Best of Season 2

Best of season two recap

0:00Hello, and welcome to Everything Psychology. This is a relaxed episode because there's no guests, it's just me, and that's because it's the best of season two. And I wanted to do this episode because over the last six episodes, I got to chat with some really amazing guests on some very different and diverse topics. We talked about the psychology of the world's

0:30most suave spy, and we also talked about the personality traits of our favourite Hogwarts characters. And we got to look into the minds of our most cherished and most loved ones. I'm not going to leave you to decide whether that's children or dogs, but we had an episode on each one of those topics. And we got to ride not just one, but two zeitgeists through this episode as well, because we just happened to have an episode on the psychology of the odyssey mindset, as Christopher Nolan very kindly launched a film to, I think, support our podcast.

1:04And we also had an episode on the psychology of weight loss, where we talked quite a lot about Manjaro, Zenpec, and the effect, positive and negative of those, but also some other behavioural psychology elements that you can use when losing weight. So this, as I said, is the best of. So I'm going to recap some of the most memorable parts, some of those sharpest insights, some of the funniest tangents I think we went on as guests as we had a chat, and some moments that truly made me go like, no way, that's amazing, real great insight.

The psychology of James Bond

1:38And I want to start in order with the psychology of James Bond. In this episode, I talked with YouTube legend and James Bond superfan Calvin Dyson. And I also talked to Professor Adrian Furnham, who has worked on the recruitment of real-life spies with the UK Secret Service. And firstly, I did ask Professor Adrian Furnham to unpack the difference between real-life spies and James Bond. You know, the question is, is the reality of the job? And, you know, I think there are four

2:12sources of information. There's what actual spies actually do. So there's data on, you know, who they select for what they do. Then there's, of course, the books, the Fleming books, which I read one as a schoolboy and didn't quite captivate me. Then there are the Bond movies, the ones that are famous. And then there are the spoofs. There's, you know, the Johnny English. And they all have a slightly different take on what are the essential characteristics of Bond.

2:45What is he really like? And there's not sometimes a lot of overlap between them, you know. And the current head of MI6 said, you know, or was it the previous one, was very, very clear that she was fond of James Bond, because it's the most brilliant recruitment device that MI6 had. The Americans are enormously jealous of it. And they tried to do one, you know, the CIA, because you don't need to, it's such an enticing, sexy sort of role that people are, you know,

3:21queue up to be selected for being a real spy. This is not as opposed to being an actor. Yeah. And we get into the actor bit and these are what it takes to be an actor who can play that role. And I'm sure we've all got views on that. But you mentioned there about, you know, SIS MI6 and the real life side of it. And I remember in your book, you have the head of SIS said Bond would have to change his ways quite dramatically if he was going to come into MI6. So what personality profile

3:55would you give Bond? What he should be or what he is? I mean, I think what he is, is, you know, amazingly sort of courageous, charming, very cool, very resilient under fire. He's never seems to be a polyglot. He never seems to be able to speak another language, which you will notice nearly all the 99% of the real spies do and have to do because they interact with people are very different. I think what you would notice about him is this, you know, to what extent he's psychopathically cold

4:30and cool and, you know, doesn't show emotions and is able to kill with impunity. The job of a spy is to get information from people. It's to establish a relationship with somebody who has access to information you need. That's the nature of the job. So you've got to befriend people. You've got to be very, very socially skilled, emotionally intelligent, tolerant of all sorts of quirks. You have to be insightful to understand what people's motivation

5:02is. I think, you know, Bond comes across most of them as extraordinarily cool, not very likable and not particularly trustworthy. And we've had many actors play James Bond. So Calvin gave us his thoughts on the psychology behind what each one of them brought to the role and what their Bond said about the era. Well, in the later Bonds, so Craig's Bond, I mean, and Calvin, you do see vulnerability, don't you? In Craig, certainly, yeah. And I think in George Lazenby in Majesty's

5:39Secret Service as well, it tends to be when they try to make more of an effort to adapt the character as he is on the page, I think, because, you know, I mean, when you, yeah, I mean, the, you know, Bond's cinematic character was very much, you know, you obviously many people were involved in Dr. No, but casting Sean Connery as a fairly sort of crucial element of the whole thing and what he brought naturally to the part, um, with Bond maybe becoming, you know, like in the Roger Moore era as well, you know, there are moments of vulnerability throughout the films, but they're

6:13small in comparison to sort of, you know, the, um, the, the, the wider picture, definitely. And you, you, you picture that famous picture of Daniel Craig sat in the shower with Eva Green, you know, that sort of vulnerability side. Is that in the books though? Or is that the cinematic Bond? Oh, oh, the, the vulnerability is definitely there in the books, I think. I mean, particularly, you know, again, the, the trope of kind of Bond ending every adventure in bed with, you know, a woman at the end. So when you look at the first five Fleming books, uh, in one of them,

6:45his girlfriend ends up dead in another one, he's stood up at a cafe. Well, the woman that he's been having a dalliance with is like, actually, I've got another boyfriend actually that I'm more interested in. So Bond is left alone moping in a cafe. And in another one, he's poisoned and he's falling to the floor. You think he's going to die. So kind of the, the established formula of him ending up with, you know, a woman at the end was very much sort of, um, you know, came in later really. Yeah. Yeah. And some of the things that aging was mentioning there, as sort of traits of a real life spy, you know, the ability to befriend other people,

7:20to have emotional intelligence, to be compassionate. Would you say, Calvin, that our Bond has any of that in the cinema? Ooh, um, ooh, that's a very good question. Cause I'm not sure. I mean, I do think that a part of the appeal of Bond, um, is that he is quite, he's a loner for the vast majority of the films. Like there are very few recurring characters in Bond and the ones that are, are the ones that he

7:50works with. So his boss, you know, his boss's secretary, Q and Q branch, all of the other characters, mostly there are some exceptions, obviously, as there are in most things in Bond, Bond. But, you know, does he have friends? In the books, Bill Tanner, who he works with, who's M's, um, chief of staff is as close as Bond has to a friend in the service, as Fleming describes him. Um, so you don't really see that element of him. He is a loner going in and he makes these relationships because, you know, kind of as Adrian was, um, was discussing, he needs to make those

8:25relationships in order to succeed in his job. So a big part of his job is I need information from this lady here. The quickest way for me to get that is to seduce her and get the information that way. So it's, uh, in a way, I think that that's, um, an appealing element of the films because him being such a loner means that you do have sort of a, there aren't that many recurring characters. You are meeting new people along with him every film pretty much. And there's a lot of mystery about them. Who are these people? And, um. Betting on who's going to last to the end or not.

8:59Well, quite. Yeah, no, exactly. And, uh, as far as the Craig film goes, not many of them last until the very end. But if Bond isn't much like the real thing in real life, what does it actually take to work for MI6? Adrian took us through his checklist and explained why real life spies are probably more like salespeople than they are action heroes.

9:24Adrian, are real life spies loners?

9:29Are they, one of the things you notice immediately is this amazing adaptable charm. If my job is, you know, I've been told I've got to get close to this particular individual, then I have to research them. I have to find out about what their needs are and what sort of personality they are. And then I've got to find an opportunity to meet them. I've got to establish a relationship. Um, and it's, you know, it's, it's a subtle business and it might be that the people you're dealing with, which the, the, they're called agents are, you don't like them. They're very dodgy. Um, um, you know, uh, they're motivated by something you might not agree with.

10:05So you've got to befriend somebody, uh, who you've got to trust and they trust you who you don't particularly like. And it's a very subtle and difficult business. So it's about, it's about the, the subtlety of the engagement. So if I find that the person I'm trying to target is a interested in photography and as a vegetarian and, you know, a great lover of the Beatles or something, well, guess what? I'm a vegetarian. I study for, I mentioned photography. So I'm trying to find a relationship. It's a sort of salesman's task. And there's none of this sort of special

10:39forces stuff that you find in the James Bond movies. You know, they don't immediately. In fact, I've never seen one at all in that light. Um, some of them used to have more of a military background than they have now, but they're not sort of heroic people who jump out of aeroplanes or go underwater. It immediately is there's no roughy tufty because there's not a roughy tufty job. Although of course it can be at times very dangerous. And one has to learn a number of skills, but the most amazing thing always is their charm. I would say is the, you know, that that is,

11:15it's an old fact, you could call it emotional intelligence if you liked, but the job is to establish relationships, to establish a close trusting and trustworthy relationship. And that's the primary skill. How you do it. And, uh, is, is another, another matter.

11:34That's the truth about James Bond. Ask any fan whether obsession actually started and it's

Childhood roots and screen time

11:40rarely James Bond or 007 himself. You know, Calvin told us that his was Moonraker on VHS because it was bought by an auntie who figured, well, you know, he likes Star Wars. He's going to like this as well. Now that points at something a little bit bigger. So much of who we become as adults is actually written in childhood. And we talked about this in the next episode when I talked to Sue Roffey and Charlie Lewis about the psychology of childhood. And we started the episode by talking about growing up and how technology is involved in that. And we actually started to talk about

12:14whether screens can sometimes help children connect rather than pulling them apart.

12:21I'm going to move on to another topic, a topic which I think is so in the forefront of parents' minds. And I'm sure teachers and teaching staff are thinking about it as well. And that's screen time and social media and embodying that. Uh, I've got a question here from Lucy from Cricklade. I'm fairly sure that if I let my 13-year-old have access to a screen all day, he would just sit there scrolling or watching shorts and playing games. I feel like I'm constantly nagging him to get off his devices. How do I help him realise on his own that endless scrolling and screen time

12:55isn't good for him? That's the $64,000 question. It's not easy. A 14-year-old will construct a version of reality in which that activity is the most important thing and the only important thing to focus upon. However much discussion you get involved in, there are, and I find this really difficult because I know the research evidence on this topic, you know, there have been what we call meta-analysis studies of many, many bits of data put together. And so you've got studies of thousands

13:30and thousands of children. And the data do show that children who spend all their time on screens are less physically fit, they do less physical activity, they're more likely to report depression, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there are obviously other factors involved. But when you communicate this with a teenager, they find it hard to fathom. In fact, look around you, look at the parents of these teenagers, they're on their wretched phones just as much as they are. So we're all involved in

14:05this ritualised, self-interested activity. I'm afraid I'm the same, but I do it with emails and research, writing to colleagues and that sort of thing. We are screen addicted at the moment and I think we need to do more than just talk about social media and the under-sixteens. Yeah. And obviously the ban has happened in Australia with social media and in France and in the UK, the government here have announced a ban of under-sixteens in social media as well.

14:37Now, do we need to split up screen time from social media? Because they are different. Sue, you were saying at the beginning that having time together, relationship building is an important part of development as a child. You can do that together as a parent. If you're working together on a screen, playing games, puzzles, talking with each other, that is social development in a relationship, but it's just using a screen as an activity as opposed to social media, which is

15:11solo in its own sort of way. I am so glad that you've made the distinction there. I mean, basically, you know, I've sometimes said to parents, you know, watch something with your children, talk to them about what you're watching, what you're seeing, ask them questions. It's as relevant as reading a book in some ways because, you know, it doesn't matter whether it's sort of on a screen, but you're right about the fact that, you know, I go on the London Tube quite often and you look up and down the carriages and virtually 90% of people will be on one sort of screen or another. And, you know, sometimes

15:48they'll be playing games, sometimes they'll be reading a book. I mean, I know that my husband reads books on his phone, but it's the social media that has been, you know, that has been really problematic. It's the cyber bullying that takes place. It's the conspiracy theories, but this is a role for education. And, of course, we couldn't do an episode on the psychology of childhood without coming back to that question that nearly every parent wrestles with. How much screen time is too

16:22much? In the Love of Learning project that we've been doing, over and over again, schools are telling us that their biggest issue when children first come to school is impoverished language. And some young children are actually speaking the words they're speaking in an American accent because they have been faced, what you were saying there, Charlie, about parents want a cup of tea or something quiet, so they put their child in front of a screen. I was quite horrified

16:59a few years ago by being in an outside cafe in the sunshine in Australia, beautiful, beautiful setting. And behind me was two young mothers, probably quite well off. It was not a cheap cafe. And they had two toddlers in seats in high chairs. Each of the toddlers was given a screen, which they had in front of them for the whole of the meal. And I thought this was a absolute lost

17:31opportunity for everyone. It was a lost opportunity to talk about the food, the ambience, the people, the friendship, everything. My daughter started talking to her son the second he was born. I'm going to put a nappy on you now, you know, and I'm going to do this and you're going to be wearing a red bib, whatever it was. By the time he was two, he was fluent. And when children come to school

18:01with impoverished language, a lot of the time it's because instead of adult interaction with those children, two-way interaction, they have had the one-way interaction with a screen. And I think that although they have their uses, and I don't blame those mums from maybe wanting maybe just 20 minutes of an uninterrupted lunch, I think for those children to be in front of screens for the whole of the time they were there, probably about an hour and a half, was actually potentially damaging

18:37in so many ways. We've already talked about how many synapses are being formed in the developing brain. And what happens is that those synapses get stronger the more something is repeated. And when it's not repeated or it doesn't happen, it actually stays a weak connection in the brain. We are really damaging our children by too much early use of screens.

19:07And in the episode, we also explored why play isn't something we should leave behind in childhood, and what adults can actually gain when they make room for play.

The developmental role of play

19:18Let's move on to another area of education, and that's play. Charlie, your research highlights play as an absolutely central part of childhood development, not just because it's enjoyable, but because it's genuinely formative. And you describe in your new chapter of the book you're contributing to four distinct types of play, physical, object, pretend, and structured play with rules. Can you briefly explain the importance of play? Well, as you've illustrated through the diversity of types of play, it really is highly important,

19:57not just for children. I'll come on to that in a minute. It's important for children because play gives them a medium in which to try things out, to explore their own capacities, and to engage in activities with others, particularly with peers, but also with parents. And if you ask me to select which type of play, I would say pretense plays, is the most predictive of all sorts of later social skills, it's been shown in a number of different longitudinal studies. So engaging in an activity

20:32as if you were doing something is really important. And that was discovered in the early 1900s by a guy called Sully who looked at his own two daughters pretending to be sisters. Now they weren't being themselves, they were being themselves as hypothetical sisters. And he wrote extensively about how important this sort of activity was. It gets children to reflect upon what's it like to take the position of the other person in a relationship. And that's, I think, the reason why play is so important. It allows us to

21:07look at the possible. Now, I mentioned adults, just quickly mention various studies there. There's a guy called Michali who wrote about 15, 20 years ago about the, not play, but what he called the concept of flow. And he said that all adults invest a certain amount of creativity in what they do. And that's what he called flow. And it's identical to hypothetical play. When they're thinking through a problem,

21:39they think, well, what if I do it this way? What if I do it that way? And then they make a decision. That creativity is what makes both us human and makes what we do more creative and more enjoyable and more enjoyable for other people to share with. So play is a bucket term, but I think it explains something about us as human beings. So in your mind, play almost seems like a childish word. Children play.

22:09Exactly. Yeah. Should it not be? No, not at all. We should all play. We should all pretend. All the time. Yeah. I mean, my family say I do it too much, but up to a point, we should be doing it. Yeah. Definitely. I entirely agree with that. And it's not just about play as a sort of a construct. It's also playfulness. You know, I mean, our lives are enriched by playfulness. And, you know, we need to take playfulness seriously because it makes a big difference.

The psychology of weight loss

22:43Childhood, it turns out, is where so many of our adult traits are planted, including our relationship with food. In the third episode of the season, I chatted about the psychology of weight loss with psychologist Dr. Joanna Silver and Matt White, who is the author of The Snap Monkey. Now, Joanna talked about the phrases we need to absorb without even noticing as kids. You know, a second on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. Foods that are naughty. Bodies that are a project. Now, those messages don't just fade when we grow up. They turn into

23:17full-blown adult habits, both good and bad. So here's what happens next. This is the psychology of weight loss. To cut through some of those myths around weight loss really quickly, I put a round of very quick-fire questions to Dr. Joanna Silver. So I got some quick-fire questions to finish off, really. Joanna, I'm going to start with you. I'll go through five with you. BMI, useful measurement or harmful myths. I think that there's a time and a place for it,

23:47but overall it needs to be used in conjunction with other things, and it's certainly not the be-all and end-all and does not tell the whole story. Calorie counting apps, therapeutic tool or toxic habit. I think overall, I think they can be very dangerous because I think they can make people really obsessed and not being in tune with their body and what their body needs. The diet industry, genuinely helping or exploiting people? I think if it was genuinely helping, people would go on one diet for life and never need to go

24:17on again. I think it can really distort people's relationships with food and their bodies. One food you would prescribe for mental health? I'm not going to name a food, but it would be a food that gives people pleasure and enjoyment and perhaps has connotations of happy memories with other people or by themselves. That's a brilliant answer. Yeah. Finish this sentence. A healthy relationship with food is- One in which you're in tune with your body and in tune with your other needs. Fantastic. Matt, are you ready?

24:49I'm intrigued now as what mine are going to be, because my answer to that would have been a healthy relationship with food is one that is possible. Willpower, real psychological force or a convenient fiction? Real psychological force, but not endless. Start Monday. Rational or trap? Both. Why both? Because starting Monday is sometimes a valid reason, but a lot of the time people do it because they're just procrastinating and they're not going to start Monday. The worst diet trend of the last decade?

25:21Too many to choose from. The gallon of milk a day one was pretty bad that I did, so I'll take that. A Zempec. Medical revolution or very expensive shortcut? I'd say again, both. In the right thing, it is a medical marvel, but for most of the people, they use it as a shortcut. Complete the sentence. The snack monkey hates it when you- Plan. What do you mean by plan? When you've put systems in place that mean that the choice is actually less of a choice

25:53and more of a habit. A better example, a good example is where you pre-portion your food, so rather than having a huge bag of crisps and just say, I'll only eat a few, you portion them up or you put a few in a bowl and you take them away. Yeah. A couple of closing questions for you, just to sum up really. Matt, you've talked about how you personally went from a 41-inch waist to a 34-inch waist, not through a diet, but through the techniques that you've established in your book. If someone listening right now is standing

26:27at the cupboard, packet of hobnobs in their hand, what's the one thing you would say to them? Be honest with yourself. Are you bored or are you hungry?

26:41And if they say, I'm bored, but I still want the biscuits? Put the biscuits down, walk, go for a walk around the room, pick up your phone, do some texting, read an email, read a book, and then come back in five, ten minutes later and see if you still want them. Because then you might actually be hungry. But beneath the rules and the routines, there's often something much harder at work.

Shame and food habits

27:07Joanna explained how shame can shape our relationship with food and why that can be so damaging.

27:14And I've read some articles from you on that, and you talked about the distress that people might feel after eating. And I think that shame cycle is interesting because behaviourally, it's a trap, isn't it? That research constantly highlights, but I think it's all very well being in research, if it doesn't actually get out to people so that people can feel okay about it, that shame is actually one of the most powerful, aversive, emotional states that we can experience. And yet, paradoxically, it tends to drive the very behaviour that it's punishing.

27:45And why do we feel that? Going back to Matt's point about the media and the environment, the context of which we eat and judge ourselves against maybe other people, is that where the problem stems from in a lot of the people that you work with? Yeah, I think, as you said, I think shame is central to eating disorders or disordered eating. And I think perhaps it comes back to many of the messages that people have received, you know, without meaning to growing up, the idea, you know, going back to,

28:15oh, I've been really good today, or I've been really naughty today. And there are a lot of phrases about that have been passed down intergenerationally, a second on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. You can never be too slim. So I think all of these messages are really, really internalised, and that sometimes restricting can be seen as you are doing a good thing, you are doing a virtuous thing. And therefore, eating can bring a lot of shame, and eating certain foods and having a particular body type can bring shame. And as you were saying,

28:47people then will deal with their shame in the best way that they know. And that can often involve, as we said, binging, or restricting or making themselves sick. And then that can bring an absolute, as you said, another layer of shame that I know that this is wrong. You know, I know that making myself sick is, you know, people will have real, real moral judgments about that. Or, you know, people will say that I feel like, you know, X for eating this amount. And then, often then the shame kicks in. And the way that people will manage the shame is then by turning to

29:22the eating disorder as a way of punishing themselves. So I think, yeah, the people I see are often just crippled by that shame. And I think you're coming to therapy and coming to group therapy is a really, really good way of, you know, shame wants to be in secret, shame wants to isolate. And when you're with other people and talking about it, it can have a really powerful function of slowly reducing the shame. Yeah. Matt, you've had a very personal journey with weight loss. Is the shame cycle something you can relate to? Definitely. From multiple points. I also had issues where I was, I was never officially

29:59diagnosed as having an eating disorder. But I have a pain, chronic pain condition as well. And I've had this since I was 13. So my relationship with food has been, it's purely as fuel to start with. And then as I got older and the pain got worse, I would find myself being sick if I ate. And it isn't even if I ate too much. It's just if I ate, I tended to, at certain times of the day, I tended to have a pain wave and I tended to be sick. And in my own head, I then felt, because people around me said, you must be, you know, you must be bulimic. You must be having

30:31this eating disorder. Even though clinically, there is a perfectly valid reason for it. And now I've gone through all of the stages of, well, acceptance of the fact that these are the times when I should eat, these are the times I shouldn't eat. If I eat now and I eat a small amount, I'm not going to be sick. All of those types of things, because the pain condition is still there. But the shame still happened, even though I didn't actually have a reason for it. And then that shame then also led to me thinking, well, once they're accusing me of that, I will just eat that much more. That fucking button again. And so I ate more. And I

31:03would find myself eating way more. And it's not just a case of eating the whole packet. I'd eat the whole like extra large Domino's pizza when I wasn't really hungry. I was doing it just because it was there. If it was there, I used to work and I was in IT doing implementations over a weekend. And if someone had ordered in the food, I could have eaten lunch already. But because the food was there, there was this expectation that because I was fat, I was going to want to eat it. And therefore, I'd kind of convince myself I should eat it. And then the shame

31:34of kicking and all of the other things, as well as the body type shame. I mean, even now, I'm not exactly a comfortable person. I am a confident person. But until recently, I wasn't really a comfortable person in my own skin. To the point where one of the things I did to help myself get through that is I got my first tattoo. And it wasn't a small tattoo. It was a huge tattoo down the upper part of my arm. Because I wanted something that I would

32:04be happy to show my arms off, you know, that kind of thing. I got one on my shoulder when I was in the GB team. Because I wanted it to be, I wanted people to see that part of me. And I was suddenly drawing people to the parts of my body that before then, I'd always been ashamed to show. So shame is a huge, huge thing in this society. Yeah.

The snack monkey and the captain

32:25Matt White also introduced us to the concept of the snack monkey. That's the processes of the brain that wants that immediate reward, regardless of what we planned five minutes earlier. I think most of us have stood in front of the fridge at 11 o'clock at night, eating something which maybe we promised ourselves we wouldn't. And in your book, you describe this sort of metaphorical fight with us at that moment. Can you go into that a little? Yeah. So the idea is that there's two systems in your brain. There's one that plans ahead,

33:02buys vegetables, gets you a gym membership. I call that the captain. And then there's the other, which in my book is a smooth talking, smiling used car salesman that says, go on, one won't hurt. You've had a hard day, you deserve it. And that's the snack monkey. I came up with the idea based on the things that I'd done over the last 40 years. I used to be quite fat. I had a 41 inch waist. And so I was the person who was standing

33:33in the kitchen at nine, 10, 11 o'clock, looking in the fridge, didn't really feel hungry. I just wanted to do something and I was drawn to doing it. And I'm also the person that would, as Joanna was saying, would constantly beat myself up if I was on a diet or I was trying to be good with my food. And then I'd have the donut at work or I'd have something and I'd feel, oh, hold on, this is now ruined now. And then I would beat myself. And that process is actually the thing that then caused me to eat more of the bad food. Almost, I call it the fuck it button in the book.

34:08The little monkey has pushed the button and then I've said, fuck it, I'm not going to eat this. The diet's gone. I'm just going to eat everything now. I may as well eat the whole packet. But the bigger question when you were saying, why is it hard? I think part of the reason it's hard to lose weight is the world is actually now massively stacked against us. And we're not just fighting our own self-control because it's not about self-control. Losing weight is not about self-control. We're fighting a system where foods are designed to make us want to eat it. That bliss

34:43point, the perfect blend of sugar and salt and fat to make us want more, the more-ish element. We actually train ourselves, our parents train us and we train our kids that when you have a good thing at work or a good thing at school, you go out for food. You go and have ice cream. You go and have treats. We've actually trained ourselves. So the environment is massively stacked against us.

35:07So in the episode on the psychology of weight loss, we learned that lasting change isn't a quick fix.

The odyssey mindset and transformation

35:13It's a process you go through, which it turns out is the entire theme of the next episode we talked about. Because 3,000 years before a Zen pick, the Greeks had already worked out that transformation isn't an event, it's a journey. And nobody embodies that better than a man spending 10 years trying to get home from Troy. This is where I talked to Dr Sam Akbar about the psychology of the Odyssey, and in particular the psychology of the Odyssey mindset. In this episode, we began with Calypso,

35:46the goddess who offers Odysseus immortality, but only if he gives up the life he's trying to return to. Here's what Dr Akbar had to say. I think what I liked about your book is how much you do base it in real life, and your contemporary life as well. You mentioned AI, social media, Instagram, you know, all the things that we do talk about, whether it be for us, our children, and our behaviour. You do then link that back to lessons from the Odyssey again. So that's what I thought was really, you know, a wonderful accompaniment to

36:20the poem, and also the film, if that's what you've gone to see. Can you give us some examples of that? Because I think that would really come home for people. Okay, so one thing might be what I call the Calypso effect. So you don't see this in the film so much. But the story is Odysseus, after many struggles at sea, loses all his crew and is washed up on Calypso's island. Calypso is a nymph, a goddess, and she keeps him there. Now he has a rather

36:53jolly time at the beginning. I mean, one of the things that Nolan's films miss out is Odysseus is a lover, and not faithful to his wife. That makes a bit of a trickier Hollywood thing, doesn't it? So he stays there for seven years, but he really wants to go home. And she says to him, why do you want to go home? We have this wonderful life here. And she lives in this beautiful property on a lovely paradise island. Even when the gods visit her, they're like, wow, this is great.

37:25The gods who are coming from Olympus. She's foxy. She never ages. And she's saying to him, you know, I will make you immortal and ageless if you stay here with me. There's a wonderful moment where she says, and I bet I'm more beautiful than your wife. And I bet I'm taller than her. Yeah, I remember that bit in the poem. Yeah. And he's like, no, I want to go home to my human wife. But he's so tactful about how he says it. That's another great thing that Christopher Nolan hasn't included. And I accept you, you have

37:58to make the film that you're going to make. But Odysseus is so sort of suave about how he kind of rejects her. And what she's offering is this seemingly perfect life. And what the modern day equivalent of this Calypso effect is, is a life that is saying to us, have the stuff, have the house, have the car, have the extension, have the plastic surgery, have the clothes, have all the stuff that seems so appealing, but yet is hollow to you. Maybe to some people it isn't, it's meaningful,

38:34that's fine. But, but, you know, those are the examples I draw. That's the Calypso effect. It's this kind of trade off of saying, have the surface of what you want. But underneath it, she has taken away what it means to be human from him. He is a man who revels in being human. He doesn't, and Christopher Nolan draws out, he doesn't want to be a god. That's not who he is. This life is for gods, but I am immortal. I need meaning. And for us, the Calypso effect is, exists everywhere. We can

39:06have the trappings of what looks like a successful life, but without meaning, it's an empty bargain.

Penelope and resilience

39:15This episode wasn't all about Odysseus, because back in Ithaca, Penelope is fighting a very different battle. We looked at her intelligence, her resilience, and the psychology of waiting.

39:29So, of course, Penelope goes on her own odyssey. She might not ever leave the palace. She's what I call a loom-based hero. He's a sea-based hero. And one of the ways that I think about Penelope, and actually Christopher Nolan kind of draws this out in one of the lines he gives her, where I think, if I remember correctly, she says, men do what they want, women do what they can. And the way I've interpreted that for her, her, as many of your listeners will know, she's got this famous story,

40:02she buys herself time from having to choose a suitor by weaving her father's, father-in-law's funeral shroud, and by night she unweaves it. And for me, what I love about that is that it is a beautiful moment of resistance and resilience because she's showing great internal locus of control. She's saying to herself, or, you know, we don't hear her articulating it, but this is my interpretation, is that I am in a society and a system where I cannot wield the same power to

40:38effect change. So I'm going to have to do it in a different way. And this is how she's doing it. This is her act of resistance. And what I love about her is I feel like she's saying, I may be successful, I may not be, but I am not going down without a fight. This is who I am. And so, and I draw parallels with kind of how Martin Luther King has talked about how you subvert systems. You have to start with yourself. Don't let anyone tell you that you're nothing. And I think Penelope is a beautiful part of that resistance, that she's doing what she can

41:15to fight off these men in the cleverest way possible. And she may or may not be successful. So she is one element of a woman in a society where she has a limited sphere of control. And for all of the monsters, all of the heroics in the book and in the film, Odysseus spends a surprising amount of the poem actually crying. We explored what those tears tell us about masculinity,

41:45grief and survival. Now, it might just be my memory, and you've seen the film more recent, I saw it a couple of weekends ago, but I didn't, I don't remember Matt Damon crying as much in the film. Even when he watched his shipmates being gobbled up by monsters or turned into pigs or drowning around him, he wasn't a big crier. But is it important, again, going back to real life, for people to face that sadness? And why do you think maybe that's missing in the film? Well, that's exactly something I did notice, that the first time you see Odysseus in the poem,

42:20he's sitting alone on Calypso's Island and staring into the sea and crying. And this is how we meet this hero who's been built up and built up and built up, this great hero of Troy, and he's just crying and staring at the sea. And for me, that's a great moment that's actually been lost. And that's where, you know, he's lost the richness of Odysseus, because he feels all these difficult

42:50feelings. He quite often cries, Homeric heroes cry all the time. And so from how I have understood that is that's about a kind of ancient emotional intelligence. It's about being in touch with you, what you feel. It's about how it guides you to what's important to you. Homer never criticizes it. Odysseus never says to himself, well, I'm such a loser, I cry all the time. People occasionally say, we've cried enough now, let's have dinner. All right, fair, fair. So I do think that element is missing. Why has he left that out? I'm not quite sure. I think maybe did he feel he gave him that

43:28emotional vulnerability in other ways? So maybe through the scene with Penelope, how he thinks, you know, in flashback, what he remembers about his men. And I think it's something that's lost. I don't know quite why. I think there could have been more of that sort of the sadness. Yeah. Because I found it interesting. And I think I read about it in an article you were interviewed as well about sort of the modern interpretation sometimes of ancient Greek wisdom

44:01as what the stow bro stoicism. Yeah. And it's sold to young men as never show weakness. That's the thing to do. You're a stow bro. I mean, how wrong have they got that? Well, I mean, I think that's one interpretation of it. Certainly, I think that if you look at people who really are knowledgeable about stoicism, who write about it and research and philosophers, that's not what they're saying. I think there's a sort of strain of that, that has probably come

44:33out. But I don't think, you know, the stoicism is much more nuanced, I think, than that. But I do think it's sort of, why is, somebody asked me recently, why is that kind of thing so popular? And I think it replaces what religion had. There's something about stoicism that can, if you want it to, feel quite black and white and give you quite a good blueprint for what to do in different situations. And I think it gives you what maybe religion gave us once. And I think people

45:07are looking for that, especially in uncertain times where we don't have those religious or civic structures that maybe held us. We're looking for something about how do I, I need a set of rules through which I navigate life. After 20 years away from home, the first living thing to recognise

The psychology of dogs

45:27Odysseus when he finally gets there isn't his wife, and it isn't his son, it's his old dog, Argos, who'd been waiting for him the whole time and, you know, spoiler alert, dies right after the reunion. Now it's almost like Homer knew what our next episode was going to be, because actually the next episode was the psychology of dogs, where I talked to Professor Daniel Mills and behavioural animal trainer Hannah Grice. And first, we tackled the question I think every dog owner thinks they

45:59already know the answer to. Do dogs really love us, or have they simply worked out who controls the food? And as part of my research on this episode, I did a walkies online, and I consolidated lots of questions that people asked on Reddit and Quora to see what's the most asked question that people asked. And strangely, the most asked question, number one was, does my dog actually love me, or has it just worked out that I'm the one that opens the food? So are they manipulators,

46:30or do they actually love us? Well, with my Labrador, probably both. But what I would say is, yeah, I mean, I would say dogs love. And we've got to be careful how we sort of explain what that means. But certainly if I come home or an owner comes home and they're getting the whole full body waggle, we would see signs that we would say we would attribute to love. They're pleased to see us, they're happy to see us upon reunion, or happy to play with us. But I think in terms of food, if we kind of go back to reducing our relationship just about food,

47:07I think that's a disservice. Because God, if you look at the early work around cupboard love, and then Harlow's monkeys, he showed that actually those monkeys wanted to have the comfort of the blanket monkey rather than the wire monkey holding food. So you know, there has to be safety, there has to be trust, predictability in the relationship, warmth. And I think that's where the love then stems. But you can still have a client, I've got clients who absolutely adore their dogs, they love their dogs. And seemingly the behaviours of the dog towards them would,

47:42we could say a love. But at the same time, the dog may be destroying the house, or, you know, biting the owner when they've got a valued item. And that can be really confusing for clients. And that's when the relationship can break down. To carry on that topic of love, Daniel, I'm going to come to you on that, because you've mentioned earlier that when your dog owners look and gaze into each other's eyes, they get a spike of oxytocin, that bonding hormone. So is that love when the chemical romance kicks in?

48:12It's one of the things that contributes to that sense of love. Yeah. And, you know, I think I agree with Hannah that, you know, dogs love us, but in a doggy way. And that's, but that, it's, you know, some people do say, yeah, dogs are like cuckoos in the nest, they're just exploiting us in the same way as a cuckoo does. They're not, as I said, they're not thinking about it in that way. They have a bond with us. And when we think about bonds and relationships, you know, bond is a reason to be together. We spoke earlier about, you know, why dogs and humans come together and there's a mutual gain.

48:49Now that you can be very transactional about that and say, well, they're only interested in the resources, but actually bonds are often more than that. Humans, you know, yes, we might just have a business relationship, but actually that's a bit alien to dogs. So if you're going to work with someone, you have an affiliation with them. You know, that's the whole point of an affiliation is we're better together. We achieve more things together. It's a very human thing to sort of be cynical about that and say, well, you're just exploiting the niche because that's a cognitive

49:23process. Whereas these bonds are very emotional and they're certainly there. So when we think about a relationship, we can think about it in terms of, yeah, affiliation, which is we are better together. We can think about it in terms of caregiver and care receiver. I'm looking for you to provide me with things. I'm a care receiver. But also there's an element of, I will care for you. You've got a guard dog. So, and they will conceptualise the relationship if they're clear within those sort of boundaries and these can all come together.

49:56We also looked at behaviour that's often labelled as fear in dogs and why what a dog is actually experiencing may be frustration. The behaviour clients panic about most but shouldn't. Growling. It's useful information, tells us the dog's feeling uncomfortable, something needs to change. So a common mistake is punishing the growl because then the dog learns that's now

50:26unsafe to do it and we just have that really important warning signal. So we should never punish a growl, treat it as information and then work out what we need to stop that was happening in the first place that led to the growl. When writing the segues between episodes, I thought, actually, how am I going to get between the episode of the psychology of dogs into talking about the psychology of Harry Potter? Well, there is a big dog in Harry Potter and one of the characters spends the whole story disguised as a big black dog. That's about it, really. So that's it. The

The world of Harry Potter

51:02segues done. The final episode is about the psychology of Harry Potter, where I talked to Professor Will Brooker and Neela Matthews, who was a studio tour guide at the Harry Potter studio tour, and also a psychologist herself, about things such as what personalities do the Harry Potter characters epitomise? And also, what about the controversy surrounding Harry Potter and the author? In the episode, we asked the question every Harry Potter fan has asked themselves. Which Hogwarts house would

51:36the sorting hat choose for you? And for this, actually, I let AI have a go at asking a question of Professor Will Brooker. Talking about everyone has their view, an odd thing I do as part of this podcast is I feed AI with lots of information about the podcast, publicly available things. And then I ask it, what question would it ask each of you? And so, Will, I'm going to go with you first. AI has got a question for you,

52:07and it's this. I've read every Harry Potter book roughly 900 million times, and I have never once been sorted. I have no house. Nobody has made me a scarf. You study how people build an identity out of a story they didn't write. So tell me honestly, is the sorting hat reading something real in a person? Or is it just

52:37very good at telling people what they've already decided about themselves? Thank you, AI. You know, for a very clever machine learning brain, I think you've missed something there. You've given only two possibilities. I've thought about your question hard. It isn't a simple binary here. It isn't one or the other. And I've thought about this, and I'll tell you what I think. If you have the sorting hat on your head at age 10 or 11, you're not a fully formed human being at all. You're going to be a combination of different traits. And if you have a sorting hat

53:12on your head, and it says, right, you're in this house. This is the brave house. This is the studious house. This is the nice bumbling house. And this is the villainous house at age 11. And then it puts you in a club where you get like a scarf and a common room, and you get teachers who are very much like yourself. If you're going to get taught by Snape or so on, or McGonagall, you're going to become a certain sort of person. If when you are basically a child, you are told, okay, this is the thing you are. I'm going to put you in this club with all these other people. And these are the values of your

53:42house. And they go back centuries. And we've got all these diadems and artifacts and so on. You are going to become pretty much that kind of person. Neela Matthews then explained what fandom can give us psychologically, and why Harry Potter has even found a place in her therapy room.

54:04One of the things I do with Harry Potter is I do a lot of trauma healing, we do somatic work, vagus nerve work. And what I realized was when I talked to people that they would tell you something little and I would offer them an invitation to tell me what it meant to them. That would often, for me, lead to them telling me their life story and crying. Because it unpacks something for them, which was deeper, not just nostalgia, but maybe they had something with their mother or their grandmother or minded them of something. And that encoding was really important. And so I still use

54:39the books and the spells and I shift between, this is going to be weird for you, maybe will, but between science and spirituality and tell you why the spells work. I did a meditation in body movement in the Great Hall. I was really privileged to do that, to help people with their entrainment of energy. But what is really lovely is we're talking in the same language in lexicon. It's almost like you've bridged something where you don't need to get to know anyone, which is what happens in fandom. It's probably, you get that in the con, the, all of the cons, the super fan.

55:10And I love Star Wars. And there's a, it's almost like, let the force be with you. We all know what that means. You know, we lean into that and it feels like you're part of that. And I think it was the same with Harry Potter. So I can say, right, what you need to do is when that person comes and they're like a dementor working there, dementors actually like depression. It sucks the life out of you. And when I'm talking to people, you understand what that means.

55:38And of course, we couldn't discuss Harry Potter's legacy without addressing how the public conversation around J.K. Rowling has affected some readers' relationship with the world that she created.

55:50I'd like, I'd like to make a point and kind of address an elephant in the room here, to be honest with you. If I'm talking about Star Wars to people, I fully, fully agree about this. But if I say to someone, you know, do you prefer the sequels or the prequels or so on? I agree that with a Star Wars fan, that can create an immediate kind of common language. However, with Harry Potter, a lot of people think J.K. Rowling is one of the most hateful people on earth. And they think that the whole mythology is transphobic and also racist and various other prejudices. To the point that this

56:21week on social media, I've seen people saying they're going to boycott Tim Hortons for doing a sponsorship deal with a new HBO. But I think Harry Potter is so unusual, perhaps even unique, in that with some people, it can completely bring them into a world where they feel safe. And for other people, I'm not actually one of these, but I see a lot of it, they feel entirely unsafe. And they feel this is a story which to them represents hate and alienation and oppression. Rowling is using her money to fund

56:54causes which want to wipe out their very existence. That is really extreme, isn't it?

Closing thoughts and season wrap

57:02So that was the best bits of season two. A spy who's nothing like a real spy. A childhood memory that grites the adult that you become. A diet that only works once you stop calling it a diet. A 3,000-year-old poem that still knows exactly what you're going through. A dog that can read you better than your therapist does. And a wizarding world half of us still measure our own lives against. Different guests, different weeks, very, very wildly different topics, but the same questions

57:33just kept surfacing. Who are we? Who and what shapes us? And why do we fall so hard for the stories, real or fictional, that tell us who we could be? If you've made it this far, thank you very much for spending time with me and going over some of the conversations we've had through the episodes in this season. You can obviously go back and listen to all of these in full, and I would really encourage you to do so if any of these you found interesting. I am Paul Davis, this has been Everything Psychology, and I'll see you in the next season.