Modern WisdomWhat Chronic Stress Does To Your Body - Dr Robert Sapolsky
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,038 words- 0:00 – 6:00
What Robert Wished People Knew About Stress
- CWChris Williamson
What do you wish more people knew about how stress impacts the human body?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Um, that while it's worth paying attention to the fact that it does crummy things to your heart, and blood pressure, and bladder, and everything else, uh, for me, most meaningful thing is it does crummy things to your brain. The worst is that it makes you less empathic. It makes you less tolerant. It makes you less willing to take somebody else's perspective. It narrows your tunnel of concerns, and I think what we see is in a world full of stress, uh, people are crummier to each other on the average.
- CWChris Williamson
Why does stress cause that reduction in empathy?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
All sorts of interesting stuff, various places in the brain, but in one region, uh, we think, we, colleagues and I and lots of other people in the field, um, think we've gotten a sense of the brain region that's relevant, something called the anterior cingulate cortex, and if you wanna summarize it, uh, this is the part of the brain where you feel someone else's pain. Sit someone down, stick them in a brain scanner, poke their finger with a pin, and like all sorts of ouch parts of the brain activate, and as part of that, this part of the brain, anterior cingulate, also activates and it's got a lot to do with interpreting what the pain means, that sort of thing. Like, you poke somebody with a pin after you've told them they've just had this very powerful anesthetic cream smeared over their finger, when in actuality it's, like, cream cheese or something, and they don't feel the pain. The parts of their brain that are saying, "Ouch, that was in my finger," are still going on, but anterior cingulate is gone silent, because you have fallen for a placebo effect. It's, it's about the interpretation of the pain rather than the nuts and bolts features of it. So now stick the person in the brain scanner, and don't poke their finger with a pin, make them watch their loved one have their finger poked, and the pain-o-meter brain regions have nothing to say because, like, nobody's doing anything to your fingertip, but the anterior cingulate activates. And neurons there on this very, like, simplistic level can't tell the difference between your pain and someone else's pain. Um, big amazing sort of footnote in there, uh, typically people suffering from major depression, this part of the brain is overactive. It's just pain 24/7 wherever you look and that kind of thing. Okay, so it turns out that when people are stressed, they become less generous, they're more likely to cheat in a economic game, their moral compass goes out the window, their, their range of concern narrows down to people who look just like me and pray like me and eat like me and all that sort of stuff that we're way familiar with. Um, and it turns out what stress hormones are also doing is disrupting the functioning of this part of the brain, and there's, like, a drug you can give to rats or give to college freshmen volunteers which will block the effects of the stress hormone, and when you throw that in there, uh, they maintain their empathy despite being stressed. They maintain all sorts of physiological markers of it. We're feeling less capacity to look at somebody else's pain and somebody else's perspective on the world when we're stressed because what matters has turned into a very self-interested focus for most people. So, like, amid stress doing terrible things to your memory and your executive function and judgment and all sorts of stuff, this increasingly strikes me as this, this is the outpost that's really interesting.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. One of the things that continues to come up in your work on stress is this, uh, it's almost like an agentic view of what's happening to you. It's how much agency do you have? Is this kind of being imposed on me or have I selected that this is gonna happen? What is the role of agency a- a- and of volition when it comes to stress and how we interpret it?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Well, it falls under the rubric of how I think everything in the universe works, which is, like, there's no agency at all. There's no free will. Um, in recent years, I've stopped spending most of my time futzing around with wonder at the time and soaking in stress hormones and getting much more interested in larger issues of biology of who we are and how we got here and our best moments and our worst moments, and everything ambiguously in between, and when you spend enough time, like, obsessing over biology and how it interacts with environment and all the things that came before us that we had no control over, both biologically, environmentally, you reach this conclusion somewhere in there that there's no damn free will whatsoever. It is entirely a myth. So this is, this is my current song and dance trying to convince the wor- world that, uh, this is, uh, how things work.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, if we want to increase the stress in everybody, at least for a short term, perhaps that, that's a nice little teaser for what we can get onto.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Talk to me,
- 6:00 – 12:29
Where is the Threshold of Short-Term Stress Becoming Long-Term?
- CWChris Williamson
'cause obviously short term stress is useful, long-term stress not useful. Is there a line?Is-- am I not supposed to be stressed after eight hours and 35 minutes? When does short-term stress start to become bad?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Well, it depends on who you are and your place in society and what culture and, as long as we're at it, what species you are. And sort of the- the- this central concept in stress is, like, you get stuck in a traffic jam, you're stressed, you do this with this hormone, you turn off this other one, your- your blood pressure does whatever. And the amazing thing is, if you went back 100 million years and some, like, dwarfy little dinosaur was being chased by someone terrifying, that dinosaur would have been secreting the precise same molecules that you do when you're stuck in traffic or thinking about global warming or who... It's an incredibly ancient piece of art, like wiring. It's the same thing in us and other primates and mammals and fish and birds and reptiles and amphi- it's incredibly conserved stuff. And what it's been doing for, like, 150 million years or so is saving your life when you were facing a short-term physical crisis. Somebody's very intent on eating you, you're very intent on eating somebody else because you're starving, and everything that it does is get your body for dealing with the next three minutes of crisis. You're mobilizing energy from storage sites to deliver to the muscles that are saving your neck, you're increasing heart rate, blood pressure, you're turning off everything unessential in your body in the hopes that there is a later, you'll take care of it later. Growth, tissue repair, immune surveillance, reproduction, all of that, all built around, like, triage everything that's not essential for the next three minutes. And then you get us smart primates, us humans who could anticipate our deaths, or some, like, low-ranking baboon who spends his entire life not being chased by lions but being hassled by higher-ranking guys, and what you've invented is this, like, totally corrosive, disastrous chronic psychosocial stress, and you see this very simple outcome. You go sprinting for your life when your blood pressure is way, way elevated. This is a good thing. It's saving your life. You, day after day, deal with an abusive boss or you have an anxiety disorder or whatever, and you're doing the same thing with your cardiovascular system, and you're gonna blow it apart because the system didn't evolve for being turned on chronically, and for most beasts it's either over with after three minutes or you're over with, and we're capable of doing this, like, for months, years on end, and that's not what the system evolved for. And that's why us and a few other primates are smart enough to get sick from psychological stress.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, the idea, the concept of being smart enough to get sick from psychological stress is- is a- an odd sort of twisting of the words, but I suppose it's very true, right? Because if we didn't have this unbelievable abstraction ability to be able to contemplate, "Am I really speaking my truth forward? Is this my highest actualization? Maybe that cookie that I ate yesterday really does say everything about me that I've always thought that it was," ruminating about that weird thing you said to a teacher 15 years ago, whatever it might be that you're vacillating about, we are able to abstract our stresses and ruminate about them and continue to cause them to persist in our mind even when they're not there. So even if we're not being chased by said dinosaur or- or tiger or baboon, we can imagine all of the previous baboons and tigers and dinosaurs that we thought about getting chased from and still get the same physiological effect.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yes, as well as remember our most incompetent, embarrassing social moments of our lives, as well as imagine that you're destined to do something like that over and over again in the future, as well as worry about- worry about a movie character. You watch somebody on a screen or you read a- a novel and you activate a stress response because, "Oh no, watch out! The bad guys are coming up behind you." Or you're heartbroken, you know, at the end of a novel by some beloved character getting done in, or worse and most meaningfully, you sit there and you read about what's happening in Ukraine or Bangladesh or some- and you do the exact same thing. We're taking this 150-million-year-old circuitry and we can abstract it over space and time like nothing that's ever walked this planet before.
- CWChris Williamson
Right. With this perspective, the kind of trite cliché of people saying humans are not meant to consume the entire world's catastrophes 24 hours a day in real time, this is presumably having a real, genuine impact on our stress response and therefore health outcomes, physiology, hormones, all of that stuff.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, to show how similar things are and then how different, you take a female baboon, this was some great research done some years ago by some colleagues-
- CWChris Williamson
Ah.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... and she has an infant and the infant dies. There's a high infant mortality rate. And they could show up to a month later, not only is this female more socially withdrawn, doing less grooming, all... She has elevated stress hormone levels. She is mourning for a month afterward, and that sure looks familiar, and often she will carry the body around for days afterward. Wow, that looks just like us. And then we do the same thing when we see that Bambi's mother was killed in the- in the cartoon and we're haunted by that for years. Whoa, we can take this very primate thing, "My child has died," and we're f- uh, feeling upset about an animated-... cartoon character we're still, uh, you know, we could just extend it in ways that's unrecognizable to other species.
- CWChris Williamson
I
- 12:29 – 25:50
How Brain Development is Influenced by Mother’s Socioeconomic Status
- CWChris Williamson
learned from you that a third trimester fetus's brain development is impacted by the mother's socioeconomic status. What on earth is going on there?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
How screwed is that? How, like-
- CWChris Williamson
Insane, absolutely insane.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... in, you're born and you're already screwed by having picked the wrong womb? Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Take that from the top for me, take that from the absolute top.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Okay. Well, you know, people used to realize poverty, social instability, being a peripheralized out group, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong race, the wrong, uh, all of those things, what, you know, your body, like, pays a big price. In the United States, for example, if you are African American, on the average your chromosomes are aging at an accelerated rate compared to everybody else because stress hormones mess up the enzymes that keep your chromosomes young and, like, whoa, like, the chromosomes in your cells are falling apart faster? So whoa, no surprise, no surprise. And when you look at, like, health, socioeconomic status is a gigantic predictor. Am I assuming correctly you're in the UK?
- CWChris Williamson
Austin, Texas, but I was in the UK-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Oh my God.
- CWChris Williamson
... for a very long time. I'm a- I'm an adoptee-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
... over here.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Okay. Well, no wonder you've got that Texan accent. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... you know, the classic White Hall studies of civil servants in Britain and stuff, your socioeconomic rank has an enormous impact on your body, and it's got nothing to do with getting healthcare access, it's got very little to do with the fact that, like, you can't afford your health club memberships. It's stress, it's the psychosocial effects of, like, chronically having no control, no predictability, all of that. And then they figured out that, like, the socioeconomic status of your family when you were a kid is predictive of all sorts of unhealthy stuff when you're 60 years old. And then, among other things, uh, people got brain imaging techniques cool enough that they could now brain image a fetus and see how it's doing. And back came the finding that already as a fetus, your mother's socioeconomic status, uh, has an impact on your brain growth. How does that happen? Very simple. If you're poor and if you're chronically socially, psychosocially stressed for any of a gazillion other reasons, you've got elevated levels of these stress hormones in your bloodstream, and they get through the placenta, and they get to your fetus and have all sorts of effects while the fetus's body is learning what kind of world it is out there. Whoa! It's a scary one, it's an unpredictable one, these stress hormones having all sorts of effects on how you're constructing every outpost, including your brain. And it turns out, some of the fanciest parts of your brain, your frontal cortex, et cetera, are very sensitive to these stress hormones and their maturation is impaired by them.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. What are the outcomes? What are the, what are the sort of outcomes that you see from, um, a mother that is low socioeconomic status, perhaps highly chronically stressed? What is the sort of brain or the sort of person that will be born out of that, more than likely?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Well, this one isn't well understood yet because these are the first studies coming out, this is officially cutting aide, cutting edge neuroimaging techniques, but we already know a ton just a few years later. Get a kid by the time they're five years old going into kinder- kindergarten, and on the average, their family's socioeconomic status is already a predictor of this kid's resting stress hormone levels. How screwed is that? And on the average, it's already predictive of the maturation of the frontal cortex in this kid, how thick this cortical region is, what its metabolic rate is like. And one wonders, so what does this part of the brain do that I keep mentioning? Um, it's the brain region that lets you be self-disciplined and long-term planning and impulse control-
- CWChris Williamson
No way.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... and emotional regulation. I don't know, a lot of, a lot of people will be familiar with, like, the famed marshmallow test with, like-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... five-year-old kids. And oh my god, that's amazing, you get a five-year-old who can't hold out for the second marshmallow and they're, they're on it within seconds and all of that. And this is predictive decades, decades later of this kid's cumulative earnings over their lifetime, their adult socioeconomic status, their patterns in metabolic diseases, cardiovascular... Whoa, already at age five, the ti- the, the, uh, die is not cast unchangeably, but it's already leaning in a fairly significant direction. By age five, that's already a predictor of what things are gonna look like as an adult in lots of these important realms. And by age five, if you once again pick the wrong family to be born into and you're already marinating in chronic psychosocial stress because, you know, your family's poverty, by age five, you already have that profile that's predictive of, you know, that outcome that is on the less, uh, desirable side long afterward.
- CWChris Williamson
Absolutely insane. It's, I had Robert Plomin on the show, um, I've spent a good bit of time learning about behavioral genetics over the last couple of years, and (clears throat) what I'm really fascinated about is this odd intersection between nature and nurture. The fact that you are, your parents are predisposed to behave in a way-... which creates the nurture. Their predisposition has to be inherited by you, at least in part, because that is the nature element of what's going on. So when you have this very odd blending, let's say that you have a mother who is, uh, uh, predisposed to be a little bit more anxious, okay, so perhaps you have got a predisposition to be a little bit more anxious, but then what's the environment in, that you grow up in, right? You already have this sort of precursor downstream from that, mothers that say, uh, uh, overbearingly, "You can't go out without your coat on," and, "Make sure that you ring me before this," what's the subtext that you're being taught there? That the world is a scary place, that you need to be very concerned, that you must always be vigilant, and you've already got this predisposition? It's this fascinating intersection and the interplay between the two that I think is, is really interesting in behavioral genetics.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
And an incredibly important one. And behavioral genetics has kind of, uh, I don't mean this to pejoratively, but grown up, um, to the extent of realizing when it comes to behavior, genes are very, very, very rarely determinant. They're about vulnerabilities, they're about potential, they're about, you know, skating on the edge of something, and it depends on what environment you wind up in whether you're pushed over the edge. It depends if you have the right nurturant things, that you've got the genetic potential all set to take advantage of, it after a while is irrelevant to ask, "What does this gene do?" But only to ask what a gene does in this particular type of environment. Great example of this in terms of stress and genetic vulnerability, uh, classic study, it's been mired in some controversy for years but I think it's the most important study done in biological psychiatry in a quarter century, there's this gene, it's got something to do with serotonin, this neurotransmitter in the brain. Everybody knows serotonin has something to do with depression, SSRIs like Prozac work on it, um, so it's this gene that comes in a few different flavors and all sorts of animal studies suggest that you wind up with this flavor and you're at mis- more at risk for depression. Um, and that made perfect sense and, whoa, that says, that, you know, suggests all sorts of genetic, uh, impact on depression and such, so let's go look at some humans. And this amazing study following, like, thousands of people from childhood up until, like, early adulthood where you've got their genomes and you're saying, "Well, does having, like, the scary, vulnerable version of this gene increase your risk for having a history of depression by the time you're 25 years old?" And the answer was absolutely clear, yes, yes it increases the risk if, and only if, you had a lot of stressors during childhood. In the absence of a stressful childhood, having that risk variant had virtually no impact whatsoever. It's not the genetics of becoming depressed, it's the genetics of being more vulnerable to depression when it's coupled with huge amounts of stress early in life. And this turns out to be the theme with, like, everything implicated with genes and behavior, it depends on the environment that you're in. And what do you know? It turns out all sorts of these genetic risk profiles, uh, when it's coupled with a stressful enviro- environment, an abusive one, a neglectful one, or what e- that's the circumstances in which they suddenly are adverse.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. It's interesting to think about, um, let's say you had some child that was 99th percentile conscientiousness, r- you know, it's full standard deviation higher in IQ, all of it, like, some stuff, big predisposition, but they were born into an environment or a culture that wasn't really pushing them to use that discipline and that motivation and, and that sort of drive. Perhaps they're born into somewhere that doesn't even have a, a formal education system. And you think, okay, well, what, what ability do they have to be able to capitalize on this? And again, another fascinating thing is we've moved recently, only in the last sort of 100, 150 years, from a brawn-based to a brain-based economy, which has meant that people who had a competitive advantage only two centuries ago, if that same disposition was born now, they're g- uh, totally different. Like, what are you gonna do with y- your ability to dig eight hours a day without getting back pain? I get back pain.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Right? I'm not gonna be, I'm not gonna be good, I'm not gonna be good on the, on the digs. Um, eh, what do people get wrong? So what you've said there sounds tenuously close to what people who don't understand epigenetics on the internet say is epigenetics.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
That sounds to me like the sort of epigenetics of the gaps, that they would say, "You see? The genes aren't turned on and then the environment turns them on." Is that epigenetics? And if not, what is epigenetics related to it?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Well, actually that's, like, epigenetics. I, I can't give a much more accurate description of it than that. Uh, you got your genes' DNA sequence, long strings of them specifying proteins that you make, um, and it turns out, like, 95% of your DNA doesn't specify genes. It's the instruction manual, it's the on and off switches for when you activate or deactivate the genes, in particular circumstances, in this part of your body but not in that part, and so on. Um, and it turns out very little of environment changes your actual DNA sequences, and the stuff that does is, like, bad stuff, like radiation, things like... Not, not, not stuff-
- CWChris Williamson
Chernobyl, yeah, okay.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... we're thinking about here. Yes.
- 25:50 – 29:00
Does Your Stress Impact Your Descendants?
- CWChris Williamson
to me like you're saying-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... bad stuff not only leaves scar tissue for you, and not just for you now, but you in the future, and then also potentially your kids as well, presumably.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, through mechanisms. Well, you've already mentioned one mechanism, which is, like, the regulation that happened to your genes and the brain you got right now as an adult is gonna influence how you, how you raise your child. And, you know, what, (laughs) what parents spend an awful lot of time doing is trying to figure out ways to make their kid just like them when they grow up, to have the same cultural values, to have the same neuroses, because those don't seem like neuroses, they seem like the only sensible way to go about handling the world, all of that. So there's multi-generational transmission through parenting style, through culture, all of that. But multi-generational epigenetic stuff also arises from unbelievably cool mechanisms. Okay, for example, so you are that fetus and mom is stressed as hell because she has an anxiety disorder, for example, and thus you're being soaked in a lot of the physiological consequences of her anxiety disorder, and that influences your brain and among other things, it causes epigenetic changes in one part of your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is about fear, anxiety, all of that. And what does a lot of stress early in life, including during fetal life, thanks to those hormones, do? It makes your amygdala grow bigger than normal, you wind up having as an adult on the average an amygdala that's enlarged, that's hyperactive, that's hysterical, that sees menace that other people don't, things of that sort. Okay, so you got this and, like, with the right therapy at the right points in life, you can actually reverse epigenetic stuff. Wow, get the right talk therapy and, like, your genes are regulated differently in your brain. Yeah, it's gotta. That's, that's, like, when therapy works. But if you haven't had that good fortune, now you're an adult with your enlarged amygdala, and you get pregnant, and because of the big amygdala, you secrete elevated levels of stress hormones because that's... And thus your fetus's amygdala will be bigger than expected, and thus when they are an adult and you have these multi-generational ripples, and this is not passing on genes, this is passing on the adverse regulatory consequences for your genes. And this stuff is multi-generational. It's not inevitable, you're not damning a hundred generations of descendants, and, like, you could intervene and very little in us is set in stone. But all things being equal, this is even a way to pass this stuff onto the generations beyond you.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. You, you mentioned interventions there.
- 29:00 – 35:52
Finding Solutions to Manage Stress
- CWChris Williamson
We are bathed in stresses. I don't know how full Andrew Huberman mode you have gone in your work to look at ameliorating or mitigating this. Has there been anything that... Or, or what is the 30,000-foot view of how to think about strategies that are good at reducing stress? What, what, what is the, like, way to conceptualize it?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Well, what I can say confidently is you're asking the entirely wrong question to this person because I'm terrible at handling stress. Like, why else do you spend decades, like, living in a laboratory thinking about this? So anything-
- CWChris Williamson
Research is me-search, Robert.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yes, indeed.
- CWChris Williamson
Research is me-search.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yes. Sublimate it all into those test tubes-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... and those statistical tests. Um, so I happen to be lousy at it, so anything I have to say here take with a grain of salt. But what the real experts show is, you know, what, what is stress about, not when you're being chased by a dinosaur but when you're being psychologically stressed, what is it that makes psychological stress stressful? It's for the same external reality, for the same external unpleasantry, if you feel like you have no control, if you feel like you're getting no predictive information about, "When is it gonna come and how long is it gonna last and how bad is it going to be?" When you have no outlets for the frustration caused by the stressor, when you interpret things as meaning things are getting worse rather than better...And when you got no social support, incredibly, like, elegant, powerful studies showing stuff, like, with a lab rat or with a college student, you give 'em shocks every now and then, they get a stress response, and you give 'em a little warning light 10 seconds before each shock, they don't get as much of a stress response. You've given them predictive information. Let them press a lever repeatedly, where they think that by pressing the lever it decreases, (clears throat) the likelihood of a shock. The lever's doing nothing, it's a placebo, it's disconnected. Yet merely by feeling like you have some sense of control, "Just imagine how worse it would've been if I were not the captain of my ship," you buffer against... So, hugely important psychological variables in there. But what you see is, like, it's narrow ranges where this is. Predictive information, give that little warning light one second before the shock, doesn't do you any good. It's not enough time to get the right psychological perspective. Give the warning light a minute before each shock and you make things worse.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Because rather than sitting there saying, "Oh, what a magnificent life I have where I know when my stressors are coming and now I can prepare for my coping stra-" You're sitting there for a whole minute s- Whoa. So it's not just have more predictive information, have more of a sense of control. You don't wanna give somebody a sense of control when the outcome was a disaster, because all you're doing is biasing them towards thinking how much better things could've been, and, "Too bad I was at the control at that time." And some of the most humane stuff we do is try to minimize somebody's sense of control in the face of... Nobody could've stopped the car the way that child darted out. It wouldn't have made a difference if you had gotten him to the doctor earlier, there's nothing they... You couldn't have done anything. A sense of control only works for mild to moderate stressors. For big, disastrous ones, help that person deceive themselves like crazy, because that's where the... So it's not just, you know, get as much control and as much predictability and as much social support as possible, because, like, often we mistake, like, superficial acquaintanceships for actual social support. And, like, it sucks when the carpet gets pulled out from under your feet, that it turns out that clubbing is not the way in which you meet people who will keep you through the moments of crisis in your life. Um, you know, narrower range for all this stuff works. Um, soundbites, and once again, the terrain where, do as I say, not as I live, um, but, you know, all the stress management stuff collectively can work quite well. Um, it's not stuff you save for the weekend, it's not stuff you save until, like, you're on hold on the phone kind of thing, um, it's something you gotta set time out for every day, and usually a block of time. And what's interesting is whether that's, like, exercise or meditation or playing your oboe or whatever it is that's doing it for you, um, actually doing that activity is stress reducing, but the mere fact that amid your life of saying, "I can't say no to this, I gotta get this done, I gotta get that done," all these pressures... If you were willing to say no to that stuff enough, if you were willing to consider your wellbeing to be important enough that you stop everything for 20 minutes a day of, like, you know, messing with Rubik's Cubes, it hardly matters what you're doing, you're 90% of the way there already because you have said, "This is serious enough and my wellbeing is serious enough that I'm gonna say no to all these things I can't say no to." So, like, that works great. Um, next thing is make sure it's a stress management (laughs) technique that, like, you actually enjoy doing. Like, because if it isn't, that's not st-
- CWChris Williamson
So you mean you don't, you shouldn't be getting stressed by doing a stress management technique?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Exactly. Like, you know, meditation, there's a gazillion studies showing it has all sorts of benefal- beneficial effects. Because of my makeup, if I spent 20 minutes a day meditating, I would have a stroke by this weekend. It's so, like, antithetical to what my makeup is. But, like, that's great that all your friends say it's wonderful. You know, see if it works for you, read the fine print, um, and if it doesn't, like, that's not stress reduction, that's exactly the opposite. I would say the last caveat that comes with that is if you've run into somebody who says, "It has been scientifically proven that their special brand of stress management-"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
"... works better than the other ones," you gotta do it al- almost every day, and it's gotta be something that actually works for you rather than working for whichever celebrity did their, like, exercise routine is talking about on- online, and, like, don't trust someone who says theirs is special, because they all are roughly doing the same thing.
- CWChris Williamson
T-t-talking about on the other side of this, moving out of stress and into good stuff, have you ever thought
- 35:52 – 42:50
How to Better Enjoy the Good Things in Life
- CWChris Williamson
about how people can help themselves habituate to the good things and the good changes that happen in life more slowly?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. Um, something I've been ruminating on a lot as of late because, you know, it's another one of those, we're, we're a weird species and it allows us to do some cool stuff, but whoa, does it have some, like, bills that come afterward in terms of no free lunch. Okay, so you're a baboon. Like, what's the source of fun in your life? You're hungry and you get to eat something great, or, like, you're in a bad mood and you get to beat up on somebody smaller so you feel terrific, or somebody mates with you, or any of these things, and, like, it's a fairly limited repertoire of what counts as rewarding.And then you get to us and, like, all of those things are nice but in addition, like, we solve a math problem that we've been working on for 20 years. And like, the world is a wondrous place or like, a piece of music or like, quadruple orgasms or like, you smell a flower that smells great or like, we've got this range of potential pleasures that's amazing compared to every other beast out there. And once again, this theme of we're just like every other primate out there until you look close and we're totally different, we've got the same brain circuitry that handles reward and anticipation and motivation as every other, like, primate out there. And a lot of it revolves around this neurotransmitter dopamine and dopamine's totally cool and it's a reward but it's actually more about anticipation than reward. And if you're a baboon, dopamine is all about, "Wow, this, like, gazelle I just killed is gonna be fantastic, this is gonna taste great." And then we do stuff, like we release the same neurotransmitter thinking about, "Wow, this is gonna be such a great planet for my grandchildren," or, "Wow, this is..." You know, we've got this range of potential pleasures and potential motivations like nobody else out there. And the range varies, like this is a system that has to accommodate smelling a nice flower and winning the lottery. And it's using the same circuits, and it's using the same neurotransmitters to do this. What that means is this is a system that has to reset really quickly because it's gotta know, "Okay, okay, we just stopped doing, winning the lottery, now we're doing the smell of flowers." So like going from zero to ten, "Okay, we've readjusted, this is what zero to ten now means, this is like the first nice smell of the season," rather than, "Oh, you've just cured world, mm, hunger or whatever." Uh, it's gotta reset quickly. And there's some cool hits coming up by now as to what's unique about the human, like, reward/anticipation system where it's got fancier regulation so you could send more negative feedback signals saying, "Okay, we're switching from flowers to orgasms now," or whatever, where it's got very fancy cir-. So that's totally great, that allows us to do stuff and there's like the bill that comes which accounts for an incredibly percent- incredible percentage of like human dis-ease and despair and dissatisfaction, which is if this system resets so quickly, by definition whatever was like a fantastic surprise and wonderful yesterday is gonna be what you feel entitled to today, and is going to feel insufficient tomorrow. And we get hungry again, and we just get hungry and hungry and hungry and whatever was great is never gonna be enough very quickly and like, okay, that's why we go to the moon and that's why we like, do incredible motivated things and we innovate and we always want the next new thing and novelty and all that. But it's also why with like damn few tragically few exceptions, we habituate to great stuff and it never tastes as good again, and never feels as good again or feels as satisfying or... And like, this is this crappy miserable thing we're stuck in as a species. You know, if we're going to like send in tens of thousands of patents for new things every year, um, the downside is what was wonderful stops seeming wonderful pretty quickly. We habituate like mad and like that's- that's our- that's our like basic predicament. It stops feeling as good and we get hungry again.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. So when it comes to extending how long that happens, is there anything that we can do? Can we slow this inevitable onslaught of hedonic adaptation?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Um, oh, sure. You- you have to be a hell of a lot more mature than I am, for example.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
And, you know, far more... You know, all this stuff, like go through these like cognitive exercises of think about somebody else who's less lucky than you or try to really file away that feeling of like glorious surprise and like, "This is great and this is like a wonderful, loving, caring world and I'm okay and it's gonna be okay." And the next day when you're feeling like, "Well, yeah, but what about..." Okay, really pay attention to the viscera of that moment to have a prayer of recalling some of it. Think about other people, think about like how great it would be to evoke the same feelings in somebody else. Wow! You know, vicariously doing that is a great way of resetting pleasures that we've habituated to. Um, and you know, every- every parent has this at various points where they say, "Wow, my kid just got to experience this for the first time. It was amazing when I did that." It's- You know, there's all sorts of means of doing it and of course you gotta have your- your act together to a greater extent than most of us readily do but like these are- these are all the ways in which you try to keep the colors from fading too quickly.
- CWChris Williamson
You hit on one of the...... uh, hot topics of the internet, dopamine.
- 42:50 – 53:18
Can You Actually Detox from Dopamine?
- CWChris Williamson
Obviously, dopamine nation, the fact that people are-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... concerned they're being driven by it, they're compulsively chasing it through a screen, through a vape in their hand, through whatever next collective effervescence experience they're having with their friends.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(sniffs)
- CWChris Williamson
How much bullshit is there in your opinion in the training, detraining-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... retraining, sensitivity detoxing of dopamine?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Um, oh, I don't know. I'm trying to be polite and not call it bullshit, but thanks for calling it bullshit. Um, it's because people get pulled in one particular direction with it, which superficially is correct, but is not really the case, and the reality is like so much more interesting. Amid this, you know, dopamine nation stuff... That's a great phrase. The equivalent phrase I'd have is, "We're the species that wants," and wants and wants and wants, and it's for much the same reason. Okay, what everybody thinks they know about dopamine and what all the- the savants thought they had shown for a long time, um, is dopamine is about reward. Take a person, take a monkey, take a rat, give it a reward from out of nowhere, and it releases dopamine from the dopaminergic reward circuits in the brain there. And yeah, it's about reward. Cocaine releases tons of dopamine like nothing in the natural world could ever do. So that, by the way, afterward, you've depleted your own dopamine stores, so if you wanna have a big rush, the only possible choice you have is to do it again, and then do it again. Because each time you come back to a baseline that's even more depleted than you were before, you know, the- the ratcheting downward of addiction. But I digress in a preachy manner. Okay, so dopamine is about reward, that's totally straightforward, all these- all these euphoriants release dopamine, case closed. But now you do the experiment a little bit differently. You take that human, rat, monkey, whatever, and, you know, you put them in a room, and here's the deal. When a little light comes on, it means if they go and press this lever 10 times, then they're gonna get a reward. Great. You learn it very quickly. Light, work, reward, light, work, reward, and you got it under your belt, and that's terrific. And so the question now becomes when that sequence occurs, when does dopamine go up? Does it go up when you get the reward? No. Not once you learn this contingency. Dopamine goes up when the light turns on because you're sitting there saying, "Yeah, I'm on top of this, I know- I know all about this lever-pressing stuff. Piece of cake, this is gonna be fabulous." Dopamine's about the anticipation. It's not about the reward, it's about, "This is gonna be fantastic." And even more interestingly, if you mess in there and you block the dopamine levels from rising, you don't get the lever-pressing. It's about the motivation driven by the anticipation. And this is, like, incredible. This is totally amazing in all sorts of ways. First off, it begins to hint after a while that it's not the pursuit of happiness, but it's the happiness of the pursuit. Yes, that sound bite, I've never patented that, but that should be on little doilies in everyone's kitchens and stuff. That's what... I mean, think about how often the anticipation of something turns out to be much better than it turns out to actually be, bummer, 'cause what you now have afterward is even that much more of a hunger, but it's about anticipation. So that's the first interesting implication, the anticipation and the striving is what's really the thing that- that motivates us. Second cool thing. Okay, so now do the experiment a little bit different. Um, what I just described was you press the lever, you get the reward, press the lever, you get the reward, 100% predictability, it's completely clear. Now shift things to you press the lever and you only get the reward about half the time. What happens to dopamine at that point? It goes through the roof the second the little light goes on, because what you've just introduced into your brain chemistry is the word maybe. And whoa, maybe drives the system like nothing on earth. Okay, I'm detecting that my dog is frantically bereaved because his ball has rolled under something. Let me go-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... help him out in his- his patheticness.
- CWChris Williamson
There's your dog.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
I'll be right back. Okay, o- okay, now, uh...
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, yes, look at you.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yes, yes. Now, okay, Sofie, come, so let me see. Oh, and now the other dog is here also. Now, let me see if I could keep him satisfied by wapping him on the nose here and pretending-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... to be trying to pull the ball away. Okay, so you introduce some uncertainty in it, and there's even more dopamine, because maybe, like you're now sitting there saying, "Yeah, I'm a total screw-up, but today I'm feeling lucky, but I'm sure I'm gonna mess up, but no I'm on time," and you're just teetering there, and that's motivating like nothing under... Add in some uncertainty, and if you get the right social engineering going on like people do in Las Vegas, they will take a one-in-a-thousand chance and convince you you actually have a 50/50 chance of something wonderful, and you just press that lever over and over again. Um-I'd say the third thing that's coolest about it is you do all this with a monkey or a rat, and this is about, like, you press the lever and then after a 10-second delay, you get the reward. And then we do the exact same thing, and we press a very human-specific lever, and what we believe is somewhere down the line we're gonna get a reward. We're gonna go to heaven after we die if, like, you pray... Whoa. We can lever press, like, an entire lifetime. We can lever press for... We're able to maintain that anticipatory dopamine like nobody else out there. We can lever press in anticipation that our grandkids will inherit money from us. Like, what is that? We take the same system and we could run it, like, a million times longer than your average monkey can, and that explains an awful lot as well.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I find it so interesting that it seems like the- the- the- kind of the- the bullseye of happiness is things are about to get slightly better than I thought they were going to be. Like, that's pretty much it, right? It's just... It's that moment just there. It's before it happens, right? It's not when the, it's not when the food's come out. It's when you see the waiter coming over with the food-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... and he's about to put it down.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
And okay, here's one of the most cynical things I ever heard someone say.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
This was a guy down the hall in the dorm at college. He said, "A relationship is the price you pay for the anticipation of it."
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Wow. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, God.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yes, yes. He had one disastrous relationship after another after another, but-
- CWChris Williamson
I imagine, yeah.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... the word "almost," whoa, that's- that's really powerful. And, like, that's how we, you know, construct cities and, like, sequence the human genome and build pyramids and all that. Like, just keep pressing the lever, because that's gonna be amazing when they stick your mummified corpse inside that big pyramidal thing.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) So, all right-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Oh, it's all gonna be worth it.
- 53:18 – 1:01:46
Why Robert Wanted to Study Our Lack of Free Will
- CWChris Williamson
We're talking about neurotransmitters and hormones. And some of that stuff's contentious, right? But largely, people are interested in how to reduce stress and how it works and how their oxytocin and their serotonin and stuff all come together. Why did you decide to descend into the hellscape that is the free will discussion? Like, why is it...
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... so important to discuss this that you would put your own mental health on the line?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs) Um, well, when I was a fetus, there's this thing that happened-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Um... Well, when I was almost back to a fetus, I wa- I was 14 when I decided there's no free will whatsoever. Um, as long as I was at it, it was one very tumultuous night. I also decided there's no God and there's no purpose to anything, and it's a huge empty and diff-
- CWChris Williamson
That's a rough evening for a 14-year-old.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, yeah, and I've been paying for those insights ever since. Uh, even, this was literally at two in the morning, I woke up during a rather, like, distressed week with all sorts of, like, angsty things going on. And I woke up and, like, I remember very clearly saying, "Oh, I get it. There's no God and there's no free will and there's..." And I even quickly wrote down notes, which of course were incoherent 'cause I was half asleep and I couldn't read them in the morning, but you know, I've been thinking this way forever. Um, and s- you know, that's great. That's kind of what I've gotten to.And about five years ago, I wrote this book, uh, called Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. And it's basically, why do we do what we do? And the answer is because of what happened one second ago, and one minute ago, and an hour ago, and back to childhood and fetal life and genes, and what culture your ancestors invented because that's how your mother treated you and evolution and all that, and you gotta take all of that into account. And literally, 790 pages agonizingly later, you know, this is... This is what we're about. Um, in the aftermath, I did a lot of lecturing, and like, you'd go through a 50-minute version of all of this and Q&A afterward, and inevitably, there'd be someone who would say, "Wow. You know, if all... if this is how stuff works, we, we may have less free will than we normally think." And I'd sort of say, "You think? You think?" And I realized, like, for a surprising number of people who would do something as ridiculous as go to a lecture on a weeknight or something, this was revelatory, and saying, "Okay, I thought this really obvious after, like, almost 800 pages through this download. Time to write something that says, 'Yeah, not only is there much less than we think, there's no free will whatsoever, and we gotta start functioning a little bit more as if that's the case.'" And thus I've sat, you know, collecting cobwebs for the last five years, writing a sort of, uh, the sequel to that book. It's coming out October. It's called Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. And I take what is far and away a lunatic fringe stance, which isn't saying that we have no free will whatsoever. All we are is the sum of our biology and its interactions with environment, and neither of which we had any fundamental control over, and that's who we are. Um, so I kinda figured I would, like, go try (laughs) to convince some people of that and fully expect that's gonna be, like, wildly unsuccessful, but, like, at least I don't have to try to frame my arguments in coherent paragraphs anymore.
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think the conversation about free will is so animated?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Um, because at first glance, and for the first 150 or so glances, it really sucks if we have no free will, if we are just biological machines, all of that. It really is terrible and demoralizing and frightening and all of that, and it's not by chance that what the polls show is like 90, 95% of philosophers who think about this are what you call compatibilists, which is they're willing to admit we're not made out of magic, like the world was made out of molecules and stuff like that, but somehow, somehow, somehow, this is where we still manage to have free will. And when you read between the lines, it's because half of them are saying, "Because damn, that would be depressing if... Because we get such... We are me. I'm me. And where did me come from? And part of being me is that, like, I've got some control over what I do." And this is incredibly central to our sense of well-being and mental health in lots of cases and all of that. But, like, bummer, (coughs) it doesn't work that way. And, you know, I go through, like, this agonizingly long book. The first half is, like, why do- we have no free will, and here's the brains and the genes, and, you know, all of that. Um, and the second half of the book, which took me much longer to write because I still don't really have any good answers to this, is, "Oh my God, what if people actually started believing this? How are we supposed to function if we recognize that there's no free will, that agency is a myth? Oh my God," (laughs) like, "What's the world supposed to look like?" And the second half of the book is very feeble attempts at trying to get at that, and hopefully in the process, like, de-deconstructing, uh, people's resistance to the notion that we have, uh, no free will. Um, the first thing everybody immediately freaks out over, everybody's gonna just run amok, 'cause there's no responsibility if you feel like there is none. And what a lot of science has shown is we're not gonna run amok. We may run amok for the first afternoon, we're convinced of that, and, like, interesting research has shown if you, like, unconsciously prime people to believe less in free will, they're more likely to cheat at a game 20 minutes later, stuff like that. But when you get people who have for a long time believed there's no free will, just as when you get people who for a long time have believed there is no God, they're exactly as ethical as people who believe there's abundant free will and it makes sense to hold us responsible for our actions, and just as ethical as people who believe there is a God who is watching and judging all of that. And sort of the key commonality is, if you've spent a lot of time thinking about this, w- what's the source of meaning, what's the source of human goodness, or any stuff like that, if you've spent a lot of time thinking about it, in lots of ways, it doesn't matter if your conclusion is we have free will or we don't, there is a God or there isn't, there is a God who cares, or any... If you've done the hard work of thinking about it, you're gonna wind up being much more ethical than average. So that's the fir- we're not gonna run amok. Um, but then people freak out saying that, "Still, still, there's gonna be some people that run amok, and what, you're gonna do..."... nothing about them, you're just gonna let murderers run around on the street because they- they're not responsible for their actions? And, you know, that's an asinine worry because we've got some great parallels. If- if you got a car and the brakes don't work, it's not safe, it's dangerous. You keep it off the streets 'cause it's gonna hurt people. And what you do is if you can't fix it, you stick it in a garage and the car can't be driven anymore. But that doesn't mean it deserves to be locked up, that doesn't mean it's got a crappy soul or something like that. It's a broken machine and-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. This is-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... you protect society from it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I guess there's
- 1:01:46 – 1:11:10
How Having No Conscious Agency Impacts Justice
- CWChris Williamson
sort of criminal side of this is a really interesting implication, right? Like if there's- does- does no free will mean that there's no such thing as blame, and that punishment and retribution a- and- and vengeance and stuff are always indefensible, right? I- I think a lot of the time what we see when we see bad- bad people, people that have done bad things, um, when we see them go to jail, there's something kind of righteous that we feel. We feel like-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... they were given their just desserts in some regard. Uh, and you need to use it as a, um, a tool of discouragement for other people to do it in future. It needs to be a societal signal, but we also-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
... know that it's only, like, a bit okay at that. There's many people who don't care about whether or not they get caught, many, many people-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... who almost prefer to be in jail than prefer to be outside, people who've become so habituated to their existence in there. So yeah, what does this do to a law system that needs to be able to protect us from people that are going to do bad things if we are not the conscious agents that have caused the actions that we're now being prosecuted for?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Well, sort of the- the nuanced response I have to that is the entire damn system is irrational and medieval and has to be completely abolished because it's premised on- it's premised on the notion that it is okay to punish people for things over which they had no control. And that, in passing, brings up the- the point you just made as to why this is so difficult. We like to punish. One of the most reliable releasers of dopamine in our brains is get to be righteously punishing of someone. Uh, yeah, that's gonna be an uphill battle 'cause that feels good when we think, like, "We're doing it for the right reasons." But the criminal justice system makes no sense at all, even the reformist versions of, like, you know, reconciliation ceremonies and- and, you know, compensatory actions on the part of people who have done harm to better understand their victims and their victims to better understand them. All of those are premised on, like, bleeding heart liberal versions of, "Yeah, the system could be a lot less brutal and could work better." Um, the system makes no sense at all because it is predicated on this starting notion of it's a just world in which people are punished for things they had no control over, and that's the only possible logical outcome. So this is where people freak out and, "Oh no, murderers running around on the streets." And all you have to apply is the same public health quarantine model that you do with a car whose brakes don't work. You keep it in there, but that doesn't mean, like, you dent the hood viciously every single day to make it a better car afterward. It doesn't mean that retribution-
- CWChris Williamson
What does this- what does this look like practically? Like, what- what- what does this mean-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Well-
- CWChris Williamson
... when it's not a car?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Okay. We do one version of this, like, all the time with a type of human who's dangerous. They're dangerous, and if you don't keep them, like, confined, um, in a way that they can't get access to other people, um, people are going to be harmed by them. And what is this? This is when your five-year-old has a cold and you keep him holed from kindergarten because they're gonna get the other kids sick from sneezing. And we've all- all learned that as a quarantine containment strategy, and we're all able to protect kindergartners from sneezy kids with runny noses and there's no judgment. There's no responsibility. You don't keep your kid home because they deserve not to be able to see their friends that day. You don't say, "You can't play with your toys because, you know, the way you're sneezing, don't you care about how you're gonna harm other people?" Whoa, we've managed to do that and we k- keep kindergartners safe from nose colds and society hasn't fallen apart. We've subtracted out a notion of responsibility and society not only functions, it functions better 'cause kindergartners not only don't get sick but you don't tell five-year-olds they've got, like, the evil demon in there that's making them sneeze or something.
- CWChris Williamson
What about people that would say, "Robert, that sounds an awful lot like jail to me"? That's what we do. We- we take the people that have done bad things and we put them in a quarantined building along with other people who also have the same bad things for a period of time and then we let them out.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Um, no, because it's a world of difference from quarantine. For one thing, what you do with quarantine, what your moral imperative is, is to figure out exactly what you need to do to keep people safe from this individual and not a smidgen more, not an inch more than that, because there's no reason to take away your child's toys just because they have a nose cold. You do the absolute minimum that is needed. In addition, you don't moralize about it. This is simply a containment strategy. And finally, what you do-And you get all of society to look at it that way. I mean, we've gotten to the point where, you know, a kid who's sneezing, we don't view them as a moral blight but, "Yeah, don't bring him to kindergarten tomorrow, they're gonna get my kid sick and that's gonna be a disaster." We've subtracted that out of it. We've subtracted that out of it in some even more meaningful realms. Schizophrenia, like one of the all-time horrible diseases, it usually gets you in late adolescence, early adulthood, and for decades and decades and decades, like somebody's child falls into schizophrenia and you take them to the doctor and it's the most tragic moment of your life as a parent because the doctor says, "Yes, it is that disease and we don't really know how to handle it and, you know, this is an enormous tragedy." And then as the parent you say, "How did this happen? What caused this disease?" And for about the middle half of the 20th century, the best, most compassionate psychiatrists on earth had an answer for you which is, "You caused it. You caused it by your crappy parenting." And of course it was always directed at the mother, at your, quote, "schizophrenogenic mothering," which amid sort of the Freudian bilge that fueled it, on some unconscious level, you hate your child, you hated your child and it's your fault, your fault. And I've talked to, like support groups of, like family members of people with schizophrenia and the first generation of people where they figured out, oh no, actually it's a neurogenic disorder of brain developmental abnormalities, it had nothing to do with your mothering. And these are all women in their 90s now and it is amazing to talk to them about the moment when they truly grasped, "This isn't my fault. I didn't do this." So as a society, we're able to, like take care of kids sneezing and we're able to subtract our fault of mothers when it comes to schizophrenia, things like that, and we're able to do it in a way where we're not moralizing anymore. So you contain the person, you quarantine them the absolute minimum needed and not an inch more and you do it without morality and you do the thing that, like every good public health person knows, that their job doesn't end at that point. Their job is to then figure out how did this happen in the first place? Why do certain sort of inner city neighborhoods produce criminals? Why is it that people who live in poverty die of, like diseases of aging when they're 50 years old? Wha- go do something about root causes and it's the same exact, like moral imperal- imperative public health people, like dig wells so people can get clean water, do things so that people don't grow up thinking that it's an infinitely scary world and you have to watch your back all the time and in fact here's a good weapon to use when you want to accomplish that. Like put those pieces together and yeah, it's obviously an utterly transformed world, but that's exactly what we're doing with kids who sneeze. Okay, let's make sure the next time I take my five year old to soccer practice that they, like put their, like warm jacket on afterward so they don't get sick, and if they do, it's not their fault, they're not evil, and make sure they don't get anybody else sick at preschool, but, like don't punish them beyond that. And whoa, we could run the world that way and we could run the world that way with schizophrenia now and we need to move to the point where we're running it that way though with a whole bunch of other stuff because it's the exact same profile and the exact same ways in which we make all sorts of peoples lives miserable for no reason and like we've done it before, so yay, let's go do it again.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay, so after we've shit
- 1:11:10 – 1:32:43
The Myth of the Self-Made Man
- CWChris Williamson
on the righteous retribution that people want for criminals, uh, and people that have done bad things from a great height, another pillar that people are very, very attached to, me included, is meritocracy. It's-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... people being able to be the architects of their own successes and I had Sam Harris on the show about three months ago and this was one of the things that we didn't get to talk about but I kind of wish that I'd brought it up to him, and he talked about the myth of the self-made man. And he said, "The myth of the self-made man does so much heavy lifting right of center. It allows people to feel like they are the architects of their own successes." And Alain de Botton from The School of Life gave me this beautiful framing years ago on this great video he did where he said, um, "In ancient Greece, the beggars on the streets, the word that was used to describe them was unfortunates. That Lady Fortuna, the goddess that has the, the scales, that she hadn't blessed them." And that's changed now into the modern world, the nomenclature that we use is a loser, right? A loser is the person that hasn't been able to get themselves up an- and sort their life out. It's been taken from something that was almost bestowed on you by a- a- an outside ethereal force to now something that was completely within your volition and, and totally under your control as a sovereign agent in the world and the implication is if the losers are the architects of their losses, then the winners are the architects of their successes. And this myth of the self-made man, all of the rest of it, I've made a lot of changes to the way that I exist and the things that I do and the texture of my mind and I've made a lot of changes over the last six years and it does sound, to me, quite disempowering and quite disquieting to hear...I didn't choose to do any of that. All of the effort that I thought that I deployed wasn't mine to choose. My capacity to have that effort wasn't mine to choose. My des- d- desire to, and choice to put my foot on the pedal of whatever that effort is wasn't mine to choose. And the executive function to piece it all together into a structured, ordered organizational framework to do it also wasn't mine to choose or to deploy. It makes for quite a sad world as someone that wants to try and become something.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
It sure does, which is why this is totally depressing. And yet-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... uh, this is actually a good thing. I mean, for starters, everything I just said about the criminal justice system, just, like, say opposite words in the same sentences and it applies exactly the same to meritocracy. It is just as irrational and just as in need of being, like, junked altogether, because, like, the other side of this being, like, a horrible unjust world is that we reward people for things they had no control over. And they come out feeling entitled and feeling like they've earned it, and so that's gotta go also. Okay, so what's the equivalent panic to, oh great, so you're just gonna have, like, murderers running around on the streets, saying, "Oh great, you're just gonna have, like, a randomly selected person taking out your brain tumor."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
No. Like, y- you gotta have, like, skilled people be neurosurgeons, and some people can gain those skills and other people not. And, like, you- you need to have competent people doing stuff. And just as, like, you keep dangerous people from hurting people, um, you keep incompetent people from hurting people as well. And, like, your neurosurgeons will still have to go through a lot of training and all of that. Um, but-
- CWChris Williamson
But that means the incentives need to be there, right? You have to-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... have the incentives in order to be able to justify them going through all of the training and doing the hard things.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. And what we went through was, like, the usual incentives for punishment have to be subtracted out because incentives are built around, "You're a rotten person and you could be cured. Go talk to the chaplain," or whatever. And the same thing in the case of the, like, brain surgeon flipped the other way. Um, like, the only logical conclusion is thank God they're capable of doing this, but they're not a better human because they can do this. They don't h- they're not entitled to have their needs and life considered more than anyone else's. So where do incentives come from, you know, major, like, oh my god, this, like, almost Buddhist crap this guy's going on about right now. We're motivated by the desire to attain prestige and power and respect and entitlement and all of that. And in the case of, like, how they were talking about those poor unfortunates not blessed by lady luck back there, um, what we have to take pleasure from is we were one of the lucky ones, to feel gratitude for that. That has to be a source of, like, "Okay, cool. Turns out it looks like I'm one of those people who has the potential to, like, be able to go-
- CWChris Williamson
Why should you-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
... save a lot of lives."
- CWChris Williamson
To interject there, why should you feel gratitude for something that you had no choice in it happening?
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Um, because you lucked out. You- you- you're not living on the streets. You lucked out.
- CWChris Williamson
I guess I've go- I've- I've- I've got the balance sheet in my mind of the degree of pleasure that people have from feeling like they authored their own successes compared with the degree of pleasure that they have from feeling like they just rolled a double six.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. This is asinine. This is, like, utopian bo- beyond words. But, like, somewhere in there we recognize that, like, there's a certain amount of irrational attribution of- of acclaiming someone when they turn out to be seven foot four inches tall and they're amazing in the NBA. Okay, that kinda, you know, that may begin to explain why they're in the NBA and I'm not, kind of thing. Oh yeah, that one we've gotten to the point in society that that one has something to do with versions of, like, your growth hormone receptors, and that was not a moral, like, triumph to grow tall enough to play in the NBA. We can kinda deal with that and, you know, society hasn't fallen apart. We can subtract out praise for somebody growing to be that height and the world doesn't collapse, and it's a much more accurate assessment. But what we're getting at here is, like, this enormous false dichotomy we do in our heads which is, like, most people don't believe in infinite free will, and they say, "Yeah, there's stuff we have no control over." Like, not everyone gets to be seven foot four. Not everybody gets to have perfect pitch. Not everybody gets to have the right glutamate receptor makeup so that they've got an amazing memory, and y- you know, there's luck. There's the biological attributes that we get gifted with or cursed with, and there's, that stuff, yeah, we had no control over. But oh, what we do with those attributes. Do we strive? Do we show tenacity and gumption? Do we, like, when the going gets tough, do we get going or do we- we squander our gifts, do we indulge ourselves and miss opportunity? That's the measure of who we are. That's this, like, totally false dichotomy that-... our attributes are made of biology and, like, what we do with it is made of fairy dust, whether-- like, that tests our souls. And, like, that's, like, the most seductive thing po- like, how could you not be, like, I don't know, these, these seven-footers playing in the NBA, and, like, a while back, there was this guy Muggsy Bogues who was five foot three inches tall, and he played in the NBA because he was, like, amazing and how could you not be inspired by that? And the one out of gazillion kids born into poverty who somehow are now the CEO of something and, like, you know, they're so damn inspiring and looking at the squandering is, like, so pleasurably appalling to watch. Um, I saw in Forbes Magazine last year, 70% of wealthy families have lost their fortunes by the second generation 'cause they just squander it and, oh my God, who could resist that id- Yeah, that's the arena in which we are convinced that, like, God and Satan are arm wrestling what you do with what you're handed out of your... And, like, if you show self-discipline or not, if you have admirable impulse control at a highly stressful moment or if you fail dismally, if you any of those things, it's made of the exact same stuff as your memory span and whether you're a good sprinter or not because of the muscle makeup of your thighs and whether... It's the same biology. It's, in my opinion, a much more interesting biology and it's got lots to do with that part of the brain, the frontal cortex, but it's the same stuff and not only if you are, like, horribly abused and grow up under, like, nightmarish adversity, not only is your brain gonna develop in a way that you probably are not gonna have a great digit span, among the other consequences. You're gonna have terrible self-control on the average because your frontal cortex didn't p- develop properly and everyone looking at you will have this great Calvinist sort of notion to apply to you, has no self-discipline, can never make themselves do the, at every juncture they do the wrong thing, they do the self-indulgent thing, and it's made of the same stuff. But yeah, again, there is kind of this problem that, like I- I see this all the time, you talk to a bunch of people who have come out to hear a lecture about the brain and that sort of thing and yeah, yeah, they all gulp if you've convinced them in the slightest that free will is a, is a pretty suspect concept. They all gulp and say, "Okay, well, we're gonna have a whole different view about punishment, oh, I mean containing dangerous people," and, "Christ, before it's over with, we're gonna have to be like the Scandinavians and whoa, this is gonna be hard and I got a lot of visceral stuff I'm gonna have to overcome there, but if you wanna really know what I'm gonna have a hard time with, it's, 'Oh, did I not deserve my good salary? Did I not earn my college degree because I was one of the ones who always skipped the parties and went and studied to die'" That's where people really begin to panic because that's gonna be the much harder one. This philosopher Daniel Dennett who's like a leading compatibilist and he's very influential and he's, like, a charming speaker and writer and he's, he's medieval in how he thinks about free will and entitlement and all of that, and, like, this quote of his that winds up in all of his YouTube talks and interviews and stuff where he's going on about how like, you know, we need to hold onto the concept of free will regardless of whether it's true or not, "I happen to think it's true," he says, "and here are my completely unsupportable scientific opinions about it, but nonetheless, because we don't want murderers and rapists running around all over the place and I... And what's gonna happen if we don't feel a sense of accomplishment in our prizes?" Whoa, that's what he's actually worried about. You know, fuck it, with the murderers running around, what's gonna happen if I can't feel as if I earned my pri- this is a verbatim quote, "if we can't feel a sense of accomplishment for the prizes we've earned." Yeah, ooh, now we know what the problem really is for all of those people with tenured chairs in philosophy or whatever. Like, that's where the panic comes in. And what I spent, like, the five years writing this book thinking I was gonna wind up with is, like, the most unpalatable punchline on earth which is, like, "Tough, this is how the world works, you really didn't earn those things. It's all chance, it's biological luck, it's environmental luck, so, like, you know, suck it up and be an adult with this." Wow, that's gonna be really a fun message to go out and try to sell people. But then you realize this is actually fabulous news, the lack of free will is incredibly liberating because it, one, when it comes to this being a world where we reward and punish people for things that they were not responsibly for, most of the time we're punishing people. Most of the time we're telling people who had the crappy luck in life to be born in a village in the Sahel where there's no clean water or had the crappy luck to be born into the wrong poor family or had the crappy luck to not be beautiful and thus for their whole life they have less of a chance to be loved or the crappy luck to have genes that make them destined for obesity or any... For most people on this planet, the news that you are not responsible for how it turned out is the most humane damn thing you can tell anyone, and there's this gigantic self-selection problem which is the people who are gonna come and listen to some, like, nutty lecture are exactly the people who are gonna be saying, "Oh my God, maybe I didn't earn my college degree." The people for whom this is like the liberating message-... they're sitting there wondering how they're gonna pay the rent at the end of the week. But for most-
- CWChris Williamson
They have no idea who Robert Sapolsky or determinism is.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
And like, frontal cortex, uh, because they're- they're working three jobs, and that g- for most people on this planet, the news that all we are are end products of all the things we had no control over beforehand is the most humane possible news you can get, and a world that adjusts to thinking that way. You know, it's a very good thing that we decided not to take old women with no teeth who live off by themselves on the edge of the hamlet and decide it's their fault that there was an earthquake and burn them at the stake. It's a more humane planet that we learned something about witches and the biological reality that... Every one of these things is gonna make for a more humane planet, and as soon as we figured those things out, the world got better for the majority of people. So this is actually a good thing. Like bummer if you were left with this existential void and on top of that like your business school degree is a little bit less source of a sense of entitlement in you, but for most people on this planet, like a justice system that is the backbone of everything that we do, which says that reward and punishment is just because it's being meted out to people who we incorrectly believe earned it, all that could do is make the world better. So (laughs) like this is a good thing. I sure can't really think that way most of the time, 'cause most of the time I'm saying, "Oh my God, but what about the fact that like I have a job? They pay me. I've got like a good salary, all of that. Whoa. I sure worked hard for..." You know, nobody is saying this is gonna be easy, but all that happens at every step when we subtract responsibility out of our perception of where human behavior comes from, it becomes a nicer planet.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it seems to me that taking the free will red pill-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... is something that hurts people who have much to be proud of, but benefits people who currently have much to be kind of despondent about. Um, it- it's like a- a flattening way to the ultimate egalitarian, uh, philosophy, right? It's as flat as flat gets.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, because if you do the impossible and really, really think this way all the time, and I sure as hell can't, but the only logical conclusion from this is none of us are entitled to anything more than any other human on Earth. There's no person out there whose needs are entitled to less consideration than yours.
- CWChris Williamson
So I- I- I understand that, but from a practical consideration, you know, if we're talking about the importance of incentives in order to be able to get people who have the predisposition or the capacity to be able to deploy that in the right way, presumably we can't just red pill free will into all of the potential budding brain surgeons out there so that they know even though I only get paid the same as the guy who has bottom of the barrel conscientiousness and just smokes weed and does Xbox all day, because he didn't choose that and I didn't choose this, it should be my duty to ignore the lack of incentive in this new world w- of UBI or something, like free will-based universal basic income. I- I'm n- guessing that that's not your proposal-
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... for, uh, like a society structure.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Well, g- good luck with that. Yeah, that's not gonna be easy. On the other hand, we've got a world where from very early on in life we're training kids with cultural myths that are exactly the opposite. Um, I don't know, if we put a lot of work into teaching people to just recognize the sheer utter chance that they wound up being who they are, and if you had the good luck, uh, you know, some gratitude would be a good thing. Okay, okay, my Christ, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna bring Joan Baez in here in a moment on like her walker or something to talk about the utopian like... Yeah, but we do it in little bits and pieces. Um, you know, (laughs) like there's- there's like Hallmark cards you can get and give to somebody that says w- what say, "Thank you for being you." Like, oh come on, "Thank you for you having been the lucky one to have turned out the way you are and happening to, like, be my spouse," or yeah, it's gonna be really hard, and I can function this way less than 1% of the time, and I constantly show that like amid believing this stuff I'm a total hypocrite because I can't really act on it emotionally the vast majority, but every now and then when it really, really, really matters, like think about it when you're trying to make sense of why it seems okay that this person gets less concern than people like you do.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
Or try to think that way every now and then when you're about to be like pissed off at somebody, or self-righteous, or whatever, or really, really think like you should be able to be in the front of the line, because after all... Um, I don't know, it's interesting, you know, being a professor at Stanford where the students are great, they're all smart, and they're great kids, and they're like-They, like, uniformly worry about the world and, uh, they're wonderful. And a huge disproportionate percentage of them came from ridiculous material and/or, and/or intellectual privilege, and most of them spent a lot of time trying to wrestle with this because they realize, you know, it's not by chance they wound up there. And it was just... And that's, you know, when you dig beneath the surface of those kids who were, like, going off to help run a free clinic in Nepal or whatever, it's not just to get into med school, it's th- on some level, they realize where they're at. And like, go look at a bunch of people in the prison a mile away from Palo Alto and the fact that way are, they are way disproportionately likely to be, uh, to not have parents who read books to them or, like, lived in a neighborhood where you could walk home at the end of the day and feel safe and, you know, that whole song and dance. And yeah, it's not gonna be easy but, like, at least do it at some juncture where you're feeling like you should be able to get to the front of the line and remember you didn't earn it.
- 1:32:43 – 1:40:22
How to Acknowledge Your Lack of Agency & Not Feel Depressed
- CWChris Williamson
a 40-minute clip, the original 40-minute clip of Sam telling Joe Rogan this on his podcast. I think it was maybe eight years ago when it came out, and I think about five years ago, I sent it. I used to work in nightclubs. It was funny that you mentioned earlier on about, about clubbing.
- RSDr Robert Sapolsky
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Um, I gave it to... I, I, uh, listened to it and explained it on the night at one of our events. I explained it to the manager of one of the venues and he was, like, interested in, in philosophy and stuff. Luke, Irish dude, f- fascinating guy. And, uh, he was like, "Oh, I'd love, I'd love to learn a little bit more about that." So I sent him it and he was spiraled into a deep depression for two weeks because I'd sent him this 40-minute video.
Episode duration: 1:41:38
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