About the Speaker
Robert Sapolsky is an American academic and scientist, specializing in neuroscience and primatology. He serves as a Professor at Stanford University, where he holds joint appointments in Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery. His extensive research primarily focuses on neuroendocrinology, particularly the impact of stress on neurological functions and the potential of gene-therapy strategies for neuron protection.
Sapolsky graduated from Harvard University with a degree in biological anthropology and later earned his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. His groundbreaking fieldwork with wild baboons has explored the relationship between social hierarchy and stress, providing critical insights into stress-related diseases in both animals and humans.
In addition to his research, Sapolsky has authored several influential books, including Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Behave, and A Primate’s Memoir, which examine human behavior, stress, and biology in an engaging and accessible way. He has been recognized with numerous accolade.
Video: Robert Sapolsky on Light Watkins' Channel
"If you've got a choice and you want to have nice low stress hormone levels and live to ripe old age, don't choose to be high ranking, choose to have a whole lot of social affiliation where you actually can gain psychological benefit from it"
Robert Sapolsky
Description
In this captivating interview, Robert Sapolsky delves into the complexities of human behavior, free will, and the biological mechanisms that influence our actions. Drawing on decades of research with primates, Sapolsky explores how stress, social hierarchy, and environmental factors shape both animal and human responses.
He challenges common perceptions of free will, suggesting that much of what we attribute to personal choice is instead driven by biological and external determinants. Through his discussion with Light Watkins, Sapolsky offers profound insights into how we can better understand ourselves and the world around us.
Content (table)
For your convenience, the interview text is divided into sections, with some parts cut/hidden under a “Read more” link. Click the “Read more…” button to expand full section text.
Introduction
Robert Sapolsky
00:00:00 — I woke up and said, Oh, I get it. There’s no God and there’s no free will. I wasted my first 20 years out there showing that if you were high ranking, you had lower levels of stress hormones, lower blood pressure. And it took me about 20 years out there to begin to realize your rank is nowhere near the most important thing. It’s what does your rank mean in your particular troop?
00:00:29 — If you’ve got a choice and you want to have nice low stress hormone levels and live to ripe old age, don’t choose to be high ranking, choose to have a whole lot of social affiliation where you actually can gain psychological benefit from it. I spent 20 years thinking all I was learning about was like, go be a big successful capitalist baboon or something in the hierarchy. But the good thing is it’s not that hard to change your categories or to change it in somebody else.
Light Watkins
00:01:04 — So I always start my interviews talking about the early days. And, you know, we’re going to ultimately get into a conversation about how there’s no such thing as free will. That’s the, I think, the foundation of your latest work and how everything that we’re experiencing in life right now individually and maybe even as a society is predetermined based on a million variables.
From Orthodox Jew to Atheist
Light Watkins
00:01:32 — So, to that end, would you do us the honor of just telling us how your upbringing sort predetermined where you ended up now in life. I know that, I know that you’re from. Brooklyn and I know that you were, you grew up as an Orthodox Jew, but now you’re an atheist and there were some things that happened 12, 13, 14 years old that were very pivotal in, in, in that, in that shift in your, in your life.
00:02:02 — So, can you, can you talk a little bit about that?
Robert Sapolsky
00:02:06 — Yeah, it was, you know, the usual that kind of does in somebody’s religiosity when they’re like looking at the details and extending them and seeing that there’s all sorts of irreconcilable sort of conflicts that come up in it.
00:02:26 — The key thing for me was, you know, more people have lost their faith during reading about Exodus because what did the horses do? Why do they have to drown the horses? Why do they have to drown the firstborns, and that usually is the problem that comes up there. My version was Moses goes to. Pharaoh after one of the plagues, and Pharaoh says, uncle, I give up, okay, you guys can go. And then God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and Pharaoh changes his mind and said, no, you guys can’t go.
00:03:04 — So, another plague on Egypt and Moses goes to him and Pharaoh says, okay, this time except. God hardens his heart. And wait a second, he’s like, forget the horses and the babies, like anyone there is getting punished because of an external thing controlling his behavior. And then God judges and, you know, the usual sort of none of this makes any sense.
00:03:33 — And that, and some more sort of personal aspects of all of it, just kind of combined to one night at two in the morning, I woke up and said, Oh, I get it. There’s no God, and there’s no free will. And the universe is this big, empty, indifferent place.
00:03:58 — And that’s kind of where I’ve been at ever since.
Light Watkins
00:04:03 — So, you were only a teenager at the time. Were you vocal about this new understanding of the world at that time? And did you get pushback from your parents or from your teachers or whoever you talked to about this? Or was it something you kind of kept to yourself?
Robert Sapolsky
00:04:19 — Mostly kept to myself. My parents pretty much went to their graves many years later, not knowing I was an atheist, because, you know, why bother? All that’s good to do is upset them, but you know, it’s not that important. You know, the rest of the world I was pretty soon surrounded by a sufficiently sort of educated, left-leaning, cynical crowd, so that none of that stuff seemed very surprising.
00:04:53 — It. I certainly wiped out my capacity to listen to teaching from rabbis.
Light Watkins
00:05:00 — And your mom took you to see, uh, to the natural history museum, I’m assuming to see some primates and that sort of lit up something inside of you. How did that, how did you explain that with this, this sort of atheism, um, belief, how do you, how’d you explain that sense of excitement or inspiration?
Robert Sapolsky
00:05:23 — Well, I sort of fixated on primates. You know, that was my go-to, what do you want to do for your birthday? Take me to the Museum of Natural History. That was just heaven. I kind of imprinted on primates quite a few years earlier than that. And I don’t know what, But it was something about, like, these animals and these African dioramas, like, I just wanted to live inside there.
00:05:56 — I did not want to live in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, I was not having a good time. Suddenly a place like that seemed like the most, like, wonderful place to escape to, and maybe even be a non-human primate in the process. Process. Uh, so I happened to imprint on mountain gorillas and I, I still remember the, you know, the diorama, which is probably 110 years old now that sort of, I looked at it and said, ah, I want to be there.
00:06:24 — I want to be with them. That, that mountain back, that silverback mountain gorilla there, that’s, that’s the nearest thing I’m ever going to have to a grandfather. There we go. That’s what I want to do.
Light Watkins
00:06:38 — You also wrote in your book your recent book about depression and how you first started experiencing that as a teenager. So was there something that happened? Maybe honest in this associated with any of this.
Robert Sapolsky
00:06:52 — I would say it had much to do with. Deciding there’s no God. There’s no free will and there’s no purpose to anything that sort of sent me in a downward spiral that I’ve been uh sort of mucking around and ever since that that seemed i don’t know that that sort of struggling in a book where i’m hoping to convince people there’s no free will whatsoever.
00:07:19 — Um that’s the pretty dangerous outcome because if we’re just biological machines the search for meaning is pretty damn challenging and all of that and i did not particularly have the.
The obsession that shaped Dr. Sapolsky's career
Light Watkins
00:07:45 — I’m working my way up to your work, but just a little montage of how your life sort of unfolded from there. You obviously went and got educated and you became an academic and et cetera. And you went to the Kenya, you know, 21. But just give us a little idea of how all that happened or maybe the story behind it. The motivation behind all of that? Because it seems like you’ve been very focused since you were, you know, a teenager on this one thing.
00:08:10 — And I’m just curious how that played out.
Robert Sapolsky
00:08:13 — I’ve been pretty focused. I, uh, when I was still like 15, I called up this professor at University of Chicago who was a major primatologist, like at home saying, hi, I love your stuff. If I’m able to come to your university, can I work with you?» And they seemed very puzzled. And ironically, 20 years later, I spent a summer working at their field site.
00:08:40 — I was writing fan letters to primatologists. I wrote one to Dian Fossey, who never answered, but just imprinted on that, I managed to get my high school to agree to give me a language credit for a self-paced Swahili course because I knew I was heading for East Africa. I went to college to study instead of with the University of Chicago Baboon Grand Poobahs, the Harvard Grand Poobah and worship at his feet.
00:09:15 — And. I sort of brown-nosed with him from the day I got there sufficiently so that four years later. He said, what the hell, let’s let’s send you out to this field site. He had a grad student who’s finishing his thesis there with the baboon, so I kind of overlapped a bit and inherited the troop.
00:09:35 — I would say the biggest complication that came up was freshman year, somewhat arbitrarily, I took an intro neuroscience class, and got blown away by that. And suddenly, it seemed equally interesting to try to understand behavior and volition and who we are in the search for meaning, blah, blah, all of that from the standpoint of brains than from the standpoint of evolutionary biology.
00:10:06 — So, ever since, I’ve been kind of being a half-assed neurobiologist and half-assed primatologist, just oscillating between the two. Because it was kind of clear by then, intellectually, neuroscience was more interesting to me. Getting to just go and live with wild primates for three months a year, there was no way I was giving that up.
00:10:35 — So sort of a lot of my effort over the years has been trying to tie the two ends together.
Light Watkins
00:10:41 — Hey, so a lot of you all have been reaching out with your guest suggestions and look, I appreciate it. I do. And to help make it easier for those guests to say yes to my invitation, I need you to subscribe to this channel. Just hit the subscribe button below. And that’s literally the best way to help me get you that guest on my podcast. All right. Thank you so much for helping out and back to the show when it comes to primates.
How stress in baboons reveals secrets about human health
"And baboons are these like hysterical backstabbing sons of bitches. All they do is, like, have major conflict and betray their coalitional partners and bite somebody who did nothing because they're in a bad mood"
Robert Sapolsky
Light Watkins
00:11:08 — Can you talk a little bit about. The difference in baboons chimps monkeys apes like why did you choose baboons as opposed to any other primates?
Robert Sapolsky
00:11:18 — Yeah, I kind of got stuck with them against my will. I really wanted mountain gorillas. Who are the most amazing. Animals on earth and they’re phenomenal all. But I wound up with baboons because they’re vastly easier to study. The department had a grad student doing baboonology. The main person doing mountain gorillas was very psychiatrically unstable, famously so, Dan Fossey.
Robert Sapolsky
00:11:47 — And everybody’s told me do not go anywhere near her in that site. That’s wildly unstable. But I was initially bummed out with the baboon, And mountain gorillas, probably if I had like hung out with mountain gorillas for 30 years, I would become some sort of Buddhist monk by then.
00:12:10 — They’re incredibly, some projecting on my part of introspective, they have very low levels of aggression, they’re these ruminating, wonderful, and baboons are these like hysterical backstabbing sons of bitches. All they do is, like, have major conflict and betray their coalitional partners and bite somebody who did nothing because they’re in a bad mood. And that actually turned out to be wonderful. Baboons have these big troops, 50 to 100 animals, males who all grew up elsewhere and showed up in adolescence to transfer in, females who spend their whole life in the same troop.
00:12:57 — So females, these complicated lineages and who your mom is and matriarchs, and males just showing it up and showing up and just punching it out savagely with each other thereafter. And it wound up being perfect, because sort of this was my bridge between the lab work and the field work studying stress.
00:13:17 — I wanted to be extremely interested in what stress does to the brain and what it has to with brain aging and dementia and depression and things like that. And that’s kind of where my lab stuff went. Um, and the field stuff, one of the direction of trying to understand, so you’ve got these baboons, they got different social ranks, which is incredibly important. They got different patterns of social affiliate. They got different personalities, all of that.
00:13:45 — So given that who gets the stress related diseases and what does it do with how their bodies are working, where I was able to dart and anesthetize them and do all sorts of clinical tests. Why were they perfect? Because like baboons living out in the Serengeti, this is like the greatest place on earth to be a baboon. There’s like tons of food. You only have to forage about three hours a day to get your day’s calories.
00:14:13 — The predators don’t mess with you much because you’re in these big troops, infants usually survive all of that. And the key implication was, if you only have to spend three hours a day getting your food, you’ve got nine hours of free time every day to devote to being total jerks to each other and just generating psychological stress and social stress. And for 99% of beasts out there, what stress is about is somebody’s trying to eat you or there’s a famine or whatever, baboons were just like westernized humans.
00:14:46 — They’ve got the luxury of sitting around and they can generate, spend all day long generating psychosocial nonsense with each other. And overwhelmingly, like if you’re a baboon and you’ve got elevated levels of stress hormones, it’s not because a lion is chasing you. It’s because some other baboon has been working really hard to make you miserable.
00:15:09 — They’re totally scheming and backstabbing and awful. And while that made them kind of hard to turn me into a Buddhist monk, it was perfect for studying a model of like Westernized stress. None of us die of famines anymore in the privileged West. We all get these diseases of lifestyle, of slow accumulation to damage, reflecting stress.
00:15:38 — And so do the baboons. They get high blood pressure. They get problems with ulcers, their immune systems don’t work as well as a function of who they are in the hierarchy and what their personalities are and what their patterns of social affiliation are. And so they turned out to be great sort of models for us.
Light Watkins
00:16:00 — Yeah. I’ve read in your book that they’re very obviously social creatures. Can they have a casual exchange like you and I are having right now or how do they communicate? It was mostly through body language and gesturing and grumps.
Robert Sapolsky
00:16:15 — Body language, gesturing, the thing that trumps everything in terms of baboon paradises when they’re grooming each other. Social grooming is like, it not only gets rid of parasites and the guy grooming you gets to eat it then, gross. But more importantly, grooming is like socially calming. Grooming, you know, they get a close scare with a lion or something, and then immediately afterward everyone spends 15 minutes grooming each other, just to kind of calm down.
00:16:51 — And what winds up then being interesting with that is who’s grooming who, and who’s getting groomed back, how much is it being reciprocated, and that’s where you see the baboon inequality coming through big time. There’s all sorts of gestural stuff where somebody, like, rubs somebody else’s nose in their low rank just because you can.
00:17:14 — You force them into some sort of subordinate gesture thing while you’re doing a dominant vocalization thing that, you know, they’re going about their business all day. A lot of it being social interaction, social competition, social support, some nice altruistic stuff amid close relatives, some miserably aggressive stuff between individuals who aren’t related.
00:17:40 — Yeah, we you’ll get an example of this sort of the psychological stress of it. You get a low ranking female, she’s sitting there, and she has to spend 30 seconds digging some root thing out of the ground to eat it. And now she’s digging another one. And along comes the highest ranking female in the troop, walks over to her, glares at her, and the low-ranking one has to get up and move 10 feet away.
00:18:07 — And our high-ranking matriarch sits down there for a minute. And the low-ranking one now finds a new spot and starts digging in there. And the high-ranking one comes over and boots her out. They will spend an hour just booting her around. There’s a hundred billion blades of grass everywhere you look. It’s not resource acquisition.
00:18:31 — It’s just, I think I’m going to hassle her. And that’s what’s going on all day.
Light Watkins
00:18:39 — There. When this is happening, where are you? Are you sitting in a truck with some binoculars or?
Robert Sapolsky
00:18:45 — Yeah, basically in a notebook doing that whole chain good all scene. You know, this was a troop fortunately that was habituated so you could be, you could hang out in the middle of them without them being disturbed. You were some sort of large mobile boulder or something. It was impossible to do some stuff on foot with them, which you didn’t do a ton of just because of the danger of other animals and such.
00:19:15 — But yeah, they’d just be going about this. I mean, And as a great example of like the misery in their society, the majority of baboon aggression is displaced aggression. Which is to say, you’re number three, you just got in your head to challenge number two, he has just trashed you, and you spin around and you attack number five, who spins around and chases number 10, who spins around and bites a female, who spins around and knocks.
00:19:48 — It’s somebody else’s infant out of a tree, all in 15 seconds, just rolling downhill like that. And what that means is like huge elements of psychological stress are lack of control and lack of predictability.
00:20:04 — And you’re sitting there minding your own business and somebody else is having a bad day and without any predictability and warning and without any control, you get your rear and slashed. Um, so it’s like, it’s an amazing landscape for just grinding psychological stress because they got nothing else to do because their stomachs are full. And like, they can’t go predate something because they’re not very good at that. And no one will meet with them.
00:20:36 — So why don’t I go just hassle someone because I can.
Why free will is an illusion (shocking truth!)
" And it took me about 20 years out there to begin to realize your rank is nowhere near the most important thing"
Robert Sapolsky
Light Watkins
00:20:41 — Right. And you went to Harvard, right? So I read a, I read a lot as a meditation person. I’ve read a lot about Herbert Benson’s work, Dr. Benson’s work. And I know he studied he was one of I don’t know if he was Walter. Cannon’s protege or he studied in the lab, the cannon lab. But apparently Dr. Walter Cannon was the guy who coined fight flight reaction. And he studied I’m not sure which primates he studied. But from what I could tell, he studied some primates in a laboratory setting.
00:21:12 — Yeah. And expose them to electric shocks or something like that. So what my question is, your research obviously is in the field and you’re studying primates in their natural habitat. How, what, what, what revelations did your work, um, due to further Dr. Cannon’s initial work on the fight flight reaction or the stress response?
Robert Sapolsky
00:21:36 — Yeah, he’s one of the two gods of stress physiology. The other was this guy Hans Selye. Um, there’s sort of two branches to the stress response. There’s the sympathetic nervous system, and that was Cannon’s deal. And then there’s these glucocorticoid hormones like cortisol, hydrocortisone. And that was so his contribution. And ever since the canonites and the cellulites have been fighting over which branch is more important.
00:22:04 — And I’m definitely of the, the glucocorticoid branch. But I thought initially what I was going to go out and show was, like, if you get a choice in the matter, you want to be a high ranking baboon, because you got all the psychological advantages, you’ve got control, you got predictability, you got outlets, if you’re having a crummy day, you can always get somebody to groom you and you don’t have to groom them back because you’re high ranking, that sort of thing, all sorts of psychological advantages there.
00:22:38 — And I wasted my first 20 years out there showing that, um, showing if you were high ranking, you had lower levels of stress hormones, lower blood pressure, your reproductive endocrine system worked better also. So it seemed like, okay, what’s the big lesson? Go out and compete and win, win, win, and be dominant.
00:23:00 — And it took me about 20 years out there to begin to realize your rank is nowhere near the most important thing. It’s, what does your rank mean in your particular troop? Different troops have different cultures and that’s not like a, oh my God, Disney, Bambi sort of term. It’s, that’s like a legitimate term these days in terms of how readily do you get dumped on if you’re low ranking.
00:23:28 — In some troops it happens all the time and others it never. So what’s your rank? What does it mean in terms of what kind of culture is it in your troop? How stable is the hierarchy? What’s your personality? Do you see threat everywhere? Are you type A and in a very literal way, or are you able to tell the difference between a threatening circumstance and a neutral one?
00:23:53 — And it turns out more of the physiology, the stress physiology is explained by that one variable than your dominance rank. Like, if you’re sitting there and your worst rival on the whole planet shows up and takes a nap 50 yards away, if that makes you crazed and agitated, and you stop doing whatever it is you were doing, and you’re all anxious, and you’re going to have like two, three times
00:24:22 — the cortisol levels in your bloodstream as somebody of the same rank who can sit there and say, the guy’s napping. This is not a big deal. This is, I, if you see threat everywhere, you’ve got a much more active stress response, independent of your rank, and it was a bigger predictor, a bigger variable of that. Could you get some control in social circumstances? That was a predictor as well.
00:24:49 — Did you have social affiliation? How often was there somebody you could go like lean next to? And it turned out that all of that stuff, personality, cultural context of the group, situational stuff with social affiliation, all of those were more powerful predictors than rank itself.
00:25:09 — Like if you’ve got a choice and you want to have nice low stress hormone levels and like live to ripe old age, if you’re some like male baboon, don’t choose to be high ranking, choose to have a whole lot of social affiliation. And of the type where you actually can be gain psychological benefit from it. Like you’re agitated because somebody just did something mean to you. And if your most likely response is you go displace aggression onto somebody else, that’s not a great outlet.
00:25:44 — If it’s to go sit down next to somebody you get along with, And maybe you’re even in physical contact and maybe even one of you grooms the other, that’s the far more effective way of doing it. And it showed in their bodies. So I spent 20 years thinking while I was learning about was like, go be a big successful capitalist baboon or something in the hierarchy.
00:26:09 — And like, social affiliation and cultural context had so much more to do with that.
What if everything is predetermined? (Society's biggest question)
Light Watkins
00:26:16 — Well, I would say also you were learning about the fact that free will is not as simple as we we like to think it is. And and, you know, you put a lot of emphasis on the prefrontal cortex, which, as anyone who studied stress knows, that if you don’t have access to your prefrontal cortex, then everything reroutes to your amygdala, which gives you basically two options to run away or to fight. And when we look at how outcomes happen, we can usually trace it back.
Light Watkins
00:26:48 — This is the, from what I understand, this is the essence of your work. We can trace it back to access to that part of the brain. So that plays a pivotal role in this idea of free will. So you’ve written like eight bestselling books, and your most recent one is called Determined. And I guess it’s good to pivot to that work now. Determine a science of life without free will, which is very triggering for a lot of people, this idea that there’s no such thing as as free will.
00:27:20 — So I guess we can start with just talking about that. Like, what do you mean by free will and what do you mean by there’s no such thing as free will?
Robert Sapolsky
00:27:31 — I think where people get into trouble is two realms where they decide they’re seeing free will because it just feels like it and where they’re not and where that gets you into trouble. The first one is when you actually make a choice. You form an intent and you choose something. You’re choosing between Coke and Pepsi. You’re choosing between invading this neighbor or that neighbor, whatever it is you’re making.
00:28:00 — And you form an intent. You’re consciously aware that you’re making this decision, you got a pretty good sense what the consequences are going to be. Most importantly, you know nobody’s holding a gun to your head. You’ve got alternatives available to you. And for most people and the criminal justice system, that’s necessary and sufficient to say that’s it. There’s free will, there’s responsibility, there’s culpability, which gives me apoplexy at that point, because that’s like a 10th of 1% of what you need to be paying attention to.
00:28:35 — Because you look at somebody who just had this intent, and they carried it out, and they knew it was going to have this effect, and they knew they could have done otherwise. And you’re learning zero, unless you ask the question, how did they turn out to be the sort of person who would form that intent at that moment. And that’s 99.9% of what goes on.
00:29:00 — And we have this, this intuitive trap of it feeling so tangible when you’ve just chosen between this or that, when you’ve decided what you want to do, and you choosing you, that most of the time, we’re not thinking, How did I turn out to be somebody who would have that desire, that intent at that point? And that’s where all the free will disappears. The other domain, which is like the quicksand for everyone, is like you look at someone who’s had some lousy luck and adversity and all of that, and somehow they reinvent themselves.
00:29:39 — They pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They show incredible self, you know, these heartwarming stories. Or you look at somebody who has had every possible advantage and they just piss it away with self-indulgence. And there’s this huge, huge temptation there to think that when it comes to self-discipline and backbone and gumption and all of that, that’s not made of biology.
00:30:07 — That’s magic. That’s free will. Like biology may have something to do with, you know, whether you’re good at playing lacrosse or whatever weird sports are happening right now in France, you know. But that’s, that tells you nothing about who’s going to push through the pain and do it. And that’s where we get back to the prefrontal cortex.
00:30:31 — What you, how would you, attributes you wound up with are purely biological interaction with environment, and what you do with them, purely biological, self-control, self-discipline, all of that is made out of the same biology, yuck, as is anything else in your brain. And it’s all coming out of the prefrontal cortex.
00:30:55 — Like, every time life has you in a position where, like, you got to make a choice, and there’s a smarter one, but the other one’s more tempting, the choice that you wind up making is entirely a function of how do you wind up getting to that point? How do you wind up with a prefrontal cortex that would have the power or not, that would have the values or not, as to what counts as self-discipline? All of that, and what we know is that’s the realm in which for a billion different reasons, you had no control over what life handed you in that regard.
00:31:33 — It’s starting with being a fetus, like a mother’s socioeconomic status is already influencing the rate of cortical development in her fetus. Like, ooh, use some free will. I’m going to pick to be in the womb of somebody of high socioeconomic status. So, I get born with already the starts of a great prefrontal.
00:31:55 — At the moment of birth, all of this, You had no control over the circumstances that produced the you, who you are at this moment, was already in effect. And where that plays out most dramatically is at those junctures and where you got to make a choice. And if you do the impulsive, disinhibited one, it’s going to seem wonderful for three seconds and you may regret it for the rest of your life.
00:32:25 — Just at every juncture where we have that moment, what we’re doing is saying, what kind of prefrontal cortex did our cumulative bad luck and good luck starting with the time that we were a single fertilized egg have to do with like what I’m dealing with here.
Light Watkins
00:32:45 — In that moment. When I was eight or nine years old, the experience that sort of made me start questioning these kinds of things as well, is I was on a, we were on a family vacation driving from Alabama, where I’m from, to Chicago. And we took this detour into Kentucky to go see, there were these billboards saying, come and see Abraham Lincoln’s log or his birthplace. And it showed a picture of his log cabin on the billboard.
00:33:13 — And it was like 10 miles in the opposite direction. So we took a family vote. We decided to go and see. Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, because why not? And we get to this parking lot, and there’s a warehouse in the middle of the parking lot looks like a Lowe’s building or Home Depot or something. And we walk in and there’s a log cabin that’s roped, it’s cordoned off in the middle of the warehouse. And it’s got all these little artifacts inside of it.
00:33:41 — And I started asking questions, you know, so how did you all get it? Did you just build this structure around where the log cabin was, or they go, No, we actually relocated it to the structure. I said, Oh, that’s interesting. So all of these are this whole thing is from you found it in the woods? Well, actually, no, it came from the same place that his cabin would have existed. And anyway, long story short, none of it was the original anything.
00:34:09 — And that’s when you noticed it was made out of Legos? Well, I noticed that everything was bullshit. All these stories that we tell ourselves about anything, you know, if you look in, quote, history and you ask enough questions and you dig deeply enough, you’ll start to see that, hey, somebody just made this up one day. Somebody just made up the calendar. Somebody just made up this religion. Somebody just made up this belief system, marriage, the marriage construct, you know. So I started asking those kinds of questions at that age.
00:34:43 — And I’ve, my, my personal philosophy on this is that people, you just have to choose something that serves you. And so this idea of choosing to believe that there is free will doesn’t make it any more real than choosing to believe that there’s not free will. But I find it that as a scientific mind, you know, things obviously have to make sense.
00:35:07 — And so you’ve, you’ve of drawn this conclusion or this connection between this idea of no free will to, you know, having access to this part of your brain. And I don’t think people appreciate how much not having access to that part of the brain actually leads to certain outcomes in their life that are not very desirable. Exactly.
Robert Sapolsky
00:35:30 — And how much of what you’re going to do in that moment is a function of what was happening to that a minute ago, and an hour ago, and a year ago, and back when you were an adolescent, and that whole deal there, because, you know, you have, like every single part of your body, you have a completely unique prefrontal cortex. And it happened.
00:35:56 — It happened by good luck and bad luck, which don’t balance each other out, each one tends to amplify the other. Each one tends to amplify itself. And yeah, that’s exactly it in that moment. I’m impressed.
Mind-blowing coincidences: do they really exist?
"Anytime you think you understand what the attribution is, you're almost certainly wrong"
Robert Sapolsky
Light Watkins
00:36:12 — You had like a five year- It reminded me of the fable of the turtles that you open your book with. I think that’d be genius if you could share that fable of the turtles, because I think that perfectly illustrates the essence of the book.
Robert Sapolsky
00:36:25 — I start the book with like this parable that I thought was totally great in college. And it’s so ingrained in me, almost certainly, I’m saying it word for word from how we used to say it. So it seems that the philosopher, it seems that William. James was giving a lecture about the nature of the universe. And afterward, an old woman comes up and says, Professor James, you had it all wrong. The world is actually on the back of a gigantic turtle.
Robert Sapolsky
00:36:57 — And to which he said, oh, well, madam, in that case, where does that turtle stand? And she said, on another turtle. And he said, oh, but madam, where does that turtle stand? And she said, it’s no use, Professor James, it’s turtles all the way down. Which, you know, as a starting point in the book is, that’s totally like ludicrous, ridiculous, all of that. It’s much more ludicrous and ridiculous to decide that somewhere down there, there’s a turtle floating in the air.
00:37:28 — And that floating in the air is that you can do something free of your history. You could be an uncaused cause. Vague definitions of you could be showing free will. Whatever it is you’re doing, it occurred because it’s turtles all the way down there.
Light Watkins
00:37:50 — Is the idea behind making this case for no such thing as free will, is it to lead to an egalitarian society, or what is the idea?
Robert Sapolsky
00:38:02 — Yeah, in a sense. I mean, after people, well, I should point out that I have about as extreme of a stance on this as you’ll get anybody in sort of the brain sciences type stuff. There’s other people who are at the same point, but there’s a whole lot of people who would kind of say, well, you know, there’s maybe some circumstances where there’s exceptions. And I’ve staked out an extreme stance here and saying that there’s none whatsoever.
00:38:33 — So, what do you do with that? What do you do with that? And like, what’s the world supposed to look like if, oh my. God, people actually started believing that. And half the book, the second half of the book is that, and that was the much harder half for me to write, of working through, like, what’s, how are we supposed to function? What should
00:38:57 — society look like? And what I have to spend a lot of time there is the things that are not going to happen as disasters. Everyone immediately say, oh my. God, you’re just gonna have murderers running around on the streets. Obviously. Obviously not. There’s a way to protect society from dangerous people without telling the dangerous people they have rotten souls. It’s a quarantine model and it’s straight out of public health sort of stuff. Oh my God. Okay. That, but then everybody else is going to run amok because he can’t be held responsible for anything.
00:39:31 — Everyone will just become antisocial. And there’s a whole literature research on that showing that in effect for the first five minutes, you’re going to run amok. And once you’ve had the chance to think about it, and especially grow up with these ideas, you will have just as ethical of standards as somebody who believes we should be held responsible for our every action.
00:39:54 — In the exact same way, that sort of parallel people who are atheists, people say, oh my God, they’re going to run amok and be so immoral because they don’t think there’s anyone who can hold them responsible. And that’s what people do for the first five seconds or the first five years of them deciding there is no God, but you give them enough time and they are exactly as ethical in their behavior as people who are highly, highly religious. You’ve just found your meaning through a different route there.
00:40:25 — Okay, so that’s not going to be a problem. Then people freak out and they say, well, If everything’s determined, nothing can ever change, don’t bother. And that’s like a critical point that like, of course, we change, massive change occurs, but we are not choosing to exercise free will.
00:40:47 — When we suddenly form a new opinion, we have been changed by circumstance, and we’ve been changed by it as a function of who we turned out to be at the moment that we experienced that circumstance. So with all of those like things in place, things not to panic about and change can actually happen, but it works very differently than people think it does. If you believe in free will, we’re not going to run amok. We don’t have murderers running around everywhere. We can get through that.
00:41:18 — I think what you’re left with is exactly what you were alluding to, which is if you believe in free will, it means you’re okay with some people being treated way better than the average human for reasons they had nothing to do with, and other people being treated way worse. And if you really go for this, there’s no free will stuff. Blame and punishment are intellectually and ethically gibberish. Praise and reward are as well.
00:41:53 — Feeling as if you have earned anything, that anyone has earned anything, that you were entitled to anything, that there’s such a thing as justice being carried out, that there’s such a thing as justice, none of that makes any sense at all. And you got to navigate stuff from there, which is where the, oh my God, how are we supposed to function with that? And what seems clear is, like, you know, I haven’t believed in this free will stuff since I was a kid.
00:42:23 — And most of the time, my first reflex is to operate like an entitled, like Westernized. American, whatever. You know, I think this way and I can’t function this way. Most of the time it takes a whole lot of work to say, wait a second, think about like what it is that you had no control over that got you into this like wonderfully advantageous place.
00:42:50 — Think about that person, you were just having a judgment about all of that. And you know what we’re left with is it’s going to be mighty hard for everyone to decide there’s no free will tomorrow and thus society just takes off from there with no more prisons and no more meritocracy and no more CEOs with corner offices and no more, you know, it’s going to be incredibly hard. But what I try to hammer through in that latter part of the book is, over and over, historically, we have identified realms where it turns out we don’t have free will.
00:43:29 — People do stuff that they had no control over. And each time we figure that out and come up with what would be a biological explanation, not only doesn’t society fall apart, the world becomes more humane. We figured out that old ladies with no teeth don’t have the power to control the weather by casting witchcraft or whatever.
00:43:51 — And so it’s not the 15th century anymore and burning people at the stakes when there’s suddenly a storm in the middle of July. Good. You know, we figured out witches don’t exist. They don’t have the power to control the weather. And it’s a much better world that we don’t burn old ladies at the stake anymore. We figured out at some point that having an epileptic seizure is not a sign that you were possessed by Satan. And that’s good.
00:44:19 — We stopped, you know, burning epileptics at the stake as well. We figured out at some point, mothers don’t cause schizophrenia in their children. It’s not their fault because they unconsciously hate their child. It’s a neurogenetic disorder. And as soon as that was sorted out, hundreds of thousands of mothers of people with schizophrenia were absolved from, you had no control, it had nothing to do with it. It’s not your fault.
00:44:51 — And then we figured out, you know, chronologically in my own lifetime, after I was like a school kid some decades later, like some kids don’t learn how to read very well, people, not because they’re lazy or stupid or unmotivated, but they got this screwy neurological thing called dyslexia. Like you can actually look in a microscope of like somebody’s cortex and you will see the abnormality. Oh, they’re not lazy. They’re, they got screwed in another way.
00:45:23 — Some people are screwed with it. This is, this is the bad luck that they got handed. It. And not only, like, was that a great realization, because you could get some insights now into how to teach somebody how to read more effectively, if they have a learning difference and, you know, efficacy, all of that. But mainly, you’re not raising people thinking that they’re stupid or unmotivated. Like, you get all these 40 year olds who say, yeah, I got a dyslexia diagnosis last year.
00:45:55 — God, if I could only have gotten that when I was in, in fifth grade, I’ve spent my whole life hating myself thinking that I’m just lazy and not smart. If only. I could have found out then. And every time we figure out one of those, we’re, I don’t know, 20 years into figuring out that people are not exercising free will when they decide they fall in love with somebody of their sex or the opposite sex.
00:46:22 — People are not exercising free will when they decide they’ve always felt like they’re a different sex than their body says they are. Like, okay, that all we’re doing with each one of these, yeah, we’re not going to figure out tomorrow how to completely get rid of a sense of free will, because it’ll be like sheer, utter chaos. But we’re doing this step by step. And each time the world becomes more humane. And it’s like a much better world.
00:46:50 — Not only is the world not falling apart, it’s much better that like Southern Baptists don’t try to do conversion therapy on their like gay teenage sons anymore, or like, you know, beat Satan out of them for that, you know, in all these cases becomes better. So we got to just keep pushing and doing more and more of that, because all sorts of realms where it seems intuitively obvious right now to us that somebody chose to do, they could have done otherwise, people in
00:47:23 — the future are going to look back on that and say, exactly, here’s the pathways by which that person turned out to be who they were, and why they had no control over what they did at that point. And, oh, what barbarians people were back in the early 21st century, imprisoning some people and punishing them based on not understanding this, or telling other people that they are better, more worthy humans because they turn out to be smart at something and thus can
00:47:55 — do a successful hostile takeover of somebody’s corporation or, you know, they’ll look back on us with that same sort of view. So we got to just keep pushing against it and keep assuming anytime you think you know why somebody has just done something. Anytime you think you understand what the attribution is, you’re almost certainly wrong. And you’re almost certainly looking at it way too blinded, because you got to think about stuff way, way unexpected and below the surface and subliminal and ancient and nuanced and all of that.
00:48:33 — And you probably don’t have a clue the things that went into making them who they are at that moment and why they did what they did.
A new perspective around racism and tribalism
Light Watkins
00:48:42 — Just playing devil’s advocate I actually personally agree with everything you’re saying, for the most part. But let’s say you have a, you have a spiritualist, someone who believes in karma and Dharma and life purposes and sacred spiritual contracts and these kinds of things. What if they said the same about you, that you’re looking at this idea of life, very narrow bandwidth, and that you probably have some blind spots and things you’re not seeing. I’m sure you’ve encountered this because you’ve been talking about this forever. You’ve written about it in all of your books.
Robert Sapolsky
00:49:10 — Yes, just put a dime in my right ear and you’ll get a 30 second lecture about this once the gears start moving. Yeah, you know, How do you debate yourself against your own argument? Well, I don’t have to invoke a notion of free will to try to explain how I wound up the way I am. I can see where a lot of the gears and levers were. I can see some of it having to do with my brain, some having to do with my upbringing, some with a culture, some with my genes, you know, I can, you know, there’s all sorts of pieces I don’t understand, but I can kind of see how it turned out this way.
00:49:56 — And how I had nothing to do with it, and I’m not particularly worthy of praise, and I’m not particularly worthy of blame for the things I’m crappy about. Yeah, I could turn that on myself. And it’s all within, you know, a very mechanistic framework, which, as you say, puts me a gazillion light years away from a sort of spiritual approach to thinking about this stuff.
00:50:26 — You know, I turn into like, you know, dead white male scientist when saying, show me the nuts and bolts of how a spiritual phenomenon works in your head. And you know, there’s all sorts of neuroscience we know now that we’re all cocky and arrogant about that we couldn’t begin to think about 50 years ago. So maybe this will get explained also in near death experiences, there will be a neurobiology that all, you know, that may come.
00:50:54 — But at least for me, it’s all in the context that we’re these biological machines. We’re really complicated ones, we’re really vulnerable ones, we’re really sensitive to environment that we interact with. But like, that’s kind of all we’re made of.
Light Watkins
00:51:13 — You have some concepts in the book. And by the way, I really enjoyed the writing. I found it, I found it refreshingly self-deprecating and just, I mean, it had a little bit of a textbook academic component as well, some of the diagrams and stuff, but the way you write is very irreverent.
Robert Sapolsky
00:51:35 — And self-deprecating. There are plenty of times where I’m insufficiently self-deprecating and my wife could probably give you all sorts of examples of that, but that’s nice that you decided that.
Light Watkins
00:51:51 — It just makes it easier for someone like me to read, like I’m not interested in getting a degree in this stuff, you know, but you want to try to understand it well enough. And you talk about some really relevant concepts, especially relevant with everything that’s going on today. And I wanted to just double click on the joy of punishment section, because you talk about justice. And I think this can really bring it home for a lot of people, especially a lot of Black people hearing about these kinds of concepts.
Why people love to judge
"Races, I don't know, they're maybe 20, 30,000 years old, which is an eye blink in terms of hominid history. And most of all, for 99% of human hunter-gatherer history, the nearest person you, the furthest person away you would meet in your life was somebody from three valleys over, someone who looked just like you"
Robert Sapolsky
Light Watkins
00:52:20 — You talk about the hungry judge effect, but you also talk about lynching and all kinds of things. So I would say just pick your favorite example from that section of the book, and let’s talk about how that relates to this idea of determinism.
Robert Sapolsky
00:52:35 — You take people and you put them in a mock jury, and they are trying to decide whether or not somebody committed a crime, and it’s all about their prefrontal cortex activation. They decide they did commit a crime, and now they get to decide the punishment. And that’s all about the limbic system, the emotional parts of the brain. That’s where the froth comes out. That’s where you see emotional brain regions have made a decision when you’re doing brain imaging before your cortex is catching up to give an explanation for it.
Robert Sapolsky
00:53:10 — And sort of the backdrop to a lot of that is, you know, mammals like to punish. Like when a rat, you know, when a rat could lever press to get another rat a shock, if the other rat has bitten it, not only will it lever press, not only will it work to punish that rat, but you can show there’s activation of dopamine reward pathways when that’s happening.
00:53:38 — The same exact thing in us, like an incredibly powerful stimulant to the whole dopamine reward part of your brain is not only getting to punish somebody, but feeling good about yourself when you’re doing it, feel as if justice is being served and you are, you know, and any
00:53:58 — time you try to unpack people’s sense of what counts, where is retribution appropriate? And my view is it’s never appropriate. But what that is always just pickled in is people like to punish. People like to blame. People prefer to do that. It decreases your stress hormone levels. It’s a bizarre feature of us. Almost certainly evolutionarily, what it’s about is what’s called third-party punishment.
00:54:32 — In game theory, you get two individuals, and one of them is crummy to the other, and this one has an option to take revenge, and that could pull for cooperation. A great way to get for cooperation is if you have a third-party individual as an objector, outsider viewing it, who’s able to punish the one who is a jerk. As soon as you bring in third-party punishment into sort of economic games, that really pushes for cooperation.
00:55:00 — What’s third-party punishment? That’s the police, that’s your school teacher’s voice in your head, all of that. But the trouble is, in formal game theory, it’s costly to punish. I mean, in all of these scenarios, you were willing to give up a certain number of points that you have in order to take points away from that creep.
00:55:23 — You have to pay. It is costly to be a third-party punisher. So where have we evolved the reasons to actually select for it? First, people who are third-party punishers are trusted more. When you observe people being third-party punishers, you’re more cooperative with them. But the other thing is, you evolved a system where it feels good to be a third-party punisher.
00:55:49 — That’s exactly, like, that’s where it came from. Punishment is costly. Detached third-party punishment, which is one of the most effective things out there to get organisms to start being cooperative, is costly to this, like, objective bystander sort of thing.
00:56:08 — How do you make that work evolutionarily? It had to turn out that punishing, especially when it is like in a sense of tremendous self-worth and goodness and all of that, feels good. And anything we think about a system of supposed justice has to not only incorporate all the ways in which we are irrational when it comes to considering someone who we unconsciously consider to be a them rather than an us, all that sort of thing. And then superimposed on top, the final frosting is we like to punish.
00:56:46 — And we have a cortex that’s very good at coming up with supposed rational explanations for why our affective emotive limbic pleasure in punishment actually makes a great deal of sense after the fact.
Light Watkins
00:57:02 — And even little seemingly intangible things like whether or not the person who’s in charge of this has eaten lunch is going to determine the degree of the punishment.
Robert Sapolsky
00:57:12 — Yeah, all of this stuff going on subliminally, like there’s all these levers that are being turned on and off or buttons being pressed, pushed or whatever in the biological machines that we are due to totally unexpected influences. But yeah, if you’re, if you stand before a judge in the United States, and they’re hungry, a whole literature by now shows, they are going to be less merciful.
00:57:43 — If you stand before a judge in Saudi Arabia, and they’re hungry, hungry, because they haven’t eaten yet, they’re going to be less merciful to you. If you stand before them and they’re hungry because it’s Ramadan, they’re going to be more merciful to you the longer they haven’t eaten. Culture and values and how much your stomach is gurgling and what that means.
00:58:09 — And does that mean you should be able to just throw this guy back in jail so you can go get a, you know, McDonald’s? Or does it mean that your stomach is gurgling because you were reminded of your piety and like, all of this stuff is playing out. Whoa, you get the exact opposite results, depending on if you’re in a court in Kansas City, or in Mecca, the exact, yeah, stuff like that plays out in it also. All of that matters.
Light Watkins
00:58:40 — Talk about coincidence. You had a section on coincidence, and I wasn’t clear about the diagrams, but what is the, the no free will perspective on coincidence?
Robert Sapolsky
00:58:52 — Oh, that’s just kind of getting at the nuts and bolts of when people say, okay, if you say there’s no free will, it means nothing can ever change, things can change. And when you look at the mechanisms by which organisms, including us, change their behavior, not only you realize change happens, but you come away with seeing not only is it telling us about our machinedness when you look at how it actually works under the hood, but it’s the same basic
00:59:23 — blueprint of machinedness when any other like organism out there is changing its behavior in response to experience. And one of the key things that happens with it in terms of conditioning is there’s whole circuitry in your brain that’s very good at noticing when two things tend to go together as a pair, when they tend to coincide.
00:59:47 — You have very good coincidence detectors, whether you are a human or you are a sea slug or anything in between, and coincidences like that, there’s a whole neurobiology as to how you begin to connect the two and where one of them will trigger the other. You’ve been conditioned to do something or other, and when you’ve been conditioned to do something that way by something that actually had nothing to do with the other thing. We say you’re being superstitious. You see causality that isn’t there you, you, you have decided that wearing your lucky underwear is what like causes this outcome.
01:00:24 — And there’s a neurobiology to how it is that those went together enough that you decide that one does to the other. That’s part of the, what kind of brain you have during this moment. How readily did you wind up with a brain that links together two events? How much is your brain one that respects sort of critical thinking to say, okay, is this really the case? Let’s look at this closely.
01:00:52 — How much emotional comfort do you get when you see coincidences that help you explain the world? How much of an incentive, how’d you turn out to be the sort of person you are where two things come together, and how likely are you to yoke the two of them together? That somebody says, oh, I had the election stolen from me, and you yoke that with the notion of that is truth and justice.
01:01:20 — Different sorts of ways you wind up being the sort of person where you’re vulnerable to that or not, versus saying, hey, we can deconstruct this in about three seconds and show that that’s nonsense. You know, all these ways in which, you know, we’re very good, we, we animals are very good at detecting coincidences and inferring causality, but
01:01:47 — we’re very vulnerable to seeing causality that isn’t actually there in circumstances where we’re stressed, and we’re angry, and we’re tired, and we’re hungry, and we’re afraid, and we’re resentful, and we have outgroup hatreds and all of those make us much less effective at doing this, but the underlying machine area doing it, it’s the same in us in the sea slug.
Light Watkins
01:02:13 — And basically what I’m getting from this is you don’t want to be the baboon who’s freaking out because the higher status baboon is taking a nap 50 yards away. You want to be able to perceive life in general as objectively as possible. And what I’m thinking of now is, I don’t remember if I read this or heard it in an interview with you, but you talk about how racism is a very natural phenomenon.
01:02:40 — We’re all essentially racist, but what you’re really saying is we’re all tribal. We identify with other people who look like us and who behave like us and who agree to the same cultural indoctrination as us. And whether we have access to our prefrontal cortex or not. That really is the determining factor if we are going to display an act of racism or if we’re going to keep ourselves in check.
Robert Sapolsky
01:03:01 — It’s getting at this whole business of that we’re really, really automatic in distinguishing between us as in them’s. We other primates do as well. It’s incredibly automatic. You see them really like 10 month old kids are ready. We do it in a fraction of a second and it’s always in the direction of someone who counts as a them. And we’re not very predisposed towards treating them nicely kind of thing, but at the same time, it’s incredibly easy to manipulate us as to who counts as an us and a them.
01:03:35 — And you could change those categories in a flash of a second. You can shift those around and you say, well, are you left with the conclusion there that that maybe some of these categories are more baked in there, that they’re harder to get rid of. Race turns out to be one that is not very baked in there. And it makes a lot of sense when you think about human evolution.
01:04:03 — Races, I don’t know, they’re maybe 20, 30,000 years old, which is an eye blink in terms of hominid history. And most of all, for 99% of human hunter-gatherer history, the nearest person you, the furthest person away you would meet in your life was somebody from three valleys over, someone who looked just like you. Nobody started encountering people of other races until, I don’t know, colonialism got its start.
01:04:31 — This is not a deeply ingrained thing. This one is surface, surfaced deep, and it’s totally easy easy to get people to switch from unconscious racial categorizations of people to switching to different ones in a fraction of a second. That’s when it’s easy. The one that is totally in their big surprise is sex differences, because that one’s only, I don’t know, a couple of billion years old instead of 20,000 years old.
01:05:01 — That one is much, much harder. Like it. It is way easy when you switch like sports team uniforms for people to switch people from categorizing the players by race to categorizing them by team. Do the same thing with male and female players and now you switch them around and you can’t break through that with simply putting different color jerseys on people.
01:05:26 — That one is a one that’s really fundamentally in there. But racism, amid all the reasons to be like unbelievably like despairing about it, is it’s really not deeply wired into us. And reflecting the fact that race is a biological phenomenon is a pretty flimsy concept anyway, of that as sort of entities in and of themselves rather than being on biological continuous.
01:05:55 — So bad news is we really quickly decide that there’s thems out there. We don’t like them and we’re awful to them. We have all sorts of great cognitive ways of making it seem like we’re much better people than they are. But the good thing is, you know, it’s not that hard to change your categories or to change it in somebody else. And maybe what that means is like the goal The goal is not to get rid of us theming, because I think that’s kind of automatic.
01:06:28 — I think that’s virtually inevitable in a social primate, but to at least get people to use more benign categories, like people who really, really don’t like broccoli and people who do. Probably not a lot of Earth’s misery over the centuries have been caused by in-group out-group differences about opinions about broccoli.
01:06:53 — Go build your view about the world and types of people as to whether or not people have more or less than six cavities, whether or not they, you know, find benign domains of doing that, or just very objectively doing it between people who are nice and people who are crummy. And like that’s kind of a good thing if you can get people operating that way.
01:07:18 — And that usually makes for a better society. I don’t think you can get rid of us them dichotomies. But I think we can defang them much more easily than people normally assume.
Light Watkins
01:07:32 — It sounds like what you’re advocating for is having an open mind, right. So, again, having more access to the part of your brain that’s in control of having an open mind. So what are some practices? What are some ways that people can do this? If you’ve identified yourself as, you know, I’m a little bit closed off in certain areas. I like this conversation. I love what he’s talking about. I want to read the book. What was there anything we can do in the immediate time to kind
Robert Sapolsky
01:08:01 — of open this up? I guess there’s all those mechanical things of like, there’s a whole science of as you get older, like as you get late teenage years, how you begin closing to all sorts novelty, so that you’re like 95% of the way stuck in this domain, this domain by the time you’re 25, by the time you’re 30.
01:08:24 — So, the realm of all those, when’s the last time you did something completely new, learn a new language, go travel to a place you’ve never wanted to see, you know, all of those sort of very heavy handed interventions, just operate with the assumption that whatever you’ve come up with as your easiest explanation for what’s going on is probably not what’s going on. And just have that as the general rule and try to take it from there.
01:08:56 — All that being said, you know, being able to think clearly about this stuff and use your prefrontal cortex and overcome your implicit biases and understand the world as it is, and old women don’t really cause hurricanes, and ooh, let’s just be rational beings. Some of the time, you’re screwed with that. Some of the time, like knowing the truth and understanding like circumstances and where control is and isn’t.
01:09:24 — Some of the time, that’s a disaster if you’re like one of the major have-nots there. In circumstances like that, fostering self-deception is a very good therapeutic thing. You don’t want to make somebody feel like they were in control over something they had no control over if the outcome was bad. Like they never got higher socioeconomic status, they never, you know, if the outcome is good, you foster somebody’s self-worth if you give them a sense of control when they really didn’t have it.
01:10:02 — When you give somebody a sense of control when the outcome was bad and they couldn’t have controlled it, or even if they could have, decrease somebody’s sense of control, enhance their self-deception, their rationalizations. Like it’s a fairly narrow domain in which reality and facing reality is actually a helpful thing.
01:10:25 — It’s not a get as much control, as much predictability, as much information in your life as possible well, understand which things you could control and not control, you know, straight out of knee bore sort of thing. And when the outcome is bad, maybe you should in fact tell yourself you didn’t have control over that after all. That could be very beneficial psychologically.
Light Watkins
01:10:55 — Yeah, determined reminds, it reminds me of the scientific version of 48 laws of power by Robert Greene, you know, where he just talks about the different aspects of human behavior from a political and power dynamic, but you’re actually giving scientific rationale and citing research that helps people understand why they may be behaving in a certain way or why you may be getting upset.
01:11:25 — Like you talked about in an interview, sitting in those. Stanford faculty meetings, and you could see the whole, it was like you were on the, you. Serengeti or whatever the baboon reserve was, you could see the whole power structure playing out. And I think being able to see that and having language for it and having reference points for it helps you to be more objective in it or not take it personally or whatever the case, anything
01:11:49 — that keeps you rooted in the present moment where you can then make better, I don’t know if this is the right language for it, but better choices for you or for your students or for whatever or whatever you’re advocating for.
Robert Sapolsky
01:12:02 — I mean, all that understanding, just to fall back into mechanistic biologists that I am, the more understanding you have where everyone’s buttons and levers are, the more you understand how those buttons and levers got made, um, the more you do that, the more accurate of you you’re going to have about the world and lots of domains, that’s going to be a very
01:12:28 — good thing because you’ll see the extent to which people have nothing to do with how they turned out.
Light Watkins
01:12:33 — Hey, really quickly, if you like this content or if you don’t like it, let me know down in the comments because your likes and comments are going to help me learn what you want more of. And then that way I can keep bringing you the good stuff. All right. Thanks so much for your feedback and back to the show. What are your, what’s your thinking on success? Is it about self-preservation? It’s obviously not about making as much money as possible, whatever, but what is, what is the deterministic idea of success?
Robert Sapolsky
01:13:04 — Oh, that’s a very tough one. And about three minutes after the book went off to the, the printers, so I couldn’t change a word in there anymore. I immediately had the, oh my God, I can’t believe I didn’t spend more time on this. We have no free will. That’s terrible. Are you going to have just criminals run around free? No, no, no. You You could construct a world in which people are protected from dangerous individuals without invoking a sense of culpability on the part of the dangerous individuals.
01:13:35 — Good. That one’s easy. That one’s easy. Getting something to completely replace the criminal justice system, but it would have to be something like a quarantine public health model. So that one seems hard enough, but then the flip side, oh my God, we need to do something about people who feel like they really do deserve as a CEO, a salary that’s a thousand fold higher than the workers there.
01:13:59 — You really do need to, you know, meritocracy that’s got to go also because praise and reward for things you didn’t really earn. That’s just as damaging, but that one’s a harder one exactly for what you’re bringing up. Okay. That person is dangerous for reasons out of their control. So just keep them from being dangerous. That person has the potential to be very, very beneficial to people, but they’re going to have to spend a hell of a lot of time learning how to be a good cardiothoracic surgeon.
01:14:33 — They’re going to have to like stay up late and study. They’re going to have to skip a lot of parties. That’s a much harder one. You know, we want society to be protected from dangerous individuals. We want society to be protected from incompetent individuals when it’s time to take out your brain tumor. You don’t want to pick a random person from off the street to do that because meritocracy is damaging.
01:14:56 — Like you got to find a way to motivate people to do the really difficult process of getting very good at tough, helpful things without having them come out the end feeling like they are a better human than other people as a result. That’s a much harder one, and that’s where dangling notions of what counts as success, that’s that one.
01:15:22 — I haven’t made a dent in trying to figure out because you really got to get a special mindset in somebody if they’re going to work 80 hour weeks for a decade or two to come up with a vaccine for something. Like, and there’s got to be a way of doing it, other than there’s going to be all sorts of suspect versions of success and reward that one taps into in the way humans operate.
01:15:53 — Like, I don’t think I could convince, like some grad student to work 80 hour weeks in the lab to come up with one little factoid gear in a whole scientific study by telling him you’re doing this for the common good. Yeah, that’s not going to work quite as well when their damn roommate is going out to a party and they’re deciding to sit there and work more.
01:16:18 — The motivation for that, and what will count as success, that’s, I have so much less insight into that as you know, just keep people safe from dangerous people, but don’t make the dangerous people feel like they’re rotten humans in the process and don’t punish them because punishment makes no sense and be on guard that it feels good to punish.
What baboons teach us about human nature
Light Watkins
01:16:42 — So it sounds like we’re more like we’re more like baboons than we probably imagine. And having studied baboons for decades and you’d be if you could communicate with a baboon and talk about the concept of free will, they probably would think is ridiculous as well. But what does studying baboons reveal about where we’re going as a human race?
Robert Sapolsky
01:17:11 — Well, they’re just a good model system for trying to understand the levers and buttons in a system that’s based on the same blueprint as us, but is simpler in a lot of ways. It’s the same basic biological blueprint. Your brain is doing the exact same thing when you’re being an aggressive human and an aggressive baboon.
01:17:36 — Your brain is doing totally different things when the baboon is slashing somebody right in front of them and you’re pressing a button to operate a drone on the other side of the planet. Like that’s where we have the exact same blueprint, and we’re using it in completely novel, unprecedented ways.
01:17:58 — Yeah, sometimes it’s useful to see just how fundamental taking it out on somebody weaker is as a way of reducing stress, seeing just how protective social support can be, rather than getting to humans, is this person actually a friend, or are they just an acquaintance, or are they just passing, you know, baboons don’t meet somebody at a bar and the next morning they have to decide, was this a meaningful interaction or not? It’s a simpler landscape built on, nonetheless, the same basic blueprint.
01:18:32 — It’s just easier to get insights into it that way.
How to build a more humane society
Light Watkins
01:18:36 — I guess what I’m wondering is, is this supposed delusion of free will, is it ultimately self-destructive for us as a race? Or is, or do you think that we’re leaving the world better, just like the baboons are?
Robert Sapolsky
01:18:55 — Oh, absolutely worse. And it’s just an issue of, like, how does the center hold when you got a world built on justifying a small subset of people being treated way better than Irish or recent data and most people in some domains being treated way worse than. Yeah, you can’t, if you’re running stuff on that, you’re going to get into trouble.
Robert Sapolsky
01:19:25 — And the world has no shortage of like examples of why that gets you into trouble. And the US is an amazing sort of venture in the last 50 years as to how much like easily justified inequality makes for a much worse place. And inequality is It’s completely built on notions that free will is for real.
01:19:48 — It’s just different outcomes are just justice has been served.
Light Watkins
01:19:55 — And as a final statement, right? I think saying there’s no such thing as free will is it’s not as inspiring, but as maybe something more like everyone has something to contribute. Was that, is that, would that be a statement that you could stand behind or what’s what’s final statement or what would you want on a billboard for people to understand in order to create the kind of society that you think is more sustainable?
Robert Sapolsky
01:20:24 — Well, maybe they’re not everyone that does have something to contribute, which would be kind of a bummer, but may be the case, maybe in a broader sense. Every time you’re pleased with yourself or displeased with another human, remember neither if you had any control over how you turn out to be who you are in that moment.
Light Watkins
01:20:49 — Okay. Beautiful. I think, I think that, you know, again, to me, the idea of, of reminding ourselves of these things is to stay present because you get into comparison, comparison is the thief of joy, or you get into past regret, or you get into future worry. You’re the baboon worried about the higher status baboon.
01:21:16 — So anytime you can be more present to whatever it is you’re doing, you will be able to find more inherent beauty in whatever it is that you’re doing. And whatever, for whatever benefit that has, and to have a more accurate picture. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for, for coming on and, and sharing your perspective. Are you already working on the next book or thinking about the next book?
Robert Sapolsky
01:21:39 — You just kind of joined the post assuming I don’t have it in me to generate another book, but that that happened after. You probably say that every time after all your books. You’re like, I can’t do it. It’s about a one year lag and before I suddenly sit up and say, aha, now this one will actually be interesting. This is the one that will be worth spending five years on.
Light Watkins
01:22:01 — Well, thank you for your contribution to our culture and our society. It’s been an honor to have conversation with you. You’ve been on my shortlist for a very long time, so I’m glad it finally got to happen.
Robert Sapolsky
01:22:14 — Great. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. This was a total pleasure. Be well.
Light Watkins
01:22:21 — If you like that video, you’re going to love the next one. Click this thumbnail right here, and I’ll see you over there.
Summary with timestamps
This summary covers the key points of the interview, breaking them down into easily digestible segments, each marked with timestamps to help you better navigate the content.
The interview begins with a discussion of the concept of the absence of free will and how Robert Sapolsky’s scientific research led him to conclude that humans are biological machines. He shares his early findings on how social hierarchy affects stress levels and the lives of primates.
Robert talks about his childhood, being raised as an Orthodox Jew, and how his research and personal reflections led him to atheism and the belief in the absence of free will. He discusses a pivotal moment in his life when his faith was shattered while studying the Bible, particularly the episode of Pharaoh’s heart being hardened.
Sapolsky recalls how visiting the Museum of Natural History during his childhood sparked his interest in primates, especially gorillas. He explains how his decision to become a primatologist was driven by his desire to understand the biological nature of behavior.
Sapolsky describes how, as a teenager, he decided to dedicate his life to studying primates. He shares a story about how he wrote letters to well-known primatologists in his youth to get an opportunity to work with them, and how his interest in neuroscience significantly influenced his career.
Robert explains how studying stress in baboons helped him explore human health. He discusses the aggressive behavior of baboons and how social conflicts and tensions affect their stress levels, which is comparable to humans.
Robert shares his observations on social inequality and how it contributes to the deterioration of society. He argues that the idea of free will is often used to justify inequality, which makes society less just.
Sapolsky discusses how people enjoy punishing others and how this is linked to the brain’s biological mechanisms. He explains that punishment activates the reward systems in the brain, making the process emotionally satisfying for people.
The researcher explains the difference in how various social groups perceive their status in society. For example, among baboons, their hierarchy and stress levels depend on the specific group’s dynamics. This analogy is used to explain human behavior in different social structures.
The interview concludes with a discussion of success and how the concept of determinism may affect people’s perception of their achievements. Sapolsky argues that even in a world without free will, people can still feel responsible for their actions, and this does not prevent society from functioning.
