Neuroscientist: How To Escape The Rat Race | Robert Sapolsky

I woke up and said oh I get it there's no God and there's no free will I wasted my first 20 years out there showing that if you were high ranking you had lower levels of stress hormones lower blood pressure and it took me about 20 years out there to begin to realize your rank is nowhere near the most important thing it's what does your rank mean in your particular troop if you've got a choice and you want to have nice low stress hormone levels and live to ripe old age don't choose to be high

ranking choose to have a whole lot of social affiliation where you actually can gain psychological benefit from it I spent 20 years thinking while I was learning about was like go be a big successful capitalist baboon or something in the hierarchy but the good thing is it's not that hard to change your categories or to change it in somebody else so I always start my interviews talking about the early days and you know we're going to ultimately get into a conversation about how there's no such thing as free will that's that's the I think the

foundation of your your latest work and um and how everything that we're experiencing in life right now individually and maybe even as a society is predetermined based on a million variables So to that end would you would you do us an uh the honor of of just telling us how your upbringing sort of predetermined where you ended up now in life I know that I know that you're from Brooklyn and I know that you were you grew up uh as an orthodox Jew but now you're an atheist and there were some things that happened 12

13 14 years old that were very pivotal in in that uh in that shift in your in your life so can you can you talk a little bit about that yeah it was you know the usual that kind of does in somebody's religiosity when they're like looking at the details and extending them and seeing that there's all sorts of irreconcilable uh sort of conflicts that come up in it um the the the key thing for me was you know more more people have lost their faith during reading about Exodus because what did the horses do

why do they have to drown the horses why do they have to drown the first borns um and that usually is is the problem that comes up there um my version was Moses goes to Pharaoh after one of the plagues and Pharaoh says Uncle I give up okay you guys can go and then God hardens Pharaoh's heart and Pharaoh changes his mind and say no you guys can't go so another plague on Egypt and Moses goes to him and Pharaoh says okay this time except God hardens his heart and wait a second he's like forget

the horses and the babies like anyone there is getting punished because of an external thing controlling his behavior and then God judges and you know the usual sort of none of this makes any sense and um that and some more sort of personal aspects of all of it just kind of combined to one night at two in the morning I woke up and said oh I get it there's no God and there's no Free Will and the universe is this big empty and different place and that's kind of where I've been at ever since so

you were only a teenager at the time um were you vocal about this new understanding of the world at that time and did you get pushed back from your parents or from your teachers or whoever you talked to about this or or is this something you kind of kept to yourself um mostly kept to myself um my parents pretty much went to their graves many years later not knowing I was an atheist because you know why bother they're they're all all that's good to do is upset them you know it's not that important um you

know the rest of the world I was pretty soon surrounded by a sufficiently sort of educated left leaning cynical crowd so that none of that stuff seemed very surprising it certainly wiped out my capacity to listen to teaching from rabbis and your mom took you to see uh to the Natural his history museum I'm assuming to see some primates and that sort of lit up something inside of you H how did that how did you explain that with this this sort of atheism's belief how do you how did you explain that sense of excitement or

inspiration well I sort of uh fixated on primates uh you know was my goto what do you want to do for your birthday take me to the Museum of Natural History that was just Heaven um I kind of imprinted on primates quite a few years earlier than that and I don't know what it was something about like these animals and these African diaramas like I just wanted to live inside there I did not want to live in my neighborhood in Brooklyn I was not having a good time um suddenly a place like that seemed like

the most like wonderful place to escape to and maybe even be a non-human primate in the process uh so I happen to imprint on mountain gorillas and I I still remember the you know the diarama which is probably a0 years old now that sort of I looked at it and said ah I want to be there I want to be with them that that mountain bag that's Silverback mountain gorilla there that's that's the nearest thing I'm ever going to have to a grandfather there we go that's what I want to do you also wrote in

your book your recent book about depression and how you first started experiencing that as a teenager so was there something that happened maybe in unassociated with any of this that yeah um I would say it had much to do with deciding there's no God there's no Free Will and 's no purpose to anything that sort of sent me in a downward spiral that I've been sort of mucking around and ever since that that seemed I don't know that that sort of struggling in a book where I'm hoping to convince people there's no free will whatsoever

um that's the pretty dangerous outcome because if we're just biological machines the search for meaning is pretty damn challenging and all of that and and I did not particularly have the psychological means as a 15-year-old to kind of handle all that but yeah that that is readily where that takes one and just give us a little montage and I'm working my way up to your work but just a little Montage of of how your life sort of unfolded from there you obviously went and got educated you became an academic and Etc and you went to

the to Kenya you know 21 but just give us a little idea of how all that happened or maybe the motivation behind all of that because it seems like you've been very focused since you were you know a teenager on this one thing and I'm just I'm just curious how that played out pretty focused I I uh when I was still like 15 I called up this professor at University of Chicago who was a major primatologist like at home saying hi I love your stuff if I be if I'm able to come to your uh

University can I work with you um and they seemed very puzzled and ironically 20 years later I spent a summer working at their field site um I was writing fan letters to primatologists I wrote one to Dean FY who never answered but just imprinted on that I I managed to get my high school to agree to give me a language credit for a self-paced Swahili course because I knew I was heading for East Africa uh went to college to study instead of with the the the University of Chicago baboon Grand puas the Harvard Grand puah

and worship at his feet um and I sort of brown noosed with him from the day I got there sufficiently so that four years later he said what the hell let's let's send you out to this field site he had a a grad student who's finishing his thesis there uh with the baboon so I kind of overlapped a bit and inherited The Troop um I would say the biggest complication that came up was freshman year somewhat arbitrarily I took an intro Neuroscience class and got blown away by that and suddenly uh it seemed equally interesting

to try to understand behavior and volition and who we are and search for meaning blah blah all of that from the standpoint of brains than from the standpoint of evolutionary biology so ever since I've been kind of being a half-ass neurobiologist and half-ass primatologist just oscillating between the two um because it was kind of clear by then intellectually Neuroscience was more interesting to me uh getting to just go and like lived with wild primates for three months a year um there was no way I was giving that up so sort of a lot of my

effort over the years has been trying to tie the two ends together hey so a lot of you all have been reaching out with your guest suggestions and look I appreciate it I do and to help make it easier for those guests to say yes to my invitation I need you to subscribe to this channel just hit the Subscribe button below and that's literally the best way to help me get you that guest on my podcast all right thank you so much for helping out and back to the show when it comes to primates can

you talk a little bit about the difference in baboons chimps monkeys Apes like why did you choose baboons as opposed to any other primates yeah I kind of got stuck with them against my will I really wanted mountain gorillas um who with the most amazing animals on Earth and they're phenomenal um but I W up with baboons because they're vastly easier to study the department had a grad student doing babony uh the main person doing mountain gorillas was very psychiatrically unstable famously so uh Dan FY and uh everybody told me do not go anywhere near

her and that site um that's wildly unstable um but but I was initially bummed out with a baboon mountain gorillas probably if I had like hung out with mountain gorillas for 30 years I would become some sort of Buddhist monk by then they're incredibly some projecting on my part of introspective they have very low levels of aggression they're there're these ruminating wonderful and baboons are these like hysterical backstabbing sons of all they do is like have major conflict and betray their coalitional partners and bite somebody who did nothing because they're in a bad mood um

and that actually turned out to be wonderful baboons have these big troops 50 to 100 animals uh males who all grew up elsewhere and showed up in adolescence to transfer in females who spend their whole life in the same troop so females these complicated lineages and who you're mom is and matriarchs and males just showing it up showing up and just punching it out savagely with each other uh thereafter and it wound up being perfect because sort of this was my bridge between the lab work and the field work studying stress um I W up

being extremely interested in what stress does to the brain and what it has to do with brain aging and dementia and depression and things like that and that's kind of where my lab stuff went um and the field stuff went in the direction of trying to understand see you got these baboons they got different social ranks which is incredibly important they got different patterns of social affiliate they got different personalities all of that so given that who gets the stress related diseases and what does it do with how their bodies are working where I was

able to Dart anesthetize them and do all sorts of clinical tests why were they perfect because like baboons living out in the seretti this is like the greatest place on Earth to be a baboon there's like tons of food you only have to forage about three hours a day to get your day calories the Predators don't mess with you much because you're in these big troops infants usually survive all of that and the key implication was if you only have to spend three hours a day getting your food you've got nine hours of free time

every day to devote to being total jerks to each other and just generating psychological stress and social stress and for 99% of beasts out there what stress is about is somebody's trying to eat you or there's a famine or whatever bab wounds were just like westernized humans they've got the luxury of sitting around and they can generate spend all day long generating psychosocial nonsense with each other and overwhelmingly like if you're a baboon and you've got elevated levels of stress hormones it's not because a lion is chasing you it's because some other baboon has been

working really hard to make you miserable they're totally schemy and backstabbing and awful and while that made them kind of hard to turn me into a Buddhist monk um it was perfect for studying a model of like westernized stress none of us die of famines anymore and the privileged West we all get these diseases of lifestyle of you know slow accumulation of damage reflecting stress and so do the baboons they get high blood pressure they get problems with ulcers their immune systems don't work as well as a function of who they are in the hierarchy

and what their personalities are and what their patterns of social affiliation are and so they turned out to be great sort of model for us yeah I've read one your book um that they're very obviously social creatures can they have a casual exchange like you and I are having right now or or how do they communicate is it mostly through body language and gesturing and GRS um body language gesturing the thing that trumps everything in terms of baboon Paradise is when they're grooming each other uh social grooming is like not only gets rid of like

parasites in the guy groom and you gets to eat it then gross um but more importantly grooming is like socially calming you know they get a a a close scare with a lion or something and then immediately afterward everyone spends 15 minutes grooming each other just to kind of calm down um and what winds up then being interesting with that is who's grooming who and who's getting groomed back how much and is it being reciprocated and that's where you see the baboon inequality coming through big time um there's all sorts of gestural stuff where somebody

like rubs somebody else's nose in their low rank just because you can you force them into some sort of subordinate gesture thing while you're doing a dominant vocalization thing that you know they're going about their business all day a lot of it being social interaction social comp competition social support some nice altruistic stuff amid close relatives some miserably aggressive stuff between individuals who aren't related um yeah we you'll get is an example of this sort of the psychological stress of it you get a low-ranking female she's sitting there and she has to spend 30 seconds

digging some root thing out of the ground to eat it and now she's digging another one and Along Comes the highest ranking female in the troop walks over to her glares at her and the low ranking one has to get up and move 10 feet away and our high ranking matriarch sits down there for a minute and the low ranking one now finds a new spot and starts digging in there and the high ranking one comes over and boots are out they will spend an hour just booting her around there's a hundred billion Blades of

grass everywhere you look it's not resource acquisition it's just I think I'm going to hassle her and that's what's going on all day there when this is happening where are you are you sitting in a truck with some binoculars or yeah basically in a notebook doing that whole chain good all scene um you know this was a troop fortunately that was habituated so you could be uh you could hang out in the middle of them without them being disturbed you you were some sort of large mobile Boulder or something uh it was even possible to

do some stuff on foot with them which you didn't do a ton of just because of uh danger of other animals and such but yeah they'd just be going about this I mean as a great example of like the misery in their society the majority of baboon aggression is displaced aggression which is to say you are number three you just got in your head to challenge number two he is just trashed you and you spin around and you attack number five who spins around and chases number 10 who spins around and bites a female who

spins around and knocks somebody else's infant out of a tree all in 15 seconds just rolling downhill like that and what that means is like huge elements of psychological stress are lack of control and lack of predictability and you're sitting there minding your own business and somebody else is having a bad day and without any predictability and warning and without any control you get your rear end slashed um so it's like it's an amazing landscape for just grinding psychological stress because they got nothing else to do because their stomachs are full and like they can't

go predate something because they're not very good at that and no one will mate with them so why don't I go just hassle someone because I can right and you went to Harvard right so I I I I read I read a lot as a meditation person I've read a lot about Herbert Benson's work Dr Benson's work and I know he studied uh he was one of I don't know if he was Walter Canon's Protege or he studied in the lab the Canon lab but apparently Walt Dr Walter Canon was the guy who coin fight

flight reaction and he studied I'm not sure which primates he studied but from what I could tell he studied some primates in a laboratory setting yeah and exposed them to Electric shocks or something like that so what my question is your research obviously is in the field and you're studying primates in their natural habitat how what what what Revelations did your work um due to further Dr Canon's initial work on the fight flight reaction or the stress response yeah he's one of the two gods of stress physiology the other was this guy Han cier um

there's sort of two branches to the stress response there's the sympathetic nervous system and that was Canon's deal and then there's these glucorticoid hormones like cortisol hydrocortisone um and that was so's contribution and ever since the canites and the cellulites have been fighting over which branch is more important um and I'm definitely of the uh the gluc corticoid branch but I thought initially what I was going to go out and show was like if you get a choice in the matter you want to be a high ranking baboon because you got all the psychological advantages

you've got control you got predictability you got Outlets if you're having a crummy day you can always get somebody to groom you and you don't have to groom them back because you're high ranking that sort of thing all sorts of psychological advantages there and I wasted my first 20 years out there showing that um showing if you were high ranking you had lower levels of stress hormones lower blood pressure your reproductive endocrine system worked better all sort so it seemed like okay what's the big lesson go out and compete and winwin win and be dominant

and it took me about 20 years out there to begin to realize your rank is nowhere near the most important thing it's what does your rank mean in your particular troop different troops have different cultures and that's not like a oh my God Disney Bambi sort of termed it's that's like a legitimate term these days terms of how readily do you get dumped on if you're low ranking some troops it happens all the time and others it never so what's your rank what does it mean in terms of what kind of culture is it in

your Tru how stable is the hierarchy what's your personality do you see threat everywhere are you type a and in a very literal way or are you able to tell the difference between a threatening circumstance and a neutral one and it turns out more of the physiology the stress physiology is explained by that one variable than your dominance rank like if you're sitting there and your worst rival on the whole planet shows up and takes a nap 50 yards away if that makes you crazed and agitated and you stop doing whatever it is you were

doing and you're all anxious and you're GNA have like two three times the cortisol levels in your bloodstream as somebody of the same rank who can sit there and say the guys snapping this is not a big deal this is I if you see threat everywhere you've got a much more active stress response independent of your rank and it was a bigger predictor a bigger variable of that um could you get some control and social circumstances that was a predictor as well did you have social affiliation how often was there somebody you could go like

lean next to and it turned out that all of that stuff personality cultural context of the group uh situational stuff is social affiliation all of those were more powerful predictors than rank itself like if you've got a choice and you want to have nice low stress hormone levels and like live to ripe old age if you're some like male baboon don't choose to be high ranking choose to have a whole lot of social affiliation and of the type where where you actually can B gain psychological benefit from it like you're agitated because somebody just did

something mean to you and if your most likely response is you go displace aggression onto somebody else that's not a great Outlet if it's to go sit down next to somebody you get along with and maybe you're even in physical contact and maybe even one of you Grooms the other that's the far more effective way of doing it and it's showed in their bodies so so I spent 20 years thinking all I was learning about was like go be a big successful capitalist baboon or something in the hierarchy and like it social affiliation and cultural

context had so much more to do with it well I would say also you were learning about the fact that uh Free Will is not as simple as we we like to think it is and and you know you put a lot of emphasis on the prefrontal cortex which as anyone who studied stress knows that if you don't have access to your prefrontal cortex then everything reroutes to your Amala which gives you basically two options to run away or to fight and when we look at how outcomes happen we can usually trace it back this

is the from what I understand this is the essence of your work we could trace it back to access to that part of the brain so that plays a pivotal role in this idea of of of uh Free Will right so you've written you've written like eight best-selling books and this your most recent one is called determined and I guess it's it's good to Pivot to that to to that um work now determine a science of life without Free Will which is very triggering for a lot of people this idea that there's no such thing

as uh as free will so I guess we can start with just talking about that like what do you mean by Free Will and what do you mean by there's no such thing as free will I think where people get into trouble is two Realms where they decide they're seeing free will because it just feels like it and where they're not and where that gets you into trouble the first one is when you actually make a choice you form an intent and you choose something you're choosing between Coke and Pepsi you're choosing between invading this

neighbor or that neighbor neighbor whatever it is you're make and you form an intent you're consciously aware that you're making this decision um you got a pretty good sense what the consequences are going to be most importantly you know nobody's holding a gun to your head you've got Alternatives available to you and for most people and the criminal justice system that's necessary and sufficient to say that's it there's free will there's responsibility there's culpability which gives me app plexy at that point because that's like a tenth of 1% of what you need to be paying

attention to because you look at somebody who just had this intent and They carried it out and they knew it was going to have this effect and they knew they could have done otherwise and you're learning zero unless you ask the question how did they turn out to be the sort of person who would form that intent at that moment and that's 99.9% of what goes on and we have this this intuitive trap of it feeling so tangible when you've just chosen between this or that when you've decided what you want to do and you

choosing you that most of the time we're not thinking how did I turn out to be somebody who would have that desire that intent at that point and that's where all the free will disappears the other domain which is the the quick sound for everyone is like you look at someone who's had some lousy luck and adversity and all of that and somehow they reinvent themselves they pull themselves up by their bootstraps they show incredible self you know these these heartwarming stories or you look at somebody who has had every possible advantage and they just

piss it away with self-indulgence and there's this huge huge huge Temptation there to think that when it comes to self-discipline and backbone and gumption and all of that that's not made of biology that's magic that's free will like biology may have something to do with you know whether you're good at playing LaCrosse or whatever weird sports are happening right now in France you know but that's that tells you nothing about who's going to push through the pain and do it and that's where we get back to the prefrontal cortex what you the attributes you wound

up with are purely biological interaction with environment and what you do with them purely biological self-control self-discipline all of that is made out of the same biology yuck as is anything else in your brain and it's all coming out of the prefrontal cortex like every time life has you in a position where like you got to make a choice and there's a smarter one but the other one's more tempting the choice that you wind up making is entirely a function of how do you wind up getting to that point how do you wind up with

a prefrontal cortex that would have the power or not that would have the values or not as to what counts as self-discipline all of that and what we know is that's the realm in which for a billion different reasons you had no control over what life handed you in that regard it's starting with being a fetus like a mother's socioeconomic status is already influencing the rate of cortical development in her fetus like o use some free will I'm G to pick to be in the womb of somebody of high socioeconomic status so I get born

with already the starts of a great prefrontal at the moment of birth all of this you had no control over the circumstances that produced the you who you are at this moment was already in effect and where that plays out most dramatically is at those junctures and where you got to make a choice and if you do the impulsive disinhibited one it's going to seem wonderful for three seconds and you may regret it for the rest of your life just at every juncture where we have that moment what we're doing is saying what kind of

prefrontal Cortex did our cumulative bad luck and good luck starting with the time that we were a single fertilized egg have to do with like what I'm dealing with here in that moment when I was eight or nine years old um the experience that sort of made me start questioning these kinds of things as well is I was on a we were on a family vacation driving from Alabama where I'm from to Chicago and we took this detour in Kentucky to go see uh there were these Billboards saying come and see Abraham Lincoln's log his

birthplace and it showed a picture of his log cabin on the billboard and it was like 10 miles in the opposite direction so we took a family vote we decided to go and see Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace because why not and we get to this parking lot and there's a warehouse in the middle of the parking lot looks like a Lowe's building or Home Depot or something and we walk in and there's a log cabin that's roped it's cording off in the middle of the warehouse and it's got all these little artifacts inside of it and

I started asking questions you know so how did you all get it did you just buil this structure around where the lock cabin was or they go no we actually we relocated it to the structure I said oh that's interesting um so all of these are this whole thing is from you found it in the woods well actually no it came from the same place that his cabin would have existed and anyway long story short none of it was the original anything and that's when you noticed it was made out of Legos well I I

noticed that everything was all these stories that we tell ourselves about anything you know if you look in quotes history and you ask enough questions and you dig deeply enough you'll start to see that hey somebody just made this up one day somebody just made up the calendar somebody just made up this religion somebody just made up this this belief system marriage the marriage construct you know so I started asking those kinds of questions at that age and I've I my my personal philosophy on this is that people you just have to choose something that

serves you and so this idea of choosing to believe that there is Free Will doesn't make it any more real than choosing to believe that there's not free will but I I find it that as a scientific mind you know things obviously have to make sense and so you've you've kind of drawn this conclusion or this connection between this idea between of no free will to you know having access to this part of your brain and I don't think people appreciate how much not having access to that part of the brain actually leads to certain

outcomes in their life that are not very desirable exact and how much of what you're going to do in that moment is a function of what was happening to that a minute ago and an hour ago and a year ago and back when you were an adolescent and that whole deal there because you know you have like every single part of your body you have a completely unique prefrontal cortex um and it happened it happened by by good luck and bad luck which don't balance each other out each one tends to amplify the other um

each one tends to amplify itself um and yeah that's exactly it in that moment um I'm impressed you had like a five it reminded me of the Fable of the turtles that you open your book with I think that'd be genius if you could share that Fable of the turtles because I think that perfectly illustrates the essence of the book I start the book with like this par that I thought was totally great in college um and it's so ingrained in me almost certainly I'm you saying it word for word from how we used to

say it so it seems that the philosopher it seems that William James was giving a lecture about the nature of the universe and afterward an old woman comes up and says Professor James you had it all wrong the world is actually on the back of a gigantic turtle and to which he said oh well Madam in that case where does that Turtle stand and she said on another turtle and he said oh but Madam where does that Turtle stand and she said it's no use Professor James it's Turtles all the way down which you know

as a starting point in the book is that's totally like ludicrous ridiculous all of that it's much more ludicrous and ridiculous to decide that somewhere down there there's a turtle floating in the air and that floating in the air is that you can do something free of your history you could be an uncaused cause vague definitions of you could be showing Free Will whatever it is you're doing it occurred because it's Turtles all the way down there is the idea behind making this case for no such thing as free will is it to lead to

an egalitarian society or what is what is the idea yeah in a sense I mean after after people well I should point out that I'm I have about as extreme of a stance on this as you'll get anybody in sort of the the brain Sciences type stuff there there's other people who are at the same point but there's a whole lot of people who would kind of say well you know there's maybe some circumstances where there's exceptions I've staked out an extreme stance here and saying that there's none whatsoever um so what do you do

with that um what do you do with that and like what's the world supposed to look like if oh my God people actually started believing that and half the book the second half of the book is that and that was the much harder half for me to write of working through like what's how are we supposed to function what should Society look like and what I have to spend a lot of time there is the things that are not going to happen as disasters everyone immediately say oh my God you're just gonna have murderers running

around on the streets obviously not there's a way to protect Society from dangerous people without telling the dangerous people they have rotten Souls it's a quarantine model and it's straight out of Public Health sort of stuff oh my God okay that but then everybody else is to run them up because you can't be held responsible for anything everyone will just become antisocial and there's a whole literature of research on that showing that in effect for the first five minutes you're going to run a muck and once you've had the chance to think about it and

especially grow up with these ideas you will have just as ethical of standards as somebody who believes we should be held responsible for our every action um in the exact same way that sort of par people who are atheists people say oh my God they're going to run them up and be so immoral because they don't think there's anyone who can hold them responsible and that's what people do for the first five seconds or the first five years and them deciding there is no God but you give them enough time and they are exactly as

ethical in their behavior as people who are highly highly religious you've just found your meaning through a different route there okay so that's not going to be a problem then people freak out and they saywell if everything's determined nothing can ever change don't bother and that's like a critical point that like of course we change massive change occurs but we are not choosing to exercise free will when we suddenly form a new opinion we have been changed by circumstance and we've been changed by it as a function of who we turned out to be at

the moment that we experience that circumstance so with all of those like things in place of things not to panic about and change can actually happen but it works very differently than people think it does if you believe in free will we're not going to run a muck we don't have murderers running around everywhere we can get through that I think what you're left with is exactly what you were alluding to which is if you believe in Free Will it means you're okay with some people being treated way better than the average human for reasons

they had nothing to do with and other people being treated way worse and if you really go for this there's no free will stuff blame and Punishment are intellectually and ethically gibberish praise and reward are as well feeling as if you have earned anything that anyone has earned anything that you were entitled to anything that there's such a thing as Justice being carried at that there's such a thing as Justice none of that makes any sense at all and you got to navigate stuff from there which is where the oh my God how are we

supposed to function with that and what seems clear is like you know I I haven't believed in this Free Will stuff since I was a kid and most of the time my first reflex is to op operate like an entitled like westernized American what you know I think this way and I can't function this way most of the time it takes a whole lot of work to say wait a second think about like what it is that you had no control over that got you into this like wonderfully advantageous Place think about that person you

were just having a judgment about all of that and you know what we're left with is it's going to be Mighty hard for everyone to decide there's no free will tomorrow and thus Society just takes off from there with no more prisons and no more meritocracy and no more CEOs with Corner offices and no more yeah it's going to be incredibly hard um but what I try to hammer through in that latter part of the book is over and over historically we have identified Realms where turn turns out we don't have free will people do

stuff that they had no control over and each time we figure that out and come up with what would be a biological explanation not only doesn't Society fall apart the world becomes more Humane we figured out that old ladies with no teeth don't have the power to control the weather by casting witch crafter whatever and so it's not the 15th century anymore and burning people at the stakes when there's sudden a storm in the middle of July good you know we figured out witches don't exist they don't have the power to control the weather and

it's a much better world that we don't burn old ladies at the stake anymore we figured out at some point that having an epileptic seizure is not a sign that you were possessed by Satan and that's good we stopped you know stop burning epileptics at the stake as well we figured out at some point mothers don't cause schizophrenia in their children it's not their fault because they unconsciously hate their child it's a neurogenetic disorder and as soon as that was sorted out hundreds of thousands of mothers of people with schizophrenia were absolved from you had

no control it had nothing to do with it you it's not your fault and then we figured out you know chronologically in my own lifetime after I was like a school kid some decades later like some kids don't learn how to read very well not because they're lazy or stupid or unmotivated but they got this screwy neurological thing called dyslexia like you can actually look in a microscope of like somebody's cortex and you will see the abnormal oh they're not lazy they're they got screwed in another way some people are screwed with it this is

this is the bad luck that they got handed and not only like was that a great realization because you could get some insights now into how to teach somebody how to read more effectively if they have a learning difference and you know efficacy all of that but mainly you're not raising people thinking that they're stupid unmotivated like that you get all these 40y olds who say yeah I I got a dyslexia diagnosis last year God if I could only have gotten that when I was in in fifth grade I've spent my whole life hating myself

thinking that I'm just lazy and not smart if only I could have found out then and every time we figure out one of those we're I don't know 20 years into figuring out that people are not exercising free will when they decide they fall in love with somebody of their sex or the opposite sex people are not exercising free will when they decide they've always felt like they're a different sex than their body says they are like okay that all we're doing with each one of these yeah we're not going to figure out tomorrow how

to completely get rid of a sense of free will because it'll be like sheer utter chaos but we're doing this step by step and each time the world becomes more Humane and it's like a much better world not only is the world not falling apart it's much better that like Southern Baptists don't try to do conversion therapy on their like gay teenage Sons anymore or like you know beat Satan out of them for that you know in all these cases it becomes better so we got to just keep pushing and doing more and more of

that because all sorts of Realms where it seems intuitively obvious right now to us that somebody chose to do they could have done otherwise people in the future are going to look back on that and say exactly here's the pathways by which that person turned out to be who they were and why they had no control over what they did at that point and oh what barbarians people were back in the early 21st century imprisoning some people and punishing them based on not understanding this or telling other people that they are better more worthy humans

because they turn out to be smart at something and thus can do a successful hostile takeover of somebody's Corporation or you know they'll look back on us with that same sort of view so we got to just keep pushing against it and keep assuming anytime you think you know why somebody has just done something anytime you think you understand what the attribution is you're almost certainly wrong and you're almost certainly looking at it way too Blinder because you got to think about stuff way way unexpected and below the surface and subliminal and ancient and nuanced

and all of that and you probably don't have a clue the things that went into making them who they are at that moment and why they did what they did just playing Devil's Advocate I I actually personally agree with everything you're saying for the most part but let's say you have a you have a spiritualist someone who believes in Karma and Dharma and and life purposes and sacred spiritual contracts and these kinds of things what if they said the same about you that you're looking at this idea of life from very narrow bandwidth and that

you probably have some blind spots and things you're not seeing I'm sure you've encountered this because you've been talking about this forever you've been written about it in all your yes yes just just put a dime in my right ear and you'll get a 30 second lecture about this once the the gears start moving yeah you know when how do you defend yourself against your own argument of well I don't have to invoke a notion of free will to try to explain how I wound up the way I am I can see where a lot

of the gears and levers were I can see some of it having to do with my brain something having to do with my upbringing some with the culture some with my genes you know I can you know there's all sorts of pieces I don't understand but I can kind of see how it turned out this way and how I had nothing to do with it and am not particularly worthy of praise and am not particularly worthy of blame for the things I'm crappy about um yeah I could turn that on myself and it's all within

you know a very mechanistic framework which as you say puts me a gazillion light years away from a sort of spiritual approach to thinking about this stuff um you know I turn into like you know dead white male scientist when saying show me the nuts and bolts of how a spiritual phenomenon works in your head and you know there's all sorts of Neuroscience we know now that we're all cocky and arrogant about that we couldn't begin to think about 50 years ago so maybe this will get explained also in near-death experiences there will be a

neurobiology of all you know that may come but at least for me it's all in the context that we're these biological machines we're really complicated ones we're really vulnerable ones we're really sensitive to environment that we interact with um but like that's kind of all we're made of you have some Concepts in the book and and by the way I I really enjoyed the writing I found it I found it um refreshingly um self-deprecating and just I mean it had a little bit of a text book academic component as well some of the diagrams and

stuff but the way you write is very irreverent self-deprecating there there are plenty of times where I'm insufficiently self-deprecating and my wife could probably give you all sorts of examples of that but that's nice that you decided that um it just makes it easier for someone like me to read like I'm not interested in getting a degree in this stuff you know but you want to try to understand it well enough and and you talk about some really relevant Concepts especially relevant with everything that's going on today and I wanted to just uh double click

on the joy of punishment section because you talk about Justice and I think this can really bring it home for a lot of people especially a lot of black people hearing about these kinds of of of Concepts you talk about the the hungry judge effect but but you also talk about lynching and all kinds of of things so I would say just pick your favorite example from that section of the book and and let's let's talk about how that relates to this idea of determinism you take people and you put them in a mock jury

and they are trying to decide whether or not somebody committed a crime and it's all about their prefrontal cortex activation they decide they did commit a crime and now they get to decide the punishment and that's all about the limic system the emotional parts of the brain that's where the froth comes out that's where you see emotional brain regions have made a decision when you're doing brain Imaging before your cortex is catching up to give an explanation for it and sort of the backdrop to a lot of that is you know mammals like to punish

like when a rat you know when a rat get lever pressed to get another rat a shock if the other rat has bitten it um not only will it lever press not only will it work to punish that rat but you can show there's activation of dopamine reward pathway is when that's happening the same exact thing in us like an incredibly powerful stimulant to the whole dopamine reward part of your brain is not only getting to punish somebody but feeling good about yourself when you're doing it feel as if Justice is being served and you

are you know and anytime you try to unpack people's sense of what counts where is retribution appropriate and my view is it's never appropriate but what that is always just pickled in is people like to punish people like to blame people prefer to do that decreases your stress hormone levels you know we it's a bizarre feature of us almost certainly evolutionarily what it's about is um what's called third-party punishment in Game Theory you get two individuals and one of them is crummy to the other and this one has an option to take revenge and that

could pull for cooperation a great way to get for cooperation is if you have a third- party individual as an objector outside or viewing it who's able to punish the one who is a jerk as soon as you bring in third-party punishment into sort of economic gains that really pushes for cooperation what's third party punishment that's the police that's your school teachers voice in your head all of that but the trouble is in formal Game Theory it's costly to punish I mean in all of these scenarios you were willing to give up a certain number

of points that you have in order to take points away from that creep you have to pay it is costly to be a third party Punisher so where have we in evolved the the uh reasons to actually select for it first people who are third party punishers are trusted more when you observe people being third party punishers you're more Cooperative with them but the other thing is you evolved a system where it feels good to be a third-party Punisher that's exactly like that's where it came from punishment is costly detach third party punishment which is

one of the most effective things out there to get organisms to start being cooperative is costly to this like objective bystander sort of thing how do you make that work evolutionarily it had to turn out that punishing especially when it is like in a sense of tremendous selfworth and goodness and all of that feels good and anything we think about a system of supposed Justice um has to not only incorporate all the ways in which we are irrational when it comes to considering someone who we unconsciously consider to be a them rather than an us

all that sort of thing and then superos on top like the final frosting is we like to punish and we have a cortex that's very good at coming up with supposed rational explanations for why our affective emotive yic pleasure in punishment actually makes a great deal of sense after the fact and even little seemingly intangible things like whether or not the person who's in charge of this has eaten lunch is going to determine the degree of the punishment yeah all of this stuff going on subliminally like there's all these levers that are being turned on

and off or buttons being pushed pushed or whatever in the biological machines that we are due to totally unexpected influences but yeah if you're uh if you stand before a judge in the United States and they're hungry the whole literature by now shows they are going to be less merciful if you stand before a judge in Saudi Arabia and they're hungry because they haven't eaten yet they're going to be less merciful to you if you stand before them and they're hungry because it's Ramadan they're going to be more merciful to you the longer they haven't

eaten culture and values and how much your stomach is gurgling and what that means and does that mean you should be able to just throw this guy back in jail so you can go get a you know McDonald's or does it mean that your stomach is gurgling because you were reminded of your piety and like all of this stuff is playing out whoa you get the exact opposite results depending on if you're in a court in you know Kansas City or in Mecca the exact yeah stuff like that plays out in it also all of

that matters talk about coincidence you had a section on coincidence and I wasn't clear about the diagrams but what is the the No Free Will perspective on coincidence oh that's just kind of getting at the nuts and bolts of when people say okay if you say there's no free will it means nothing can ever change things can change and when you look at the mechanisms by which organisms including us change their behavior not only do you realize change happens but you come away with seeing not only is it telling us about our Machin when you

look at how it actually works under the hood but it's the same basic blueprint of Machin this when any other like organism out there is changing its behavior in response to experience and one of the key things that happens with it in terms of conditioning is there's whole circuitry in your brain that's very good at noticing when two things tend to go together as a pair when they tend to coincide you have very good coincidence detectors whether you are a human or you are a sea slug or anything in between and quines like that there's

a whole neurobiology as to how you begin to connect the two and where one of them will trigger the other you've been conditioned to do something or other and when you've been conditioned to do something that way by something that actually had nothing to do with the other thing we say you're being superstitious you see causality that isn't there you you you have decided that wearing your lucky underwear is what like causes this outcome and there's neurobiology to how it is that those went together enough that you decide that one does to the other that's

part of the what kind of brain you have during this moment how readily did you wind up with a brain that links together two events how much is your brain w that respect sort of critical thinking to say okay is this really the case let's let's look at this closely how much emotional Comfort do you get when you see Co incidences that help you explain the world how much of an in how do you turn out to be the sort of person you are where two things come together and How likely are you to Yoke

the two of them together that somebody says oh I had the election stolen from me and you yoke that with the notion of that is truth and Justice different sorts of ways you wind up being the sort of person Where You're vulnerable able to that or not versus saying hey we can deconstruct this in about 3 seconds and show that that's nonsense you know all these ways in which you know we're very good we we animals are very good at detecting coincidences and inferring causality but we're very vulnerable to seeing causality that isn't actually there

in circumstances where we're stressed and we're angry and we're tired and we're hungry and we're afraid and we're resentful and we're have outgroup hatreds and the all of those make us much less effective at doing this but the underlying machine area doing it it's the same in Us in the sea slug and basically what I'm what I'm getting from this is you don't want to be the baboon who's freaking out because the higher status baboon is taking a nap 50 yards away you want to be able to perceive life in general as objectively as possible

and and what what I'm thinking of now is I don't remember if I read this or heard it in an interview with you but you talk about how racism is a very natural phenomenon we're all essentially racist but what you're really saying is we're all tribal we identify with other people who look like us and who behave like us and who agree to the same cultural and doctrination as us and whether we have access to our prefrontal cortex or not really is the determining fact Factor if we are going to display an act of racism

or if we're going to keep ourselves in check um it's getting at this whole business that we're really really automatic and distinguishing between us as and thems we other primates do as well it's incredibly automatic you see them really like 10mon old kids already we do it in a fraction of a second and it's always in the direction of someone who counts as a them we're not very predisposed toward treating them nicely kind of thing but at the same time it's incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who counts as an us and a them

and you could change those categories in a flash of a second you can shift those around and you say well are you left with the conclusion there that maybe some of these categories are more baked in there that they're harder to get rid of race turns out to be one that is not very baked in there and it makes a lot of sense when you think about human evolution races I don't know they're maybe 20 30,000 years old which is an eye blink in terms of homin and history um and most of all for 99%

of human Hunter gather history the nearest person you the furthest person away you would meet in your life was somebody from three valleys over someone who looked just like you nobody started encountering people of other races until I don't know colonialism got its start and that sort this is not a deeply ingrained thing this one is is surface uh surface deep and it's totally easy to get people to switch from unconscious racial categorizations of people to switch them to different ones in a fraction of a second that's one that's easy the one that is totally

in their big surprise is sex differences because that one's only I don't know a couple of billion years old instead of 20,000 years old that one is much much harder like it is way easy when you switch like sports team uniforms for people to switch people from categorizing the players by race to categorizing them by team do the same thing with male and female players and now you switch them around and you can't break through that with simply putting different color Jers on people that one's the one that's really fundamentally in there but racism amid

all the reasons to be like unbelievably like despairing about it is it's really not deeply wired into us and reflecting the fact that race as a biological phenomenon is is a pretty flimsy concept anyway of that as sort of entities in and of themselves rather than being on biological continu so bad news is we really quickly decide that there's thems out there we don't like them and we're awful to them we have all sorts of great cognitive ways of making it seem like we're much better people than they are but the good thing is you

know it's not that hard to change your categories or to change it in somebody else and maybe what that means is like the goal is not to get rid of us theming because I think that's kind of automatic I think that's virtually inevitable in a social primate but to at least get people to use more benign categories like people who really really don't like broccoli and people who do probably lot not a lot of Earth's misery over the centuries have been caused by in-group outgroup differences about opinions about broccoli go build your view about the

world and types of people as to whether or not people have more or less than six cavities whether or not they you know find benign domains of doing that or just very objectively doing it between people who are nice and people who are crummy and like that's kind of a good thing if you can get people operating that way and that usually makes for a better Society I don't think you can get rid of us them dichotomies um but I think we can defang them much more easily than people normally assume it sounds like what

you're advocating for is having an open mind right so again having more access to the part of your brain that's in control of having an open mind so what are some practices what are some ways that people can do this if you've identified yourself as you know I'm a little bit closed off in certain areas I I like this conversation I love what he's talking about I want to read the book what is there anything we can do in in the immediate time to kind of open this up I I guess there's all those mechanical

things of like there there's a whole science of as you get older like as you get late teenage years how you begin closing to all sorts of novelty um so that you're like 95% of the way stuck in this domain this doain by the time you're 25 by the time you're 30 uh so the realm of all those when's the last time you did something completely new learn a new language go travel to a place you've never wanted to see you know all of those sort of very heavy-handed interventions um just operate with the assumption

that whatever you've come up with is your easiest easiest explanation for what's going on is probably not what's going on and just have that as a general rule and try to take it from from there all that being said you know being able to think clearly about this stuff and use your prefrontal cortex and overcome your implicit biases and understand the world as it is and old women don't really cause hurricanes and oo let's let's just be rational beings some of the time you're screwed with that some of the time like knowing the truth and

understanding like circumstances and where control is and isn't um some of the time that's a disaster if you're like one of the major hav knots there um in circumstances like that fostering self-deception is a very good therapeutic thing um you don't want to make somebody feel like they were in control over something I had no control over if the outcome was bad like they never got higher socioeconomic status they never you know if the outcome is good you Foster somebody's selfworth if you give them a sense of control when they really didn't have it when

you give somebody a sense of control when the outcome was bad and they couldn't have controlled it or even if they could have um decrease somebody's sense of control their enhance their self-deception and their rationalizations like it's a fairly narrow do domain in which reality and facing reality is actually a helpful thing um you know it's not a get as much control as much predictability as much information in your life as possible um understand which things you could control and not control you know straight out of knore sort of thing um and when the outcome

is bad maybe you should in fact tell yourself you didn't have control over that after all um that could be very beneficial psychologically yeah determine reminds it reminds me of the scientific version of 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green you know where he just talks about the different aspects of human behavior from a political and power Dynamic but you're actually giving scientific rationale and citing research that helps people understand why they may be behaving in a certain way or why you may be getting upset like you talked about in an interview sitting in those

Stanford faculty meetings and you could see the whole it was like you were on the you know serengetti or whatever the baboon Reserve was you could see the whole power structure playing out and I think being able to see that and having language for it and having reference points for it helps you to be more objective in it or not take it personally or you know whatever the case anything that keeps you rooted in the present moment where you can then make better I I don't know if this is the the right language for but

better choices for you or for your students or for whatever whatever you're advocating for I mean all that understanding just to fall back into mechanistic biologist that I am the more understanding you have where everyone's buttons and levers are the more you understand how those buttons and levers got made um the more you do that the more accurate of you you're going to have about the world and and lots of domains that's going to be a very good thing because you'll see the extent to which people had nothing to do with how they turned out

hey really quickly if you like this content or if you don't like it let me know down in the comments because your likes and comments are going to help me learn what you want more of and then that way I can keep bringing you the good stuff all right thanks so much for your feedback and back to the show what are your what's your thinking on success is it about self-preservation it's obviously not about making as much money as possible whatever but what is what is the the terministic idea of success oh that's a very

tough one and about three minutes after the book went off to the the printer so I couldn't change a word in there anymore I immediately had the oh my God I can't believe I didn't spend more time on this we have no free will that's terrible are you g to have just criminals run around free no no no you could construct a world in which people are protected from dangerous individuals without invoking a sense of culpability on the part of the dangerous individuals good that one's easy that one's easy getting something to completely replace the

criminal justice system but it would have to be something like a a quarantine public health model so that one seems hard enough but then the flip side oh my God we need to do something about people who feel like they really do deserve as a c o a salary that's a thousandfold higher than the workers there you really do need to you know meritocracy that's got to go also because praise and reward for things you didn't really earn that's just as damaging but that one's a harder one exactly for what you're bringing up okay that

person is dangerous for reasons out of their control just keep them from being dangerous that person has the potential to be very very beneficial to people um but they're going to have to spend a hell of a lot of time learning how to be a good cardiothoracic surgeon they're GNA have to like stay up late and study they're gonna have to skip a lot of parties that's a much harder one you know we want Society to be protected from dangerous individuals we want Society to be protected from incompetent individuals when it's time to take out

your brain tumor you don't want to pick a random person from off the street to do that because meritocracy is damaging like you got to find a way to motivate people to do the really difficult process of getting very good at tough helpful things without having them come out the end feeling like they are a better human than other people as a result that's a much harder one and that's where dangling Notions of what counts as success that's that one I I haven't made a dent in trying to figure out because you know you really

got to get a special mindset in somebody if they're going to work 80 hour weeks for a decade or two to come up with a vaccine for something like and there's got to be a way of doing it other than there's going to be all sorts of suspect versions of success and reward that one Taps into in the way humans operate um like I don't think I could convince like some grad student to work 80 hour weeks in the lab to come up with one little factoid gear in a whole scientific study by telling them

you're doing this for the common good yeah that's not going to work quite as well when their damn roommate is going out to a party and they're deciding to sit there and work more the motivation for that and what will count as success that's I have so much less insight into that as you know just keep people safe from dangerous people but don't make the dangerous people feel like they're rotten humans in the process and don't punish them because punishment makes no sense and be on guard that it feels good to punish so it sounds

like we're more like we're more like baboons than we probably imagine and having studied baboons for decades um and you'd be if you could communicate with a baboon and talk about the concept of free will they probably would think is ridiculous as well right but what does what does studying baboom reveal about where we're going as a human race well they're just a good model system um for trying to understand the levers and buttons in a system that's based on the same blueprint as us but is simpler in a lot of ways it's the same

basic biological blueprint your brain is doing the exact same thing when you're being an aggressive human and an aggressive baboon your brain is doing totally different things when the baboon is slashing somebody right in front of them and you're pressing a button to operate a drone on the other side of the planet like that's where we have the exact same blueprint and we're using it in completely novel unprecedented ways um yeah sometimes it's useful to see just how fundamental taking it out on somebody weaker is as a way of reducing stress seeing just how protective

social support can be rather than getting into humans is this person actually a friend or are they just an acquaintance or are they just a pass you know baboons don't meet somebody at a bar and the next morning they have to decide was this a meaningful interaction or not it's a it's a simpler landscape built on nonetheless the same basic blueprint it's just easier to get insights into it that way I guess what I'm wondering is is this is this supposed delusion of of Free Will is it is it ultimately self-destructive for us as a

race or is or do you think that um we're leaving the world better just like the baboons are um oh absolutely worse and it's just an issue of like how does the center hold when you got a world built on justifying a small subset of people being treated way better than Irish reason data and most people in some domains being treated way worse than yeah you you can't if you're running stuff on that you're going to get into TR trouble and the world has no shortage of like examples of why that gets you into trouble

and the US's an amazing sort of venture in the last 50 years as to how much like easily Justified inequality makes for a much worse place and inequality is completely built on Notions that Free Will is for Real it's just different outcomes are just justice has been served and as a final statement right I think saying there's no such thing as free will is it's it's not as inspiring but as maybe something more like um everyone has something to contribute was that is that would that be a statement that you could stand behind or what

what's what's a final statement or what would you want on a billboard for people to understand in order to create the kind of society that you think is more sustainable well may be that not everyone that does have something to contribute which would be kind of a bummer but may be the case maybe in a broader sense um every time you're pleased with yourself or displeased with another human remember neither of you had any control over how you turned out to be who you are in that moment okay beautiful I think I think that you

know again to me the idea of of reminding ourselves of these things is to stay present because you get into comparison comparison is the thief of Joy um or you get into past regret or you get into future worry you're the baboon worried about the higher status baboon so anytime you can be more present to whatever it is you're doing you will be able to find more inherent Beauty in whatever it is that you're doing and for whatever for whatever benefit that has and to have a more accurate picture beautiful well thank you so much

for for coming on and and sharing your perspective are you already working on the next book or thinking about the next book or you just kind I am assuming I don't have it in me to generate another book but that that happened after you probably say that every time after all your books you're like I can't it's about a one year lag and before I suddenly sit up and say aha now this one will actually be interesting this is the one that'll be worth spending five years on well thank you for your contribution to our

culture and our society it's been an honor to have a conversation with you I've I've you've been on my short list for a very long time so I'm glad it finally got to happen oh great thanks thanks for having me on this was uh a total pleasure be well if you like that video you're going to love the next one click this thumbnail right here and I'll see you over there