as well just get your frustration out. And it was great.

I watched some COVID. 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. It's a virtual world that you can now inhabit. Yeah and that's just copying other people's games. There's those are 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, with the 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 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, you're listening as well now, you know, and I know, but I 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 Because there's so many games out there that people pull loads of time into that has no potential to improve their brain power And and it's just the 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, and then just show them retrospectively. Your working memory is improved by four or five points. Your attention span has increased from 30 seconds to, you know, like, and just show them, it's good thing you played this game because now your brain's better. Bro, that's the dream.

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 super lame, but that sounds awesome. I don't know whether you know Paul Stammett's the guy that does a lot of stuff into my colleges, like a big mushroom supplementation, also psychedelics, but not just that, like, lines made in all manner of magic. 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, like, micro movements, and other bits and pieces, and they tracked it through this quantified self-app. 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 going on. So 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, and some cabin in the middle of nowhere in Canada

has spent the last six years creating what equals a technodelic. 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 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 those trippy experiences in order to hopefully give

people the positive impacts on their well, but without the danger of their strength. For the so-called. So I'm literally gonna get stuck into that as soon as I get off here and I'll report back. I look forward to it, look Jack, man. This is one of the longest episodes I've done in a while, but I've absolutely loved it. And there's still so much that I could go into.

So. It's been a pleasure. We're having met you. I'm now gonna listen to your podcasts from beginning to end. Oh, dude, well, if you notice the fact that the camera angle doesn't change, but that we swap t-shirts between episode lifehacks 101

and lifehacks 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 Signs of Sin, will be linked below. But for now, Jack, man, thank you so much. Thank you to me, you bro. you