No Freewill, No Purpose, No God? - How Society Makes Us Feel Lost In Life | Robert Sapolsky

evolutionist pulled a simulation over your eyes that optimizes you for survival and not accuracy tragically this prepares us for savanas not cities and that makes Modern Life very difficult to navigate well but joining me today is legendary biologist Robert spolski and we're going to take a hard look at the hidden truth while there is no God there is no Free Will and nothing happens for a reason you can still massively improve your life let me ask ask right now I think there's a lot of people that feel lost they feel lazy they have no sense

of what to do with their lives and given that there is no God no purpose and no free will how do people go about improving their lives right off the bat what I think that's tapping into is one of the misconceptions about the notion that there's no free will which is that is synonymous with oh my God if everything's determined nothing can ever change and all you need to do is look at the world around you and know that like people change dramatically societies change all of that changes the brain changes there's this whole trendy

sexy field of neuroplasticity about how the brain does all that yeah change occurs where people get into trouble is when change has occurred they conclude thus I chose to change and that's where you are predicating your whole stance and the notion that we are captains of our ships and there's free will and all of that and that's not the case in the slightest when we change it is because we have been changed by a certain circumstance and why have we been changed in the particular way that we have because all those prior circumstances that made

us who we are over which we had no control brought you to that moment so that you were going to respond to this stimulus in the way that you did and would change you in the way that it did so we are capable of being changed and even better once we are changed in a particular way it can even lead us to modify our Behavior so that we're changed in that way even more so and nonetheless we are not sitting there and exercising free will when we decide you know I'm no longer a Buddhist and

instead I'm a nudist now or something so here's the way that I approach life is very much that um everything is Downstream of biology and ideas and I've said many times on the show that on my Tombstone I wanted to read you're having a biological experience because as somebody that has um really I have been changed profoundly so I don't need to take any credit for that but but the just empirical evidence is I went from hardly being able to get myself out of bed uh because I had a set of ideas uh just based

on what I had encountered the home I grew up in my personal genetics and the things that I respond to but all of that led me to a point in my early 20s where I had a hard time getting out of bed I'm talking I would lay in bed for four to five hours a day every day and it was really only shame that eventually got me moving uh so I would even take credit for that but ultimately I I had biology that was to the point where I could receive the ideas and then once

I encountered those ideas I was able to put together what I call a frame of reference that and I'll I'll be as careful as I can I know I'm going to slip up in terms of language that makes it sound like that I'm in the driver's seat uh but have have a frame of reference that is uh puts me in a position where I am on a path to improving and getting better and so when you look at my life over a long period of time again without needing to clap for me but as I've

accumulated these ideas it's had a profound impact on my life the quality of my life uh my emotional tenor the financial outcomes all of it and so I became obsessed as somebody who's worked in the inner cities I've seen up close what it looks like when uh somebody hasn't been given the right environment with which to build uh their biology uh with which to get the right set of ideas and it's absolutely devastating and if I try to map out in my own mind what it means to exist in a world without free will I

start actually thinking of myself as a change agent as a uh a capsule that carries ideas that when other people encounter those ideas some of them will be changed and so that to me is the frame for this conversation is going to be what are the things that people need to do to their biology because they are hearing this right we can make that assumption so they're hearing this so now they're encountering these ideas we'll assume that they're at least fertile enough soil that the ideas will take plant not all of them will but it's

just a more useful assumption um what ideas would you want to plant in people's minds during this time that will be most fruitful if they want to move in a positive direction for people to learn enough about the biology and its interactions with environment and how it turns us into who we are out of our control all of that to recognize that blame and judgment and a sense of entitlement and self-satisfaction and none of those things make any sense at all and all they do is send people in about bad Direction either of wanting people

to be treated less well than average because if things that they've done that you were willing to decide they were responsible for or deciding that you should be treated better than average because of things that you've done that in actuality you did not earn and did not deserve and that you were just handed by random luck in life and if people come out of that that you know deciding you know judgment is almost always a suspect concept and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to ever hate anybody because that's like hating you know

plants that grow with some Toxin and that have made you sick it's just you know outcome of stuff and that no matter how good you are at something um that doesn't entitle you to more consideration of your needs than anybody else deserves what do you think are the evolutionary reasons why we have that proclivity so people bend towards not even bend they are yanked towards the illusion of Free Will and as I really sit like whenever somebody asks me about this if I'm being interviewed I'll say yeah Free Will is an illusion but it really

doesn't matter we'll get to the societal implications because I know that's an important part of your book and and your stance but on an individual life I don't think I think it is far wiser to act as if you have free will because that frame of reference will uh put you in a more empowered mindset which I think makes you more fertile for good ideas to take hold um does that seem to you why we would from an evolutionary standpoint have developed that delusion well it certainly can be the the fuel of motivation um and

that is something that obviously is highly adaptive in many circumstances um it's also incredibly protective psychologically me we are a weird species in that we are the only ones out there who know that inevitably at some point our hearts are going to stop beating whoa bummer and the only way to function is to have evolved a very unique capacity for self-deception we are a species that can generate enough circumstances where we know that bad news is coming and we can't do anything about it and where that could be crushing that it has become adaptive to

decide that we actually have more agency than we do in reality and I think the best way to appreciate that is to look at a disease of people who were not able to do self-deception and who were not able to rationalize away reality and what that is is clinical depression these are people who are pathologically prone towards seeing the world for what it is and they're like poster children for showing the psychologically protective effects being able to decide that things are going to be okay and you are the master of your fate and then that

sort of thing it's good for our mental health until it turns out not to be good for our mental health so how do we walk that line because that's one of the questions I had reading your book is uh Why Try So fervently to pull people out of a delusion that as you just said is better for their mental health well because it turns out it all depends on who the person is um I would bet anybody who would go out and buy this book about the neurobiology and philosophy of the Free Will debate and

all of that and actually go and read it my guess would be they're not homeless my guess would be they had enough protein in their diet when they were a kid and the opportunity of schooling that they actually know how to read and can comprehend it I bet all sorts of things about them in other words they're one of the lucky ones and there's this ironic pre-screening that anyone who has the luxury in life to sit around and think about are we captains of our own fate and what does biology tell us and how about

Aristotle and all that that we are the lucky ones who have wound up in this position and thus what being being convinced that there's no free will does is take the wind out of a lot of our accomplishments what do you mean I didn't earn having my corner office and being a CEO what do you mean I didn't earn my Advanced college degrees I worked hard I were there are all those nights where my roommate went to parties and I stayed and studied and said I earned this I earned this I earned love by being

like a kind person or empathic or whatever and like whoa bummer that's deflating to hear that if it's true I don't believe it blah blah that I did not earn any of this that none of this reflected the core of the me in there with all these wonderful positive attributes but what that mostly means though to me is most people on Earth rather than being given privilege and power and you know efficacy and all of that because of traits that they didn't really earn that they had no control over and they just locked out with

most people on Earth instead are suffering deprivations and being ignored or neglected or considered unworthy of attention or because they're getting treated badly because of stuff they had no control over so virtually by definition anyone who's going to go and read a book like this is going to be bummed by it and and feel like oh my I can't work that way because look I busted my ass in grad school or whatever um and the people whose lives are being made a lot tougher by the fact that it's all random um all that there's no

free will does is free you from the myth that this is a just world and people get what they deserve it's very interesting so when I I I really tried to parse through okay what do I want people to do with this information and from my perspective and I'll be very interested to see if we agree on this from my perspective the the only reason I want people to acknowledge that free will uh doesn't exist is that if you do not understand your own biology you're going to derail so if you don't understand that you

have a bias towards ingroup then you're going to treat people in the outg group ridiculously if you understand that you have a pensent towards in group but that you can and this is something that I learned from you so much what we're going to talk about today I've learned from you but um take Sports you look at somebody that's of a different ethnicity that in one instance you clock as an outgroup and then if they're wearing a jersey of your favorite team you suddenly clock as an ingroup so understanding the way in which the way

I always say it is your brain is messing with you your brain is optimized to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids now that's not the thing that I focus on what I focus on is how do you have what I'll call a good life and it's probably worth us defining that uh so for me my nor star is I'm trying to um move the individual and society as an echo of the individual towards increased human flourishing and decreased human suffering now I'm going to make the base assumption you're not a

sociopath and all of that because sure the thing that makes Hitler flourish is going to be very different uh than what I hope makes the vast majority of humanity flourish but that that's sort of my Northstar and so to get people to understand your brain is not optimized for Joy it's not optimized for pleasure it is optimized for survival in a historic evolutionary environment that we're no longer in and so there is this wild mismatch between what you what will make you thrive today and your impulses so that's where I root around okay this is

why I'm trying to get people to understand this is is there any of that that um you focus on as well or are you interested only in that societal echo of hey morons you're acting foolishly and you're holding people accountable for things that make no sense well no I think framing things and you've got the perfect word for it in terms of The evolutionary mismatches that we deal with with we've got you know Paleolithic appetites and suddenly we've got fast food and and obesity epidemic all of that I mean the the mismatches is a really

useful Concept in terms of all of this um we have a mismatch in that our building blocks of agency our building blocks of a sense of efficacy and of registering with those around us were built with 99% of human history spent in small hunter gatherer bands where you did have efficacy and your opinion counted because everyone's opinion counted very egalitarian by the best guesses and these were familiar and you registered and you had a sense of efficacy and now we're in a society where you know just to mention once we stumbled into idiocy of inventing

like socioeconomic status after inventing stuff and the unequal distribution of stuff once we get into that we can have somebody who's born into poverty and I'm not exact on the statistics but in this country there's now something like a 90% chance that they will still be in poverty as an adult in other words they can be subject to a world of lack of control control and lack of agency and lack of Free Will and a pretty bruising kind of way that's very novel for humans um I think that's one aspect of the mismatch in that

our tendency to delude ourselves into thinking we have more agency than we actually do um didn't have that much of a chance to go off the rails it was pretty focused in reality back when we were being like 99% of humans and it's this current world instead where it is so destructive for so many people to be taught that they deserve what they get when I think about the way things are I'm always looking for what is the evolutionary explanation of how that would come to pass like why if if we don't have free will

and we are just bil balls bouncing around something is selecting for that and when I think about meritocracy is probably a good place to start when I think about meritocracy that isn't going to go away uh no matter how many people recognize that they don't have free will and one idea that I love of yours is this idea that we are machines that are aware of our Machin but aren't comfortable with with our Machin and when I think about okay if I could get everybody to just snap not think about meritocracy um I don't think

it will work and the reason that I don't think it will work is as much as it pains me to say this there are machines meaning us I'm using your word uh that are better at things than other people and whether we should or not we value different things right so once you have an evolutionary algorithm running in your brain that says not only do I Want You To Survive I want you to pass on your genes to the Next Generation and I want them to survive so now that algorithm creates what I'll refer to

as a simulation so it it is not trying to show you the real world right we only see 0.35% of the available electromagnetic spectrum so it's like we already know this is a gross simplification of what's there and if it's simplifying it's making decisions of what to show what not to show and it's making those based on that desire for survival so now I'm like okay uh if that's true then the things that we have now theoretically at least are selected for because they do a good job of that and since we are optimized to

be good at things that allow our genes to pass forward there's already a hierarchy of values you're never going to be able to get people to ignore that some machines are better at those things that we value than others does that make sense totally um and two levels of response um the first amid that picture of yeah we are driven to pass on copies of our jeans all of that but then you get somebody who joins some group that involves celibacy or then you get somebody who adopts a child from the other side of the

planet who Bears virally no genetic relatedness to them and yeah there are strong trends that have been sculpted by Evolution but you know we specialize in the ID idiosyncrasies of being exceptions at every possible turn I mean there's not a whole lot of evolutionary biology that could explain like giving up your life for somebody on the other side of the planet and setting like that so we are we are shaped by Evolution but we we manag to have a lot of wiggle room with it but in this larger sense now of like what do we

do with the fact that we are machines who could know our Machin what do we do with the fact that we kind of want to have a world in which dangerous people can't do damage and where competent people the ones who were doing difficult stuff how do you do that and in some ways dealing with the dangerous people is a lot easier and quarantine models of All Sorts that are out there that that people who are asking not for reform of Criminal Justice System but replacing it entirely what's the much harder one for my money

is the flip side um which is how do you deal with the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever to like decide that someone who has the skills to remove that brain tumor from your head and can do that amazingly well and is totally unique in that regard blah blah all of that um it's really hard to construct a world in which they will not somehow feel entitled my wife Lisa struggled profoundly with her gut health and experienced debilitating stomach pain so I focus my energy on learning everything I could about the human gut viome

is on The Cutting Edge of this growing area of study with their atome gut intelligence test just 2 to 3 weeks after sending in your sample you can see your results on 20 Integrative Health tests that measure your inflammatory activity metabolic Fitness and the health of your gut lining as a special offer to my viewers viome is offering $110 off your test just go to trome.com SL impact and use code impact to get the $110 off we particularly have trouble seeing but I worked so hard to get there being able to work so hard is

another biological attribute just like having like good dexterity with your fingers so they can like suture you without like making a mistake kind of thing um I think it's in the realm of we need to make sure it's only competent people who are doing brain surgery on you and we need to have them motivated enough so that they've gone enough sleepless nights to learn how to master this and to do all that yet somehow have the person rather than thinking I've earned extra consideration I earned to be able to be in the front of the

line because of how skillful I am and here's where I'm getting utopian ridiculously for them to mostly just feel gratitude and pleasure at seeing what their hands are able to do wow I looked out wow sit me down at a keyboard of a piano and look how it turned out that I'm the sort of person with the sort of nervous system where I can now play something that moves people to tears wow how cool is that that I walked out and got to be like someone who could experience that experience knowing that you were able

to generate this okay so that's totally ridiculous that we're going to think of making people go through like years and years of neurosurgery residencies and like all of the agonies of that and the enormous emotional investment and everything else in there that they will come out the other end and say yes all I do is feel gratitude that the randomness of the universe has put me in a position where I can help people by removing their gleo blastomas you know that one's going to be an uphill battle obviously and there's that bias that the people

listening to this will probably be tilted already in a direction where there's something they've worked hard at and they're good at and all of that and asking that we just have like gratitude for how Randomness turned out with us that we were given the gifts to make less pain in the world around all these other machines yeah you got to get a pretty high futin State of Mind where that's going to work um maybe all we could do with that sort of a low Rend version of the solution is just recognize how inappropriate a sense

of entitlement is in all sorts of domains because you can do something fancy in a scout with with a scalpel doesn't mean you are a better person than somewhere else and that seems like a plausible thing to try to train Society in um it's not too lunatic to get people to the point where a really really skilled neurosurgeon and a really really skilled garbage collector can both feel good about themselves and feel good that they locked out to have disability but not that they're somehow better than the person next to them who can't do that

this is a very complicated idea so um as somebody who really focuses I was going to say takes Pride but I know better uh as somebody who focuses a lot on usefulness I I want things to be useful I want to put useful ideas out I want to take useful ideas in so I know a part of what we're going to want to touch on today is very much what the societal implications are for this and how we can improve societ Society criminal justice system I know is an example you use a lot that'll be

a good one to talk about um before we get to that though what I have a mantra in business which is don't try to change Behavior try to leverage it and I feel and you obviously acknowledge it you say look it's going to be a tall order to get people to do it I'm stepping into the utopian Zone but um when I hear these ideas I start thinking okay well how do we make sure that these become useful how do we get them to generate momentum so that life really can be better now you didn't

expressly push push back on my northst star so I'll assume for now that we're both on board with um we want people to thrive and we want to reduce suffering as much as possible um I I know that I believe that getting people to um the point where we give them as good of a shot as humanly possible to um bi logically be ready to absorb useful ideas and to encounter those ideas as much as possible so I obsess a lot about education and what that looks like in fact before we started rolling talking to

you about I'm so grateful to you you've put so much content out into the world that just makes it more likely that people are going to encounter those ideas okay so anyway going back to the idea of don't try to fight Behavior try to leverage it don't try to fight biology try to leverage it so we've got like Evolution has selected for things and one of those things is that and I think you have said this in the past we are a hungry species we hunger for so many things and I think about when somebody

comes to me and is like you know hey I'm really struggling in my life the first thing I say is Go serve somebody else get out of your own head go do something awesome for somebody else we are evolutionarily wired for that because we're a social creature and so you want to do things that elevate not only you but other people so I just I'm not fighting the biology I know you will get something positive out of that and then the other one though is progress make progress in your own life set a goal and

work towards that I I make video games I assume you know nothing about my background but we make video games here and so all day long we're thinking about reaching into somebody's brain and squeezing the dopamine centers to um get them to want to engage now for now just assume that I'm not an evil schmuck that's just trying to get all the money in the world and that my whole reason for existing is implanting empowering ideas and entertainment but nonetheless we have to think about that and so when I want to get to the point

where these ideas are not encountering sort of utopian like whatevers like this is never going to happen I want to say what what's real like meritocracy is not going away because people value things and they what we may change what they value fair enough but they're going to value a thing and they're going to want to get good at that thing and they're going to want to be praised for doing that thing and they're going to want to feel that they're better for doing that thing and it's like we've already run the experiment monks are

people that are like hey I'm not an idiot I recognize I need to be grateful I need to see a blossoming flower for what it is and really see it and understand a rock and know that there's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so just Nobody Does it so it's like this tiny tiny fraction so do you think that I'm misunderstanding what we what will be easy to get us to do and what will be hard to get us to do I agree completely it's very very hard it seems to get around the

problem of motivation and drive and even dirty words like ambition and things of that sort in a context of there being no free will um amid that though we can show over and over that we can manage that in some domains because we have already Managed IT okay so a bit of social conditioning you meet someone and you shake their hand and they say oh you have beautiful eyes and we're all conditioned to say thanks and most of us who were sensible say thanks and then a quarter second later realize how idiotic that is wow

thanks for praising me for my choice of photo receptor genes um you know that's a domain where we've made some progress to that most people would feel sheepish if the other person went on for too long most people would be willing to point out the realities of agency or lack thereof if someone tried to introduce a law that people with your eye color get treated better in society um most people would see the fallacy of that so we accomplished that in that domain um we're able to navigate a world in which people can appreciate eye

color and where in general the person complimented for it does not come out of that feeling entitled that they earned their eye color and I don't know enough about the history of people liking eye colors and such but I'm sure there was a time in the past where with a mindset where basically every attribute that anyone had that was positive was a sign that they had a good Soul because Beauty on the outside and Beauty inside were exactly the same and intertwined and and disease is God's way of punishing you and that whole there was

a time in the past where someone said you have beautiful eyes would know that they were being complimented about their Moral Moral anchor because the two go hand in hand and then we kind of learned n that actually has nothing to do with it it's just like so you can say oh thanks because you're socialized and you say that and like if you come out of it feeling like you have earned that compliment for your eye color that's ridiculous yet at times in the past there's people who would have interpreted exactly that way we're in

a mindset now that your eye color is not some sort of index of your as a person we manage to get there and we can manage to get there in other domains as well like there are people somebody with photographic memory may think it's kind of cool or find circumstances where it's advantageous I there being circumstances where photographic memory is not advantageous but we are of a sufficiently informed mechanistic world at this point that they don't think they had anything to do with their photographic memory or the fact that they happen to have perfect pitch

or something like that and if people praise them too much for that they're able to feel a little sheepish I not I don't know I just read a page and I remember it what I just glance it and I remember it I had nothing to do with it I can just hear a C sharp in my head anytime I want and it's always like perfect down to like a couple of Beats of you know vibration that's how I turned out we've been able to get to the point where some of those ways in which we

can be appreciated for some positive attribute we can accept the appreciation while accepting actually we had nothing to do with it and I'm not sure I would be comfortable in a world in which only people with perfect pitch get to have covid vaccines we've done that in some Realms we could do it more but it's not going to be easy okay so uh let me ask do you believe people should build their self-esteem yes and just because I am of the place and time to if nothing else see that as instrumentally a good thing people

will work harder if they have good self-esteem people will be able to put their shortcomings into proper perspective and realize that something bad may be bad but it's not the entire world and it is not your destiny things like that are protective and efficacious and that's often a good tool to have to make somebody feel better self-esteem like great example where that intersects with all of this um a domain where we used to see room for blame and labeling and insights into lack of motivation all of that is you know when I was a kid

if you know I had trouble learning to read and I simply was not getting there and it would be very easy at that time for me to be labeled as LA or unmotivated or whatever and then Along Comes scientist about 30 years ago and discovers that no you can have some screwy thing happening with the layering of neurons and like layer four of this part of your qu text and as a result like curved Loop letters you tend to reverse them when you're looking at them and you have dyslexia and that's great we just figured

that out that's great on a very concrete level um because people could then learn what to do what to do for people with dyslexia so they could learn to read more readily it gives you sort of more insight into the outliers but what it also does bring it back to this is like in the old bad world where you're screwed up cortical layering in this part part of your brain instead is interpreted as laziness and lack of motivation is your self-perception and your self-esteem is built around that for the rest of your life and one

sees all the ways in that become self-defeating and like these endless wow it wasn't until I was 40 that I was diagnosed with this learning difference and all those years that I felt myself being this yeah self-esteem is a good thing to build up for efficacy thereafter self-esteem is not a good thing if it feels entitlement but it certainly has its place and we can see those circumstances where we decide we're watching agency where there wasn't and the outcome isn't great and the kid still isn't learning how to read and they are being taught what

their self-esteem is going to mumble you know in their ears for the rest of their lives now now that's a pretty bad thing what should people build their self-esteem around well given that none of it makes sense and we're all machines and it makes no sense for a machine to feel good about itself and that's irrational except when it makes the machine work better except when one has learned the contingencies well enough that the right kind of self-esteem will make someone Kinder will make them more likely to feel somebody else's pain will Foster all sorts

of good stuff yeah in those cases if your self-esteem is built around you know the world is going to have been a better place because a whole bunch of molecules came together randomly and formed that thing that I called me that's a good reason to have self-esteem now going going back to cuz here is the confounding variable you were talking about people understand that their eyes are just their genetics and they didn't do anything to deserve it which obviously I totally agree um but at the same time Beauty has power uh I didn't do anything

to deserve being six feet tall but I can reach things that my wife can't so how I coming at it from my perspective I wouldn't want people to build their self-esteem around something that they didn't earn just because I don't think it will return um anything super useful but this is where I'd want them to start leaning into the delusion of Free Will and say but I would want you to for instance just to use your example to say hey go out of your way to be more kind and doing things like that that you're

now putting attention and energy into uh that I would say build your self-esteem around that now again this goes back to Northstar for me everything is adding up to you want to do things that increase human flourishing your own and others decrease human suffering your own and others um but I would encourage them to do that do you at that point have such a a reaction to the illusion of Free Will and the negative consequences that you see to that which I the word you've used the most like if we were to do a word

uh diagram entitlement would just be this gigantic glowing red orb um are you so concerned that the illusion of Free Will creates a sense of entitlement and probably self-defeating right because it's going to create entitlement in people who think they're awesome and it's going to create a sense of self-defeating I'm lame I'm not worthy and people who fall out of step for whatever reason which could go back to natal prenatal epigenetic I mean before they're even born um are you so afraid of that that you would never want somebody to lean into the like hey

like I know Free Will doesn't exist but I operate my daily life like it does maybe the conclusion is you know some nice pragmatic pragmatic thing which is like it's it's impossible to imagine how we're supposed to function if we really really reject an ocean of free will all the time I've thought this way since I was 14 and I can't imagine it or pull it off 99% of the time um because it's really really hard maybe what we should do in the face of reality of how hard this is because we are people of

our place and time and things that intuitively seem just intertwined with our sense of efficacy and our goodness and our well you know intentions and all of that maybe save the effort for when it really counts maybe save it for when you know judgment is really consequential when people really are causing damage if they secretly believe they're a better person than somebody else for something had nothing to do with when people are okay with a society running on myths of like any kid could grow up to be president kind of thing yeah put your effort

into the rare ones of those and like if you want to feel good about yourself because your eye color you know go ahead it's not the end of the world um you know save it for where it matters and I think what is amply clear is in a world in which the organizing myth is we get what we deserve and effort somehow is coupled with outcome um there'll be no shortage of finding places where it really matters let me ask you when you think about the the grips of the biology the biases that we have

the things that we are in the grips of what are the ones that make you most concerned obviously we have entitlement which I think if I'm understanding you correctly entitlement is born of thinking that you have earned height Beauty intelligence whatever whatever um what are other traps that we fall into that for tomorrow to be better than today we need to get people out of one of the biggest ones is one of those uphill battles in terms of like how we're wired up in some very fundamental way which is in the right setting a setting

of a feeling of righteousness all of that we like to punish we like to punish individuals and translating that into like actual biology like one of the most reliable ways of getting dopamine running and anticipation and all of that is to have somebody think that they are going to be able to punish someone for an infraction and that they are doing something righteous and you see the same thing with rats you get a rat that is being stressed and is secreting stress hormones and it gets to bite another rat a complete innocent bystander and the

first rat stress hormone levels go down it feels better and you see the same thing in non-human primates you know displacing aggression displacing restation and then especially inventing cultural trappings that tell you this is actually like good civic duty that one's really tough because if you're trying to say it makes no sense whatsoever to have a world in which there's any blame or punishment damn but it kind of does feel good to punish like I know of this guy who's coming up for what four five different criminal trials in the next year and I will

be very very pleased if the outcome is if he's locked up for years to come and maybe even like feels lonely in the process but yeah that really doesn't make sense um I mean I see this all the time and in like at a point a few years ago I I I do a lot of work with public defenders offices with murders and trying to teach juries about how screwed up brains can be and how like they will will like virtually be guaranteed to make the wrong choice at various junctures all of that and there

was some guy who went into a house of worship with an automatic weapon and mowed down a whole bunch of people and it was completely horrifying and a few days later I'm listening on the radio saying well the alleged shooter here was a rain today and it was decided they're subject to Federal hate crime charges also and that makes them eligible for the death penalty and my first thought was yeah fry the guy just son of a they and then two seconds later I think what are you talking about you're working on a death penalty

case right now and seeing okay maybe what we have to settle for is after two seconds of saying yeah fry the son of a to remember no that's actually it's not by chance this person turned out this way and I have no idea a like what their view of the world is and how much pain and damage got them to that point blah blah blah all of that so maybe we should not expect our first reflex to be saying oh what a poor guy that circumstances made him a damaging individual my heart goes out to

him and my task is to love the unloved or to love the unlovable um know be pissed off and want him to be fried two seconds later and then somehow in there get into your algorithm to stop and look back on that and see if this actually makes any sense maybe that's what we have to settle for doing amid you saying what are the things that I see is really insurmountable whoa two seconds of thinking about this guy being like flayed by you know the whole town square watching him be decapitated and horses pull his

limbs apart it whatever yeah okay okay let's St for a second this doesn't make any sense maybe in the face of like okay we really like punishing get people to the point where they can feel the pleasure in that and then three seconds later um we have taught the more meta level of how we think about things to reflect on does this actually make any sense it's interesting I think we're going to have to Define what makes something make sense because this what you're saying makes sense to me in a very stable Society where we

have a way to quarantine people but again I look at everything from an evolutionary perspective now whether the following stat is accurate or just directionally correct I heard that roughly 80% of people in the Navy Seals uh score very high on the um psychopathy scale if I'm not mistaken and that's because from an evolutionary standpoint you need people that can kill just without remorse because you live Liv an insanely dangerous world where there were people that were coming to kill you they did not think of you as human you were other they were going to

uh take everything you own they were going to take your women they were going to rape them and they were going to kill you like very bad things happen on on an evolutionary time scale it it is just a Litany of tragedy and horror and you know obviously right now there are two hot Wars going on that I'm aware of maybe more uh October 7th was a level of horror that was just startling to behold and so it's like oh yeah humans really are capable of just an insane level of violence and dehumanization and so

when you say it doesn't make sense it's like it feels like a maybe in this current time in this country it doesn't make sense but I get why from an evolutionary perspective it was select Ed for how do you think about that well one of the the great sort of bugaboos about sort of evolution and sort of the first Decades of social darwinists saying what is is what was meant to be and sort of naturalistic fallacy all of that is this notion that what evolution rewards is aggression and domination and passing on more copies of

your gen and a lot of what both evolutionary biologists who like sit there and do math modeling and evolutionary biologists you sit and look at animals including humans is you know this concept of alternative strategies like there's lots of different ways in which humans succeed and passing on copies of their genes and baboons and like one thing I've seen in my of studying baboons is the guy who was able to walk away from every stupid provocation instead of getting into a fight when you look at his whole lifespan he will have left more copies of

his jeans than the guy who fights his way to be Alpha and is there for eight months be before somebody breaks his arm in a fight like nice guys yeah it's not just nature bloody tooth and Claw and it's not just that nice guys finished last um one manifest ation of that is like I am by Nature extremely pessimistic but I have to admit some retrospective optimism um looking at sort of the the Hoban picture you you painted just now one of the things that all sorts of nice socialized Anthropologist will come to blows about

is when did our ancestors invent Warfare and there's one school of thought that says we have common dissent from a shared ancestor of chimps about six seven million years ago and overwhel overwhelmingly what it shows is our entire history is a species has just been blotched with organized violence and warfare and such and sort of citing certain contemporary studies of indigenous populations and rates of violence and such and paleontological records of how often you're finding an arrow head stuck in somebody's like skull when you dig them up kind of thing and then meanwhile the alternative

school is that when you look carefully there's actually no evidence of organized Warfare up until we invented agriculture about 12,000 years ago up until we became sedentary up until either because of Agriculture one notable case where people had the greatest fishing hole on Earth in North Kenya about 12,000 years ago and were willing to be violent to defend it but as soon as you had people become sedentary and start farming and start generating Surplus and being able to make things and also having Surplus time you could invent things like a standing military you could invent

things like hating somebody because they've got more stuff than you have and I'm quite convinced by the evidence suggesting that humans did not invent organized violence until like the last 10 12,000 years or so and you look carefully at say the anthropological records looking at contemporary hunter gatherers and how often they're violent and overwhelmingly it's built around they are keeping out people who are trying to come in and take their land because they want to like cut down the forest and things like that Amazonian circumstances you go through it and I think the good news

is we haven't been a species reflexively organizing into massive violence against each other for all that long of a time it's a pretty recent invention that said what the best evidence suggests is that individual hominins have been killing each other at the same rate in every sort of culture on Earth over individual conflict kind of thing everywhere you look when you spend enough time say studying Kalahari hunter gatherers in Botswana and like if you're studying a band of 30 of these people you're G to have to watch them for like 55 years running to get

enough observations to tell you what their their violence rate is like compared to downtown in Detroit over the course of a year but when you get enough of those data there's basically the same ratees of some guy killing some other guy over reproductive access of some guy killing some woman over a perceived rejection of overtures of some guy killing some other guy over an honor violation yeah that we've been doing forever and that proves to be a very tough one no degree of punishment in the form of a death penalty does much for Crimes of

Passion whether you were talking about like an ancestor two million years years ago or people in most cultures on Earth including all those nice swell heartwarming cter gatherers you come home and you find your loved one in bed with somebody else and your impulsive Crime of Passion there is going to be pretty unchangeable by external contingencies of punishment so that aspect of us I think is really really longlasting the notion of a whole bunch of homonyms coming together and working in a Cooperative way with the willingness to have a hierarchy of command to go and

try to do damage to somebody else's equivalent group that's not all that baked into our our Legacy I don't think that's the first time I've heard that that is very interesting now knowing your own work on chimps chimps will band together and do Patrol parties and raid other chimp groups and kill them off um given that are that sounds more to me like organized military it's not exactly a standing army but it rhymes with it um so given that we are on that same evolutionary tree why do you think that it we don't have that

in our just Eternal past well for a very simple reason first off I wish I had had the luck to spend decades with chimps but I SP them with baboons who are baboons sorry they're not they don't make tools like that they're not as smart but they're plenty interesting when it comes to primates being awful to each other in interesting ways um well exactly what you bring up was the driving force and Notions of like our demonically violent past because our closest relative historically is chimps six seven years million years ago we share 98% of

our DNA or so and yeah they have organized violence they kill each other they kill each other in ways where the males in one group will systematically kill all the males in another group and take over their territory and expand that and whoa look this we've got this Legacy of six million years back and all of that and there's one word that shows how this is not really the case bonobo bonobo chimps pygmy chimps they used to be called bonobos have a completely different social system they are female dominated they have virtually no aggression nothing

like that has ever been seen in a bonobo they solve every source of social tension with sex and sex of every stripe you could imagine they're totally groovy all of that and you look and oh we share 98% of our DNA with bonobos as well they are as close of cousins as chimps are and even separate of the fact that we're not chimps we're not bonobos we solved our own evolutionary selective challenges in a you unique way all of that you know we're as closely related to the most groovy pacifists out there in the primate

world as we are to murderous demonic chimps so that does in that one and some of the most influential writing about our supposed inevitability of violence because of our shared chimp ancestry predated our knowledge about bonobo social behavior and bonobo genetics and what the genome looks like okay very interesting um it doesn't seem self-evident to me that if we're related to both of them equally and we are in today's age certainly capable of extreme violence look I I may be optimistic where you're pessimistic I think the vast majority of humans just want to get on

with their day and they're loving and kind uh but we do have these weird evolutionary quirks that make other people the outgroup US the ingroup we have Envy uh so there are things that will then trigger that murderous rage we are also uh i' be very interested to see if there are studies on this but as an entrepreneur I will tell you that people crave certainty and that when you give them certainty you can get them to follow you and people are so very malleable and if you give them Something to Believe In and then

say hey but we have to go kill these other people uh they'll they'll be here for it if things are bad enough and you need look no further than the um rise of the Third Reich and anybody unfamiliar with that history is is it's just absolutely astonishing and I am a big believer uh in what Soulja nson said which is the line through good and evil runs through every human heart so when I look at those stor St I go oh God I have all those same uh the same ability to be manipulated to come

to just hor horrifyingly erroneous conclusions so anyway bringing it back to the monkeys given how far off the violent or far off the beaten path to violence that we have proven that we are capable of going when I look at bonobos who uh have every groovy flavor of sex as you were saying and I look at at least in contemporary Society uh even now like there there is a shame there is a sense of that needs to be in private so I don't feel a ton of kinship there um and then with chimps dominance aggression

hierarchy as a guy in business I will say yeah that all sounds pretty familiar um again I don't know the studies in the way that you do so I'd love to know is there is there more to that story that shows that no no no we're really in alignment with but noos and if we are does that mean that if they had stuff to protect they had a farm they could hoard wealth do you think they too would break bad eventually yeah um which is a great question um I think what you're alluding to with

your entrepreneurial self recognizing the Chimp in you um is you know we're not a chimp we're not a bonobo have been subject to the same evolutionary rules but came up with a unique solution to a unique set of challenges but nonetheless one that can have a lot of overlap with how chimp solved it or bonobo solved it but what I think is implicit in your statement um is we show staggering amounts of variability we have both I don't know Elon Musk and the dolly Llama Or you know whatever we're incredibly varied species and we are

simultaneously the most violent species on Earth but also the most cooperative and altruistic and empathic and sometimes it could be the same person who embodies both of those behaviors and sometimes it could be the same behavior and it's in the eye of the beholder whether this person is a terrorist or a freedom fighter kind of thing you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dooll business that will allow you to see your goals

through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs in Impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today so we're a very in the mid little confused species with tremendous individual variation and thus there's an implicit danger to decide that any other species out there is a good model for making sense of how we evolved and I think one can cherry-pick stuff on that and I guarantee you

there's somebody somewhere on some organic farm wearing birken stocks or whatever whose natural affinity will be much more with bonobos or yeah we're we're highly variable in that way great great example of this okay in primatology there's this broad classification you can do um across like 150 primate species or so there are species that are monogamous parab bonders and there are ones who are polygamous polyas parab bonders Gibbons cang some South American monkeys and then there's all the Apes and most of the Old World primates and all of that so you see these two patterns

and it turns out there's all sorts of traits that go in common with if you turn out to be a parab bonding species or a polygamous species a tournament species and these traits play out in remarkable ways in a species in which males mate with a lot of females different females you don't see male parental care because they don't care in a species in which females are meeting with multiple males over the course of their cycle you don't see male parenting either because there's a high degree of uncertainty in a species like that where there's

High degrees of aggression there's selection for secondary sexual characteristics like lots of muscle and sharp canines and then you look at one of the pair bonding species and males and females look exactly the same because they've been selected for the same sort of traits being good parents and male maret monkeys will do more parenting of their offspring than even the the females will and these are two totally different sorts of pictures sufficiently so like you go out in a newly discovered Island and there's a new primate nobody has ever seen before and you manage to

see this one way up in that tree as a male you see his penis and then magically he falls out of the tree dead so you've got his body to exam and then and over there there's a female because you saw her nursing somebody young and she falls out of the tree and now you can compare them and you know nothing whatsoever about the species social system right off the bat if the male is a whole lot bigger than the female you're looking at a tornament species right off the bat if you look at you

know the length of time the female nurs isn't how much milk can be stored you're finding out something about if she's a pair bonding species and right away you look at whether females and males have canines so whole bunch of these you know nothing more than and like you've just found out all this private stuff about them so where do humans fit and by every measure some of our genetic diseases the degree of difference between the average male human and female human in life expectancy body mass lung capacity width of nostrils all of that you

know sperm levels and the testes all these things that are functions of that by every one of those measures we're about halfway in between we're not a parir bonding species and we're not a tournament species we're halfway in between and that was part of what made us generalists so on the average we're that and what's also clear is amid that average of us being halfway in between and Confused a whole lot of the time and basically basically that explains you know half of Earth's poets and all of Earth's divorce lawyers the fact that we're confused

some way halfway in between um is that individuals are not always halfway in between they're skewed way out on one end or the other there's Gene profiles related to hormones like vasopressin and oxytocin and their receptors which are significant contributors to how stable and Fidel fidelius whatever the word how how faithful somebody is in their relationships how close of interpersonal space they stand in front of somebody of the opposite sex if they're heterosexual while they're already in a relationship like that winds up so we're this species where we don't fall into any of those patterns

easily and thus we're on some fairly thin ice in saying you know in this regard we just much more chimp is than we're bonoo is or whatever we're we're highly variable and we by definition the species that doesn't fit into any of those categories and when you look at the individuals amongst us none of them fit into the what the average is for our species yeah that the getting into how much of our um makeup is either echoed in our body or driven by our body I find endlessly fascinating um my wife and I been

together for been married for 21 years and so we get asked a lot about oh you know what's the secret to a long marriage and while I rarely give this answer the thing that's in my mind a lot of times is I almost certainly have a lot more receptors for vasopressin because I get so much out of bonding with my wife I don't know what to do with that not to mention what she has to do with that um yeah this is exactly our our discussion of oh my God we're machines and you just proved

that you're a machine who could know your Machin in that regard and does that like do in Hallmark cards does that do win like the feelings that you feel that you feel so strongly that they feel real even if they aren't real because you're just machine yeah that's that's the challenge that we have that's somehow we need to come to terms with us knowing our Machin in the sense that like you can do biomechanics on pelvic arches and angles of femur with pelvic arches and thus in this species they could leap in this way and

in that species they can't and here's the the equations that will prove it and that could make perfect sense to you and still your jaw drop drops open the first time you see that a gazelle can leap 20 ft across you know a rivered and that's the most amazing thing and you're like can't believe the world has produced something like this and you can do that and understand the equations that it makes it possible for their hind legs to Spring that way we have to be able to sort of come to some sort of you

know treaty and peaceful stance with our knowing our Machin and knowing and sensing the gears just underneath the surface explaining the things that make us who we are and you and your Vaso pressent receptor profile while at the same time still being able to say like it's amazing having somebody Who You're Universe revolves around them and theirs around yours and yeah okay it's Vas res receptors we need to be able to do that simultaneously because knowing like the architecture of a gazelle's pelvis should not take away your ability to just be a struck by like

how they turned out that way how circumstances produced an animal that could that gracefully go flying that far in the air so be intellectually taken with biomechanics and be grateful for the like awe and Aesthetics of getting to watch it and I think that's the only thing we can do with our being machines who understand our Machin so okay good for you you got the right kind of vasopress receptors um like may it bring you lots of pleasure and it's a good thing if it does somehow we have to reconcile that yeah well it's definitely

brought me a lot of pleasure that is for sure um the body is one thing that I'm always thinking about from an optimization standpoint I'm always encouraging people that remember you're having a biological experience if you're not getting sleep if you're not getting sunlight if your diet sucks if you're not exercising like all of these things are going to make it hard for you just to process the world um there's a couple things I'd like to touch on just to really drive this home for people one is um what I've heard you talk about before

which is the idea that the timing of your parole hearing to when the last time the judge ate was uh and then Phineas Gage and Phineas Gage is the one I always reach to when people are like oh what do you mean of course we have free will I'm like bro uh walk us through those Phineas Gage every every neuroscientist on Earth at some point was sat down in their grandma grandpa's knee and told the tale of Phineas Gage and neuroscientists almost requireed to consider naming their kid after Phineas Gage phas Gage was a railroad

construction line Foreman in Vermont in the 1840s obviously like a sobrius reliable guy if he was the foreman of this churchgoing devout guy showed up for work every day all of that one day somebody like left a stick of dynamite where they shouldn't and Gage was carrying this in this three-foot tamping iron Rod that you do something with that to make railroad lines go through mountains and stuff and this caused an explosion and it shot this metal pole into his eye and out the front part of his skull and it landed 30 feet away with

a large part of his frontal cortex stuck to it and you know he had just had an interesting biological intervention and the remark is this went through so fast and with such force that it cauterized all the blood vessels he wasn't even bleeding he was like a little bit dazed and got up and like somebody went and like got the the boss who looked in his head and said oh my God Gage I see what's wrong you've got a hole in your head I can see all the way out at the top of your head

and they said you know tell you what Gage take the rest of the day off let see you tomorrow and some of his friends walked mile and a half with him to go to the town Doctor Who looked in there and said oh something shot through your eye and at the top of your skull and weird and this doctor proceeded to be able to document what happened to Gage which was guge was almost literally overnight transformed into this disinhibited hyper aggressive alcoholic sexually predatory monstrous guy who was never able to work for years and years

afterward because and what we had just learned was summarized by the Doctor Who in his notes said gauge is no longer gauge something about that part of the brain constrains the animal energies within us and that's a pretty good 19th century definition of what the frontal cortex does in terms of regulating behavior and emotion all of that and that was the first demonstration that you could change like the fundamental character and moral values and everything else of somebody just by mucking around with their brain mucking around with an iron Rod that goes through there so

this was an UNS subtle one and thus it's easy for us to appreciate that as the causitive agent that had nothing to do with free will but this is an extraordinary example and all we've learned since then are subtler versions of it one that should give one pause which is depending on the study 25 to 75% of the men on Death Row in this country have a history of a concussive head trauma to the front of their heads where their frontal cortex is and when you put that in context you're not looking at bad souls

or you're not looking at people who just are not capable of feeling somebody else's pain you're looking at a broken machine you're looking at a a machine whose breaks in this particular domain Shattered by concussive trauma so you know Phineas guge was the first of our lessons in that and all we've done since then is learn far more subtle stuff is underneath the surface than just metal rods or concussive head injuries you know this is where all of us are turning into who we are the judges the hungry judges I love this study um and

it has been subject to some controversy this was was published in a very prestigious Journal a number of years ago looking at parole board judges in a particular country where the researchers were and they examined all of the decisions these judges made over the course of a year as to whether to Pearl somebody or send them back to prison and this was well more than a thousand cases something like that and then looking for like what predicted when a judge would free someone versus send it back for another five years and out popped this flabbergasting

finding which was the single biggest predictor was how many hours it had been since the judge had eaten a meal oh my God see a judge right after lunch and there was about 60% chance of being pared by four hours later you were down to basically a 1% chance oh my this is this is like Earth shattering all of that what is this about this is about something very simple like when you haven't eaten your blood sugar levels go down when they're low you don't have enough glucose to run your brain which is the most

expensive organ like pound forp pound in your body and you especially don't have the means to run the most expensive part of your brain the frontal cortex the frontal cortex that would make you say wait wa wait before you just send the guy back think a little bit about his circumstances think about whether you know someone like that makes you a little bit edgy because of how tough they look try to try to look past that think about how the world has been from their perspective that takes energy in the same way that we become

more selfish and less Cooperative when we're hungry or tired or sleep deprived and all of that yeah it's low blood glucose and your expensive part of the brain can't do the harder thing so that's amazing but what's even more interesting is like if you took that judge at that point and said hey look at this you had a guy with the exact same history the other day there and you paroled that guy and this guy you sent back to jail how come they're not going to say because I had low blood glucose they're GNA quote

Emanuel Kant or something and and come up with a post Haw explanation what's that telling us you know our most consequential decisions that tap into the core of us as morally reasoning beings we biological machines all of that that said this study has been ired in controversy one group sort of wrote in and challenged the conclusions based on statistics and for my money the original group reanalyzed their data in accord with these people's complaints and showed that it did nothing to their conclusion another group has challenged them on an artifact of how the study was

done and That Was Then controlled for and shown to be intact another complaint was brought up which when you look at it closely makes the point of of the original study even stronger I think it is held up and it is held up in other Realms as well go in and you're going to go into a bank and ask a bank officer for a home loan mortgage loan or whatever make sure you go in right after they've had lunch the same exact phenomenon the more hours it has been the more likely they ought to turn

down a loan application studies where you give people job application to read and some of them by name are from an outgroup member and some are from one of us and the more hours it's been the shorter time you spend reading the outgroup members application before you toss it in the trash the more hours a doctor has gone without sleeping the more implicit racial bias they show when they make judgments about dosages for painkillers all of that yeah there's all this biology going on and then the coolest thing is superimposed on that is this great

cultural wrinkle that I saw in a paper that came out more recently which is looking at one circumstance where the more hours it has been since the judge has eaten the meal the more forgiving they are and the more benevolent and the more empathic what is this about these are Muslim judges in Sharia courts during Ramadan when they're fasting during daylight hours and you're hungry then not because godamn it I had to go to this meeting during lunchtime and I didn't get to eat and I'm starving because you're reflecting on the meaning of life and

your responsibility to your fellow humans and what God wants if you if that's the culture you're growing up in being hungry because it's Ramadan makes you more merciful get the same drudge four weeks later and they're starving because they missed lunch and they're going to throw the book at the person just like the American judge would do whoa so all of that mechanistically and then there's a cultural wrinkle that's thrown in on top of that so if you were raised in that sort of culture two different types of hunger bring out very different things in

your moral decision-making process wow not only are we we machines were really interesting ones yeah that is crazy to me that context can have that kind of impact on it um which also makes me think about uh dopamine testosterone things that people think they have like a really strong beat on oh it does this but in reality they are way more context dependent um walk me through that how is it possible that testosterone can mean one thing in one context and another in another because you are secreting it in response to contextual information incredible like

mistake people have in their heads is that testosterone causes aggression testosterone does not cause aggression testosterone makes aggressive individuals more sensitive to social cues that trigger aggression and there's all sorts of studies that have been done that show that testosterone does not turn on the radio if the radio is already turned on it UPS the volume on it it UPS the sensitivity of the system to whatever you have been socially trained to learn to view as a provocation of aggression so that but then you see there's something even more subtle there going on it's not

that testosterone causes aggression yeah yeah yeah we just got rid of it and it's not even that testosterone makes you more aggressive if you are already getting the social cues that trigger aggression what testosterone really does is make you more likely to do whatever behaviors give you status when your status is being challenged okay you're baboon and your status is being challenged because some guy is like hassling you and challenging if you're a baboon status being challenged is answered by you get into a fight with a guy baboons are a lot simpler than us but

then in our world all you have to do is go to like some fancy ass private school that's having their annual auction and fundraiser or whatever and you see a whole bunch of like self-satisfied Captain of industry Rich guys there who are on the board at the place and they're sitting there half drunk because they make sure the banquet has lots of alcohol flowing and then you get to watch these like Masters of the Universe compete with each other as to who could bid the highest in this charitable auction oh my God these are Apes

who are sitting there trying to maintain their social status by seeing who can give away more of their money whoa we're a weird species go explain that one to about and you can show this experimentally there are economic games where people ACR status by being more generous give people testosterone and they make more generous offers the issue isn't that say testosterone makes aggression more likely and that that's the problem the problem is that we hand out status for aggression so readily that is very interesting to me and what what do you make of the fact

that well what I take away from that is that men are selected for their response to testosterone which is why they have so much more of it than women uh which means that men for some reason Evolution wanted to make sure that we would defend our status what do you think that's all about well that immediately fits into things like that gets you more copies of your genes passed on and that sort of business going back to the fundamentals there what it tells by the time you get to us is there's a lot of different

ways to optimize that we're a complicated species and sometimes you do that by like being a CEO Maverick and you know before you know it that's one version of incredible status and some of the time you do it by like being a warlord somewhere and you know context dependent we are a very heterogeneous species in terms of cultures and cultural values and what we mostly have our brains that evolved not to be set in stone but instead to be malleable enough to learn what your particular cultures rules are do you think that um it indicates

that women are selecting males based on status yes and most studies indicate that one classic body of work by a guy named David bus University of Texas at Austin um doing this massive cross-cultural study of people all over the planet and like here's 25 adjectives and rate them for how far they are up in your list of what you would look for in a in a partner in a in a spouse whatever and what you saw was consistently men uh in every culture out there uh averaged preferring a partner who was a number of years

younger than them consistently women chose for partners who were older than them consistently women put money earning capacity in the guy higher up on the list than the guy would do consistently men put potential fertility higher up on the list than women would do and this was crosscultural this was all over the world oh my God some of the stuff is so solid there and then you find out what the most interesting thing is about the study which is regardless of culture the most common number one thing on the list was kindness oh my God

all this cultural stuff and inculcation at roles and gender roles and maybe it's not inculcation because biology is making that and we're so different women and men and Mars and Venus and and yeah at the end of the day like everyone put kindness at the top of their list so like we make perfect sense as just another primate when you look at us through one angle and then we're completely bizarre and unprecedented in another that like you can have people who are hunter gatherers are living in like the middle of Chicago and somebody who's a

socialist or someone who's a capitalist or some and they all come out with roughly the same list of preferences there yet a list that has some stereotypical gender differences oh we're a really weird primate we're a primate but we're a very unique one the things that people rate from a sexual attractiveness perspective has become very much a hot button issue um I'm very curious to hear what you think about this whenever I think about my wife as being like me I my prediction engine breaks and I can no longer predict her behavior when I think

of women and look of course there's more overlap than there is difference 100% but there's a great I'm going to paraphrase it I don't remember who said this but uh there's a quote that goes um any individual man is a mystery but put them in the Aggregate and they are a mathematical certainty and uh I will say that the same is true of women I that makes a lot of sense to me that if you're looking at any one person of course you have to get to know them you have to figure out what is

particular about them but as you begin to step back to the population level suddenly you get a lot of things a lot of um traits that become reliable at a um at a population level and so when I think of my wife as being very different than me um of having more classically feminine ways of approaching the world so she doesn't have my level of aggression she is far more um interested in people than things she's far more interested in subtleties of communication um she um values me for very different things and I value her

I mean obviously there's a lot of overlap but just that they become these outliers uh do you see that as yes at the population level there are going to be there are big differences between men and women or no no no that's all much to do about nothing and um better to think of them as as you would think of yourself well it depends in what domain you're making the assessment uh higher ability appropriateness to cast a vote in a ballot sort of thing yeah it took this country only a bunch of centuries to figure

out that that's not a domain in which sex differences are pertinent so there it shouldn't matter matter and it doesn't matter and equal pay and you know all that sort of stuff hoay for a progressive agenda um when it looks at systematized thought versus relational thought and sex differences in that that's a Fairly reliable one those are interesting and like people even know what different gonadal hormones do to the cortex during fetal life and stuff like that so that's really interesting but what you come down to is exactly your point which is there's no human

out there who is an average human um your average human is an average human but there is no individual who fits averageness across the board because it's a statistical artifact if you throw enough data points together and patterns emerge and patterns emerge with certain distributions of frequencies and thus you can identify somebody who's average in the middle but look closely and they're not going to be Side by some trade or whatever that's why I don't know sociologists probably can tell us a whole lot more about you know what is changing the economy will do to

rates of violence than psychotherapists can do because one of them specializes in aggregate predictability from populations and the other one does one case at a time and depending on what you want to know one could be a more valid approach than the other but yeah individuals on the average are individualistic and you know hoay for that and we're far more variable than your average you know porcupine is because we evolved in a way we're a lot more elow room and the workings of the system so I want to go back to neurochemistry so dopamine has

become something that people are really focused on these days in terms of the way that our lives are um structured such that you know whether it's being on social media just the way that a phone is able to trigger all these rewards uh that phones seem designed very much like a slot machine with colors and sounds and alerts and alarms um what what do you what do you advise for people that you know in terms of if if our goal in this interview is to get out a bunch of ideas that uh nonfree will having

beings uh will hopefully take on and move in a Direction that's more useful um what do you tell people about dopamine about dopamine detoxing how should people approach a life if they want to um not become the puppet of their phone I think one thing to recognize is another one of those misnomers testosterone is not about aggression dopamine is not about reward and pleasure initially it is but when you look more closely what it's more about is it's about anti anticipation of pleasure it's about how great it is going to be when the reward actually

happens the neurochemistry that is much more built around endogenous opioid like neurotransmitters things like dopamine is about anticipation and even more importantly dopamine is about the motivation you derive from that anticipation how many times are you willing to press that lever with your paw in order to get that reward there what dopamine is about is it's the fuel for go gold directed behavior and that's a very different picture than dopamine is about reward and such because it tells you the fueling of behavior with dopamine is mostly about the fueling of the ability to hold your

breath and weight because it's going to be that much more amazing when it comes the ability to decide the future may carry a larger re than the present and it's worth waiting for and you know mice can do that monkeys can do that and they could do that for a few minutes at a time and we could do it deciding that if you have a certain mindset doing a certain sort of delayed gratification will get you into heaven when you're dead whoa you could maintain dopamine as like a motivator of you know anticipation of reward

and thus living a pure sacred life or whatever because you're going to like wind up in Paradise afterward or because you're maintaining dopamine while you press the lever over and over because you've got this bizarre thing you want to leave a better planet for your great grandchildren like we take the basic dopamine system that like motivates you to press a lever in order to get a nice food pallet if you're like a monkey sitting there or elaborate and then we do it for like taking on a five generation long project to building some like Gothic

Cathedral where like you were going to train your children to be the stonemason who will take over when you die and like Whoa We Could maintain dopamine up there for incredibly long periods of time so that's the first thing people should know about dopamine and so and us when trying to make sense of like we're the species that can hold our breath for a long long long time and that's very unique the other thing about it is like you look at a baboon and you look at what are its sources of pleasure in life what

are some of the things it could anticipate and it's basically like food that you want or sex that you're motivated about or if you're in a bad bad mood somebody smaller and weaker who you can beat up on to displace your frustration and that's about it for a bad Moon's like inventory of things to feel anticipatory about but then you get us and we've got people who could be anticipatory that you know with another 14 years of digging in Old Divi Gorge you're GNA pull up a homed fossil like nothing anyone's ever seen and you

are going to feel such pleasure and you've been scraping there in the Sun for 14 years out of anticipation that it's got to be there and then you turn around and then you also use dopamine because the doughnut you get afterward when you come at the end of the day tastes delicious and you know it's going to taste delicious and then you turn around and you use dopamine because the smell of a flower is going to be amazing and then you turn it around because you hope that whoa once again you can have like multiple

orgasms in one and then when that's all done you go to the symph and like you can't believe Beethoven could do such things with like a picky third chord or something like that and we're weird because we've got to use the same dopamine system it's the same neurotransmitter and it's the same circuitry and we use it for everything from like the smell of a flower to winning the lottery to taking cocaine to like understanding a passage of like some philosopher who's impen able and suddenly it makes sense and O we just released dopamine just like

a baboon does when it has just killed a gazelle and is getting to eat it what a bizarre species we are and the only way we can do that in that some of the time on our dopamine dial going from 0er to 10 means a great smelling flour and some of the time going from Zer to 10 is you've just won the lottery the only way we can do that is it's a syst system that has to reset the gain on the system really fast because right now you're doing good flow smells and you've got

a way have to have a way to tell the system we've just switched over to winning the lottery dopamine and going from zero to 10 on that is totally different than going Zer to 10 on the flowers and people are beginning to actually figure out unique things about circuitry in the human brain of the dopamine system that allows you to reset the gain on the system more there's more little feedback loops in the wiring this this is totally cool stuff and it has to work that way and once you've got a system that can reset

so you can go from doing flowers to the lottery and then back again to like solving a math equation you got a downside to that which I think people need to be aware of and one that explains like an incredible percentage of human misery if you've got a system that res sets that e easily by definition whatever was an amazing wonderful surprise yesterday is going to feel like something you're entitled to today and is going to feel insufficient tomorrow and that's this price of Perpetual hunger that we pay for a system that constantly has to

has to habituate to whatever the latest pleasure was because you got to reset the whole thing for starting the repetitive motivation process all over again and guarantees whatever is nice now is going to leave you hungry tomorrow and like that's how we go do things like invent you know vaccines and fly to the moon and and write whatever Grand achievements that yeah we can have extraordinary sources of motivation to carry us through with that um but but another way of stating that is what is okay today is going to be insufficient tomorrow and yeah but

what have I done lately my next Noel has to be even better than this one or my next public offering has to be even more successful than this one where the species that always gets hungry again is another way of saying that we're a species that always habituates to the present which is another way of saying that we're the species that has to use the same dopamine system for incredibly different things on like the turn of a dime spinning on a dime or whatever and that's the price we pay we're always going to invent new

stuff unlike chimps chimps make tools and all of that and you find 20,000 year old paleontological sites of chimps tool making and they were making the same tools 20,000 years ago that they're making now they don't have incremental advances in their material culture we're the species that keeps inventing new stuff and we're the species that also what was great yesterday is going to be kind of boring tomorrow and more more and more so how do we avoid uh dying on the treadmill of dopamine well I think awareness of it is a good thing those of

us who celebrate on a regular basis we have somewhere in their values in our head that what is implicit in us could be made more visible and examinable by explicit self-reflection and we're even like able to understand literatures that's showing things like implicit biases when made explicit by self-reflection weakens those implicit biases yeah think about this stuff wonder why it is like what was amazing yesterday isn't feeling like quite enough today and why it's boring now and you should be able to get something better and more exciting and something shinier and newer and all of

that like whether it's a neurochemist version of understanding it or I don't know like what was that Theologian Merton who wrote about this a lot that level of understanding this in either version that sort of insight should make you a little bit skeptical about the omnipresence of your hungers and that's a realm in which whether it's poetry or reading neurochemistry journals if either of those accomplished that that's a good thing that's a good way to make mechanism work to your advantage and recognize how much we are running on Hunger that like takes us up wrong

Pathways and even if it takes us up the right one isn't going to last for very long one thing that I found very useful in life is exactly what you're talking about now which is the idea of just pulling something into the light acknowledging what it is understanding its impact uh and then being able to make changes based on now that I know that was a big breakthrough for me um in my life with brain plasticity which you mentioned at the very top of the interview um once I could understand what was happening I knew

how to take advantage of it so we you know we've talked a lot about obviously that Free Will doesn't exist we've talked about the ways that our brain works and how we're trapped by biology now again going back to the world diagram entitlement is going to be this gigantic word um I understand what you're afraid of when it comes to free will but now I want to talk about at a societal level the the changes that you want to see um be made so I think that look PE your book basically breaks into two parts

number one is Free Will doesn't exist and you give extraordinarily detailed and compelling reasons why that is true um I'll sum up for me Phineas gagee was all I needed to hear like oh wait I can completely change somebody's life just by damaging their brain like that to me just makes it so self-evident there could be no soul there could be um nothing beyond my ability to uh process and so whether I'm disrupting that by something I'm eating that's disrupting my gut which is disrupting the serotonin that's being made which therefore my brain has less

to deal with like it just seems so self-evident to me that we are our biology and I will never understand uh I have awe and this is something you were very clear about recognizing this stuff leaves me in awe I I stand in Wonder and the same kind of reverence that people that are religious have I have that and I want that for people and and and I love that but it just seems impossible for me to make the leap that we have a soul when I'm like well what if my brain got damaged like

do I then reconstitute when I'm in heaven like I don't understand it doesn't make any sense to me uh also I have a terrible memory am I going to have a terrible memory in heaven like all it just this is all so weird to me so setting that aside though so now we look at the criminal justice system and this becomes the second half of the book which is like okay if I can get you all to believe that it's as uncomfortable as it is to embrace that Free Will doesn't exist that you don't get

to own your um accomplishments in the way that you would probably want to uh but the criminal justice system and the changes that you want I think will be the other controversial part so what's the what's the pitch in reality so if we're going to quarantine people um what do you mean by that and how do we actually pull it off okay so when deciding you could subtract responsibility let alone like a culpable soul out of making sense of humans damaging actions against other humans um what you're left left with there is how do we

protect Society from people who are dangerous and what sort of the public health model quarantine model of infectious disease is built around is number one figure out how to constrain the person so that they're no longer an infectious danger to people around them number two don't do a smidgen more than that because the person doesn't deserve that number three make sure you're framing that in a context where this person had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there's some like virus floing out of their lungs now into the air around them and number four

put effort into understanding where disease like that comes from original causes and stuff and when that's turned into the same thing for dealing with like damaging humans in the way that we would call now criminality figure out how to constrain them so that they're not dangerous anymore obviously like not believing in Free Will doesn't mean we'll just let murderers running around all over the place constrain them don't do it an inch more than you need to Don't Preach to them in the process about how there's some sort of Soul that's relevant to all of that

and make sure like any good Public Health person you are interested in root causes and try to figure out what it is that creates people who are damaging in that way and try to fix things at that level and this sounds completely like know absurdly idealistic or something but we do that all the time and just to give two different domains we do that all the time you get a car whose brakes aren't working and it's dangerous it'll kill people you don't know how to fix it it's dangerous constrain it don't use it put it

in a garage don't do a smidgen more than that don't go in every day with a sledgehammer and smash the hood of the car because it deserves retro ution for the fact that it breaks failed and it hit someone Don't Preach to it and at that point try to figure out why breaks fail okay so that's that's machines as machines but what about us as machines how do we do that where we really can subtract out a sense of responsibility and blame and culpability all we do that all the time there's a circumstance where there's

a certain type of human who is dangerous to the people around them they will harm them they will damage them and this is a danger and we have to take societal steps to prevent this from happening and what do you do if that's your kid and they have a nose cold you keep them home from kindergarten tomorrow because the rule is if your child is sneezing a lot please keep them home so they don't get everybody else sick constrain them quarantine them so that they're now not a danger to the other classmates but don't tell

them they can't play with their toys today when they're home because they're bad having caught a rhino virus and don't like confuse Health with purity of Soul like previous centuries and tell them they've gotten rotten soul and that's why they're sneezing and make sure people are figuring out why people get nose colds and if there's a way to prevent it wow we have subtracted a blemish on your pristine moral soul out of 5-year-old sneezing and we're able to protect other kids from getting the nose cold and we don't tell this kid that they're a rotten

human because they're sneezing and it's a more human place and it's a healthier Place great that's our blueprint we've got two things that we've been talking about this entire episode one is biology everything is Downstream of that uh but it's also Downstream of ideas and so the one thing that I worry about with this approach is that if we assume people don't have free will but they are going to respond to the ideas that they're able to ingest um by one let's take the kid example that has a nose cold so that works quarantining them

works because the immune system's kicking in is going to fix that the car brakes thing um that's probably closer because there's something wrong and let's say we're not a mechanic so we don't know how to fix it we know it's Danger we can recognize that we can put the car in a garage um that's incarceration of some kind whether it's a mental hospital or otherwise and while I hope that tomorrow we have the Breakthrough and this becomes the thing that you can cure and then it's you you quarantine them long enough to cure them and

then you let them go um but we don't yet have that solution so it still ends up being incarceration now I hear you and one of the things you want is just to make sure that we're not smashing the car hood because because it deserves to be smashed for having bad breaks I I definitely understand that but I that still feels like incarceration and then as we get into what that's going to look like in real life it feels like that's just going to play out the same way that we are now because they're going

to be housed with other people it is going to be the violent and the deranged and it's all going to end badly the second part of this is uh do you know um Sam bankman freed do I know okay no but I no no no I just mean the the story of what happened so yeah which is fast okay so for he's very fascinating for people that don't know quick primer um ends up defrauding people out of8 billion do he's awaiting sentencing right now but he's been convicted now the weird twist here is that his

mother wrote an essay uh called Beyond blame saying like hey like we have to I mean very similar to what you're saying now this I don't know that she said broken car but like you you have to separate the um the person from the thing that they did and so one I'm not saying that Sam uh is abusing the system though that is another thing you have to worry about is whatever system you put in place people are going to exploit it 100% And so follow the show me the incentives and I'll show you the

outcome says um Berkshire hathway I'm forgetting is Charlie Monger so if you incentivize people to say oh it wasn't me which it wasn't but like people will begin ideas will plant themselves in people's minds that are you know have that criminal nature to begin with and and they're going to leverage that in the system it's like what we see right now with you make it uh you don't prosecute people that steal less than $900 or whatever and they'll go in and steal $800 99 we're watching that play out so um I worry about that do

you think it is just pure coincidence that um Sam bankman Freed's mother happened to write an article about that and he happens to be what the second biggest uh fraud of all time and no doubt it's competitive with Bernie maid off because he isn't quite in his leag um Sam's mother who I am forced to note is a colleague of mine she's professor at Stanford law school and has built a career about sort of issues of Free Will and stuff and I I can't get past the point that it's just the most wonderfully ironic thing

on Earth and I can't like stop just seeing that is like a meme for like the unlikely turns that happen in the world oh my god of course his mother that's what kind of legal scholar she is and then when you look closely that both she and her husband benefited financi actually quite a bit from Sam Shenanigans yeah yeah okay we've got an irresistible version of the oh my God if you convince people there's no free will we're all just going to run a muck people are going to run a mck because there's no responsibility

and there have been some unfortunately highly compelling convincing studies done supposedly showing that when you psych Psy psychologically manipulate people uh to believe Less in their agency they cheat more It games immediately afterward things yeah we're all going to run a muck because because the devil is just underneath the surface and thank God it's only the veneer of reward and Punishment and societal disdain that keeps you acting civy and we're all just you know hobbsy and Savages underneath but then you look closer at that literature and instead of looking at somebody who you've just manipulated

into feeling a little bit less belief in their agency get somebody who comes in and says I don't believe in Free Will I haven't believed in it forever I don't believe in it and you put them in a circumstance like that and they are exactly as highly ethical as is someone who believes we need to be held responsible for our every action and all of that what's that about there's an amazing parallel the other version of people will just run a muck they'll run a muck if they stop believing in God because forget you're not

responsible for your actions this is the version of no one will hold you responsible for your ultimate actions and oh my God they're going to run a mock in that whole thing and what you see when you look at it is atheists people who are strident solid in their atheism are just as moral in their behavior as are the most religiously observant people out there and who are the ones who fall off but that that you know Olympian State there it's the people in between for whom they don't believe in God but it's mostly because

they're apathetic about it or they're religious but it's just for the kids or just in the holidays or whatever and what you see is this ironic thing you get somebody who is thought long and hard about the basis of human goodness and what we to our fellow human and where meaning comes from all and it basically doesn't matter if your conclusion is yes we have free will and we the Agents of our action or you conclude yes there is a God or if you conclude there's no free will or there's no God the fact that

you've done the hard work to think through this is what virtually guarantees that neither end of the spectrum runs a muck and you know as one quasy anecdotal example of this this after World War II there are all sorts of sociological studies of who are the people who risked their lives to save various outgroup members from Nazis and stuff and it wasn't the people with rarified philosophy degrees and it wasn't the people who were highly religious in a particular way it was people who were either highly religious or highly secular and were brought up that

way by their parents and had built a system of moral imperatives built around that because you thought long and hard about it and it doesn't really matter which end of it you wind up with and you know in the face of but you know still you're dangerous person you're going to put him in a prison with other violent people and that's just a breeding ground and like that doesn't look good I'm virtually required by law to say at this point the Scandinavians the scand they have a penal system that avoids most of that and they

have a system where responsibility is viewed as far less part of the picture than the American system and they have a system where prisoners are treated far far better and where the principle is one of quarantine and minimal constraint nothing more than that and oh my God people are going to run a market and they've got on Tenth the violent crime rate that we do and they have one fifth the recidivism rate that we do talk to me more about that I'm not aware of that so what do they do in the prison system uh

are they educating people are they um really cracking down on violent outbursts how do they pull that off yeah they do all that and they view that as a system okay the the greatest example is Andre brevik he was that white supremacist guy who 10 years ago whatever went and killed 75 people in Norway um went to this island where there was a whole bunch of a progressive parties summer camp for teenagers thing going on and he killed a cop and took his uniform and showed up there pretending and mowed down 70 kids there after

he had after setting off a bomb just outside the office of the Prime Minister who is a progressive liberal and in fact had grown up in that summer camp program and all of that and this was the worst atrocity in the history of like Norway and he made it worse by throughout his trial giving pseudo naazi salutes throughout insisting he wanted to be considered a prisoner of war of like the white Knights of Templar Army trying to save Europe from the the ethnic horde that and like and what do they do they convicted him and

they gave him the longest jail sentence possible that is allowed by law in Norway he's in jail for about 20 years and he has an apartment he has internet access he's currently enrolled as a part-time student at the University of Oco irony of irony majoring in political science and he's got like a fitness machine and when he's getting a little bit lonely like the state will pay retired cops to come and play cards with him because he's feeling a little bit isolated there because he has Ren renounced his beliefs and he's still dangerous so his

constraint has to involv he doesn't get to interact much with other people and like that's what done that's what's done with him and that's the sort of society they have and admit that they've got a far far lower crime rate than they do for a gazillion other reasons than in the United States because they believe governments should support the social needs of people and you know off we go in the Scandinavian Utopias that may not hold up to close examination all that great so it's not just that but the shest measure of it is you

ask member of societies after that trial was completed was Justice done and overwhelming majority of people in Norway thought this was the appropriate thing to do with him and you asked the family members of his victims and there were few of them who wanted to torture him for the rest of the time but the most average response of family members of the victims was yeah he's away the government has done what it's supposed to do he's away and even better than he could never harm someone again we never have to think about him again that

pathetic broken guy who latched on to vicious you know rabbit ideology at some point because he had been a nobody mediocrity his whole life and this made him feel important for a little while and he fell into the hands of sociopaths who manipulated them him with their ideology yeah poor schmuck that's how we turned out to be like that but best of all we don't have to think about him anymore he's never going to hurt anyone anymore and that's the kind of society they've constructed there oh my God people are good to run a mck

no they've got a fraction of the crime rate that we do in the United States and a fraction of the recidivism rate the P the purpose of their quarantine system is to train somebody to have useful skills when they come out the other end to have a society that has a network that will give him the opportunity to live by that and along the way try to teach him skills about empathy and like trying to understand what damage consists of and what it is you did to other people and whoa it works it works better

than here and it works better than here in a place where not only do we believe in God and Free Will and something that we inculcate your average American kid in from like kindergarten but where we prove over and over that it hasn't done any good because where Society filled with violence and treating people terribly and stuff like that so like whoa a lot that God-fearing has gotten Us in this country here yeah you look at the the options the comparisons to choose from and like there's better ways of doing it and ways that are

capable of subtracting out the pleasure of punishment and retribution and the notion that penalizing somebody is virtue in and of itself and you can subract all that stuff out and it's a more Humane place and it works better such an interesting debate this whole thing free will all of it it's crazy Robert thank you so much for joining me today where can people uh follow you oh well I have to say at this point you know I got this book and it just got published last month and it's called determined a science of life without

free will uh penguin random house where people can follow me I don't know but my young adult children have recently gotten enthused about this and I'm doing something now I don't know if I'm tick tocking or twittering or ask me anything on AMA on they they've set that up because they insist that I'm so as of a week ago I have a social media presence and that is all I know about it um so somewhere I'm out there and good luck finding it I sure don't know how to but welcome to the 21st century even

if I'm not really part of it yet that's all right free will uh it lacking Free Will has has led you to that so nobody nobody blames you we'll put it in the show notes uh that way people can find you very easily you are well worth following that is for sure speaking of things that are well worth following everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you enjoyed this episode check out this deep conversation with Donald Hoffman about reality and Consciousness what

we are are avatars of the one the one awareness is exploring all of its possibilities through different avatars