#693 - Dr Robert Sapolsky - The Shocking New Science Of How To Manage Your Stress
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Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My yesterday is doctor Robert ski. He's a professor at stanford university, a world leading researcher and an author. Stress is an inevitable part of human life.

But what is stress actually doing to the human body when that happens for such a prolonged period of time? And what does the sign say are the best interventions to defeat? Expect to learn the crucial difference between short term and long term stress, how stress actually impact the human system, the neuro developmental consequences of stress and poverty.

How to do, train your dopamine sensitivity, what everyone doesn't stand about, how homo's work, whether believing in free will is a useful worldview, why there is a relationship between belief in free will and obesity, and much more, if you don't know, doctor oppose you. He is a complete legend in the field of evolutionary biology and research in general. And this conversation goes absolutely everywhere.

So yeah, so much to take away from this. And he's really fun. I love is set of light, playful side of jokey approach to pretty serious academic topics. He's great. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome doctor Robert suppose.

What do you wish more people knew about how stress impacts the human .

body um that while its worth paying attention to the fact that that does crimm things to your heart and blood pressure and blood and everything else uh for me most meaningful thing as 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 perspective IT narrows your tunnel of concerns. And I think what we see is in a world full of stress, people were premier to each other on the average.

Why does stress cause that reduction in empathy?

All sorts of interesting stuff, various places in the brain. But in one region, we think we, colleagues and I and lots of other people in the field think we've gotten a sense of the brain region as relevant, something called the anterior singular cortex.

And if you want to summarize ze that this is the part of the brain where you feel someone else is pain, sit someone down sticker in a brain scanner, poke their finger with a pin, and like all sorts of ouch, part of the brain activate, and as part of that, this part of the brain material singular IT also activate, and is got a lot to do with interpreting what the pain, the instead sort of thing like you pok somebody with a pin, uh, after you've told him they've just had this very powerful anesthetic cream smear their finger when in actuality it's like cream cheese or something and they don't feel the pain the part of their brain that are saying, ouch, that was in my finger are still going on but ontario singular IT was gone silent because you have fAllen for a placebo effect. It's it's about the interpretation of the pain rather than the not symbols features of IT. So now stick the person in the brain scatter and don't pok their finger with the pen.

Make up, watch their loved one as their finger poked and the panel meter brain regions have nothing to say because like nobody y's doing anything to your fingertip. But the interior singular activites and neurons there on this very like simplistic level can tell the difference within europe in and someone else is pain. Um big, amazing through the footnote there.

Uh typically people suffer from major depression. This part of the brain is overactive, is just pain twenty four, seven, wherever you look 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 an 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 let's do the stuff that we're way out here 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 freshman volunteers, which will block the effects of the stress hormone. And when you throw that in, there are they maintain their empathy despite being stressed.

They maintain all sort 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 I commit stress, doing terrible things to your memory and your execute of function and judgment and all sort.

This increasingly strikes me as this. This is the outpost. That's really interesting.

One of the things that continues to come up in your work on stress is this um it's almost like an agent's view of what's happening to you. It's how much agency do you have? Is this kind of being imposed on me or if I selected that this is going to happen? What is the role of agency under volition when IT comes to stress on how we interpret .

IT well, IT falls under the rubrics of how I think everything in the universe works which is like there's no agency at all. There is no free will. Um in recent years i've stopped spending most of my time fixing around with wonder on at a time and so keen and stress hormones and getting much more interested in larger issues of biology, who we are and how we got here and our best moments and our worst moments and everything and bigger sly and between and when you spend enough time like obsessing over biology and how to 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 yh so this is this is my current song and dance, trying to convince the world, world that this is how things work.

Well, if we want to increase the stress in everybody, at least for a short term, perhaps, that that is a nice little teeth, what we can get on to talk to me, because obviously, short term stress is useful. Long term stress not useful. Is there a line, is I not supposed to be stressed after eight hours and thirty five minutes, where when the short term stress start to become bad?

Well, IT depends on who you are and your place in society, and what culture and ones were at IT, what species you are, and sort of the the the central concept. Stress is like you get stuck in a traffic jam. Your stress, you this with this hormone, you turn off the other one. Your, your blood pressures is whatever.

And the amazing thing is, if you went back a hundred million years and some, like tpy, a 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 other primates and mammals and fish and birds and rip tiles, and it's credibly conserved stuff. And what has been doing for like hundred, fifty million years or so is saving your life when you are facing a short term physical crisis.

Somebody y's very intent on eating you. You are very intent on eating somebody else because you're star. And everything that IT does is get your body for dealing with the next three minutes of crisis, your mobilizing energy from storage sites to deliver to the muscles that are saving your neck.

You're increasing heart red blood pressure. You're turning off everything on essential in your body in the hopes that there is a latter. You'll take care of bit later. Growth, tissue repair, immune surveilling, reproduction, all of that all built around like trios. Everything is not essential to the next three minutes.

And then you get us smart prime mates as humans who can anticipate our deaths, or some, like a low ranking babboon who spends entire life not being chased by liars, but being hassled by higher ranking guys. And what you ve invented is this, like totally corrosive diaster and chronic psychosocial stress. And you see this very simple outcome.

You go sprinting for your life in 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 anxious or whatever, and you're doing the same thing with your cardy rescue or system and you're going to a blow IT apart because the system didn't evolve for being turned on chronically. And for most bests, 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 prime ads are smart enough to get sick from psychological stress .

yeah the idea the concept of being smart enough to get sick from psychological stress is is an odd set of twisting of the words, but I suppose is very true, right? Because if we didn't have this unbelievable abstraction ability to be able to concentrate, am I really speaking my truth forward? Is this my highest state utilization? Maybe that cookie that I ate yesterday really does say everything about me that i've always thought that I was ruminating about. That weird thing you said to a teacher fifteen years ago, whatever you might be, you're fascinating 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 are not there. So even if we're not being chased by said dinosaur 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 .

physios logical effect, 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 against 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 the stressed response because, oh no, watch out, the bad guys are coming up behind you or your heartbroken, you know, at the end of an 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 bonga deserts and youtube, the exact same thing. We're taking this hundred fifty million year old circuitry, and we can abstract IT over space and time, like nothing that ever walk this planet before.

right? With this perspective, the kind of track please share of people saying humans are not meant to consume the entire world's catastrophies twenty four 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.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, to show how similar things are and then how different you take. A female baboon, this with some great research done some years ago as colleagues, and he has an infant, and the infant is there is a high infant mortality ality rate, and they could show up to a months later.

Not only is this female more socially withdrawn, doing less groom or SHE has elevated stress for model SHE is morning for a month afterworld 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.

We, wow, we can take this very primate thing. My child has died, and we're fall feeling upset about an animated cartoon character. We're feel we could just extend in ways that unrecognizable to other species.

I learned from you that a third trimeter fetuses brain development is impacted .

by the mother's socioeconomic status. You are born, and you are already screw by having picked the wrong wob. Take that from .

the top for me. Take that from the absolute top OK.

Well, you know, people used to realize poverty, social instability, being a profiles ed out group. The wrong. Ethnicity, the wrong race, the wrong at all, 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 here, chroma somes are aging at an accelerated rate compared to everybody else, because stress hormones mess up the entries that keep your chromosome ones Young. And like, wow, like the cho zones in your cells are falling apart faster. So wo no surprise, no surprise. When you look at like health, social economics status is such organic predict. And I assuming correctly, you're in the U K.

Austin, texas, but I was in e tape very long time. I mean I mean a lot over here.

Okay well no wonder you've got that text and accent. Um you know the classic White hall studies of civil servants in britain and stuff here, social economic rank has an enormous impact on your body and is got nothing to do with getting health care access. It's got very little to do with the fact that like you can't afford your health club memberships IT stress, the psychosocial effects electronically having no control, no predictive ly all.

And then they figured out that, like the social economic status y hear family when you were a kid is predictive of all sorts of unhealthy stuff when you're sixty years old. And then, among other things, uh, people got brain imaging techniques cool enough that they could now bring image fees and see how it's doing. And back came the finding that already as a feed is your mother's social economics status, uh, has an impact on your brain growth.

How does that happen? Very simple. If you're poor and if you're a chronically ally, psychotic, socially stressed for any of gaia and other reasons, you've got elevated levels of these stress hormones in your bloodstream and they get through the placenta and they get tear fears and have all sorts of effects while the fetus body is learning what kind of world IT is out there.

Wow, it's a scary one, is an unpredictable one. These stress hormones having all sorts of affects, and how you are constructing every outpost, including your brain and IT. Turns out some of the fanciest parts of your brain, your frontal cortex, such a, are very sensitive to distress hormones, and their maturation is imported by them.

Yeah, what are the outcomes? What what the sort of outcomes that you see from a mother? There is low social economic 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?

Well, this one isn't well understudied, because these are the first studies coming out. This is official league, cutting a cutting edge neural machine techniques. But we already know a ton, just a few years later. Get a kid by the time there are five years old going into the kindergarten. And on the average, their family social economic status is already a predict of this kid's resting stress hormones.

How screw is that? And on the average is already predictive of the maturation of the frontal cortex in this kid, how thick this cortical region is, what its meta lic way is like, and one wanders. 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 and emotional regulation.

I don't know a lot a lot of people will be familiar with like the sam marshmallow test with like five year old kids and oh my god, that's amazing. You've got a five old who can hold out for the second marshmallow and there they're on IT within seconds and all of that. And this is predictive decades, decades later, of these kids cumulative earnings over their lifetime, their adult social economic status.

There patterns, meta lic diseases, cardio askt wo already at age fog. The the via die is not cast unchangeably, but is already leaning in a fairly significant direction by age five, that's already a predict of what things you're going to look like as an adult and launch of these important roles. And by age five, if you once again pick the wrong family would be born into and you're already marinating in chronic psychosocial stress because know what your family's poverty by each five, you already have that profile, that predictive of, you know that outcome that is on the less desirable side long afterward.

Absolutely insane. It's I had a robot, paloma, on the show. Um i've spent a good bit of time learning about behavioral genetics over the last couple of years. And what i'm really fascinated .

about is .

this odd intersection between nature and nurture. The fact that you are your parents are pretty exposed 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 a pretty exposed to be a little bit more anxious. okay. So perhaps you have got a previous position to be a little bit more anxious.

But then what's the environment in did you grow up in, right? You already have this sort of product a downstream from that mothers that say overbearing ly, you can go out without your coat on and make sure that you ring me before this. What's the subtext that you're being taught that 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 pretty position. It's this fascinating intersection and the interplay between the two that I think is is really interesting in behavioral.

credibly important one and behavioral change edict as kind of, uh, I don't mean this too pejoratively, but grown up to the extent of realizing when IT comes to behavior, genes are very, very, very rarely determined. There are about vulnerabilities. There are about potential there about, you know, skating on the edge of something.

And IT depends on what environment you wind up in, whether you are pushed over the edge. IT depends if you have the right and nurtured and things that you've got the genetic potential all set to take advantage of. IT after while is irrelevant to ask what is this gene to, but only to ask what 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, not in biological in a quarter century.

There's this gene. It's got something to do with serious in this new transmitter in the brain. Everybody knows serotonin has something to do.

The depression as there is like process work on a um so it's a gene that comes in a few different flavors and all sorts of animal studies suggested you wind up with this flavor and you are much more risk for depression um and that made perfect sense and wow that is that you know suggests also genetic impact on depression and such legal look at some humans and this amazing study following like thousands of people from childhood up in two like early adult where you've got your che omes and you're saying, well, just having like the scary vulnerable version of this gene increase your risk for having a history of depression by the time you're twenty five 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, is the genetics of being more vulnerable to depression when is coupled with huge amounts of stress early in life. And this turns out to be the theme with like every everything implicated with genes and behavior IT depends on the environment that you're in. And what do you know IT turns out also to these genetic risk profiles uh, when it's coupled with a stressful environment and abusive one, neglectful one, what that's the circumstances in which they suddenly are adverse.

Yeah it's interesting to think about um let's say you had some child that was nineteen ninety percent, I conscientiousness you full standard deviation hye r 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 in that and that sort of drive. Perhaps they're born into somewhere that doesn't even have A A formal education system.

You think, okay, well, what what ability do they have to be able to capitalize on this? And again, another fascinating thing is we moved recently only in the last one hundred, one hundred and fifty years from a Brown base to a brain based economy, which is meant that people who had a competitive advantage only two centuries ago, if that same disposition was born now totally different. And what you going to do with your ability to dig eight hours a day without getting back pain? I get back pain, right? I'm not going to be.

I'm not going be good. I'm not going to be good on on the dig. What do people get wrong? So what you've said, the sounds tenuously close to what people who don't understand epigenetics on the internet say, is epigenetics.

That sounds to me like the sort of epi genetics 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 epi genetics related to?

And well, actually, that's like epigenetics. I can't give a bunch accurate description of than that uh you got your genes DNA sequence long strings of them specifying proteins that you make um and IT turns out like ninety five percent 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 party, your body, but not in that part and so on. Um and IT turns out very little of environment changes your actual D N A sequences. And the stuff that does is like bad stuff, like radiation, things like not just thinking about good.

Yes, for example, all all those three headed dogs running around there with the with the russian troops. Um but what environment, what experience is messes with the on off switches. And epigenetics is the fancy term for the fact that experience doesn't change your genes, but IT changes the regulation of them, often, really for a long time, often life elong, often through some incredibly cool mechanisms.

Multi generation ally, this is how like your atis and you're being soaked in long of stress hormones. And what are they doing? They're causing epigenetic effects on on off switches in the brain that unless you intervene, predation like majority later on, you're going to be a lifelong.

This is exactly MC. Epigenetics is just the fancy term for way to second stuff that happens to you is going to make a difference fifty years later is going to make a difference in your disease risks. Your diet early in life has epigenetic effects on how good your panky is reacting to glucose in your bloodstream when you're eighty.

So epigenetics is just the trendy term for saying. The interesting stuff about genes is much less the genes themselves than their regulation. And what environment does change the regulation? Your genes?

That's fascinating. Maybe the people on twitter were right all along. So IT sounds me like you're thing, bad stuff. Not only leave Scott issue for you and not just for you now, but you in the future and then also potentially your kids as well presumably yeah .

through mechanisms. While you've already mentioned one mechanism, which is like the regulation that happened here, genes and the brain you got right now is an adult is going to influence how you, how you raise your child. And you know what, what parents spent an awful lot is time doing is trying to figure out ways to make their kids just like them when they grow to have the same cultural values, to have the same neuroses.

Because those, those seem like neos is they seem like the only sensible way to go about handling the world. All of that. So there is multi generational transmission through parenting style, through culture, all of that.

But multi generation epigenetic stuff also arises from unvarying cool mechanisms, okay, for example, so you are that fears and mom is dressed 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.

One party, your brain, called the amygdala, the magdala, is about fear, anxiety, all of that. And what is a lot of stress early in life, including during fetal life, thanks to his hormones, do IT makes your micky's a grow bigger than Normal? You wind up having as an adult on the average and a Michelle that's in large, that's hyperactive, that's historical, that sees menus 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 gotto that's that's like when therapy works. But if you haven't had that good fortune, now you're an adult with you're in large to make a lot and you get pregnant.

And because the big a mcdowell a use secret elevated levels of stress hormones, because that's and thus your fetus m mitler will be bigger than expected. And thus when they are in adult and you have these multi generation 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 are not damming a hundred generations of the sentence, and like you could intervene in very little in us is set in stone. But all things being equal, this is even a way to pass the stuff onto the generations beyond you.

While you you mentioned interventions that we are based in stresses. I don't know how full Andrew huberman mode you have gone in your work to look at imitating or mitigating this. Has there been anything that or what is the thirteen thousand foot view of how to think about strategies that are good at reducing stress? What what is the like way to conceptualize IT?

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 you spend decades like living in a laboratory thinking about this?

Research is research. Research is research.

Yes, sublimate IT all into those test tube, those statistic tests. Um so I happen to be loud at IT. So anything I have to say here take the grain of salt, but what the real expert show is, you know what? What is stressed about, not when you're being chased by a dinosaurs, when you're being psychologically stressed, and what does that? That makes psychological stress stressful.

It's for the same external reality, for the same external unpleasant ta. Y, if you feel like you have no control, if you feel like you're getting no predictive information about when is you could have come on, how long as you could at last, and how bad is is going to when you have no outlets for the frustration caused by the stressed, when you interpret things as meaning things, you're getting worse rather than Better. And when you ve got no social support, incredibly like illegant powerful studies showing stuff like with a lab bread or with a college student, you given shocks every now and then, they get a stressed response, and you give him a little warning light ten seconds before each shock.

They don't get as much of the stressed response. You've given them predictive information. Let them press the level repeatedly where they think that by pressing deliver decreases the likelihood of a shock.

The lover is doing nothing. It's a placebo, is disconnected yet merely by feeling like you have some sensor control. Just imagine how worse that would have been if I we're not the captain of my ship.

You buffer against so hugely important psychological variables 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 because rather than something they are saying, oh, what a magnificent life I have where I know when my stresses coming and now I can prepare for my coking strack you sit in there for whole minister wow. So it's not just have more predictive information, have more of a sense of control. You don't want to 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 have been.

And too bad I was the control of that time. And some of the most two main stuff we do is trying to minimize somebody sent to control in the face of nobody could have stopped the car the way that child started out IT wouldn't make a difference if you had gotten them to the doctor earlier. There's nothing that you couldn't have done anything. A sense. C control only works for mild to moderate stressors for big disasters.

Ones help that person to see the themselves like crazy because that's where the so it's not just you know get as much and cruel and is much predictability and as much social support as possible because like often we mistake like superficial acquaintance ships for actual social support and like IT sucks when the carpet gets pulled out from under your feet that IT turns out that clubs is not the way in which you meet people who will keep you through the moments of crisis in your life. Um you know now arrange for all the stuff works, sound bites and once again the train 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 is something you ve got to 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 OPPO or whatever IT, is that 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 noted this, I got to get this done.

I got to get that on all these precious if you were willing to say no to that stuff enough if you were willing to consider you're well being to be important enough that you stop everything for twenty minutes of day of like, you know, messing with rubik cubes. That hardly matters what you're doing your ninety percent of the way they are already because you have said this is serious enough in my world being a series enough that i'm going to say no to all these things. I can't say no too. So like that works great. Um next thing is make sure it's a stress management technique that like you actually enjoy doing like because if IT .

is be getting stressed by doing your stress management .

technique exactly like you know meditation, there's a gazan study showing that is also to be beneficial effects because my makeup, if I spent twenty minutes a day meditating, I would have a stroke by this weekend, is 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 that works for you. Read the fine print um and if he doesn't, like that's not just reduction.

That's exactly opposite. I would say the last caviar that comes with that is if you've run to somebody who says IT has been scientifically proven that their special brand of stress man IT works Better than the other ones you gotto do IT almost every day. And it's got to be something that actually works for you rather than working for whichever celebrity didn't. They are like exercise routine is talking about on online and like don't trust someone who says there is a special because they all heard roughly doing the same thing .

talking about on the other side of this, moving out of stressing into good stuff. Have you ever thought about how people can help themselves habituate to the good things and the good changes that happen in life more slowly?

Yeah something i've been remitted on a lot as of late because, you know it's another one of those where weird species and that allows us to do some cool stuff. But wo does that have some like bills that come afterward in terms of no free lunch? okay.

So you're babboon like, what's the source of fun in your life? Your 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 repeat or of what country is 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 twenty years and like the world is a wonderful place, or like a piece of music, or like quad group organ zs, 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 beasts out there. And once again, the 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 in anticipation and motivation as every like prime mate out there.

And a lot of IT revolves around the neuro transmitter, dopamine. And dopamine is totally cool and its reward, but essentially more about anticipation than reward. And if you're a baboon, dop mean, is all about, wow, this, like gaza I just killed, is going to be fantastic.

This is going to taste great. And then we do stuff like, we released the same door transmitter thinking about, wow, this is gonna be such a great planet from 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 newer transmitters to do this.

What that means is this is a system that has to we set really quickly because it's gotto know OK. Okay, we just stop doing winning the lottery. Now we're doing the smell of flowers, so like going from zero to ten, okay? We've we adjust if this is what zero attend now means this is like the first nice smell of the season rather than, oh, you've just cured world hunger, whatever.

A it's got a reset quickly and there's some cool hits coming up by now as to what unique about the human like reward anticipation system where it's got fancy or regulation so you could send more negative feedback signals saying, okay, we're switching from flowers to orgasms now whatever, where it's got very fancy car. So that's totally great. That allows us to do stuff and theirs like the bill that comes, which accounts for an incredibly, the incredible percentages like human, this ease and despair and dissatisfaction, which is if this system reset so quickly, by definition, whatever was like a fantastic surprise and wonderful yesterday is going to 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 he is great is never good to be enough very quickly. And like, okay, that's why we go to moon, and that's why we, like, do incredible motivated things. And we innovated and we always want the next new thing and novell ting all.

But it's also why was like damn few, tragically few exceptions, we habituated great stuff and IT never tastes 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 sending tens of thousands of patterns for new things every year, um the downside is what was wonderful. Stop seeming wonderful pretty quickly. We habituate like mad and like that that that are like basic predicament. IT stops, feeling is good and we get hungry again.

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 hidden ic adaptation?

Um oh sure. You you have to be a hell of a lot more mature than I am, for example. And you know a far more, you know all the stuff like go through these like cognitive exercises of think about somebody else less lucky than you or try to really file away that feeling of like glorious surprise and like this is grain and this is like a wonderful, loving, caring world and i'm OK and it's good to be OK and the next day when you're feeling like, yeah but what about OK really pay attention to the via of that moment to have a prayer of recalling some of that. Think about other people.

Think about like how greater would be to evoke the same feelings into somebody else wow you know vicariously doing that is a great way of resetting pressures that we've habituated to. Um and you know every every parent has this at various points where they say, wow, my kitch just got to experience this for the first time. I was amazing when I did that.

You know, what is also a means of doing that? And of course, you gotta have your your act together to a greater extent than most of us really need to. But like these are, these are all the ways in which you try to keep the colors from fading too quickly.

You hit on one of the hot topics of the internet, dopamine, obviously, dopamine nation. The fact that people are certain that have been driven by IT that compulsively chasing IT through a screen, through a vapp in their hand, through whatever next collective effect scs experience that having with their friends. How much bullshit is there in your opinion in the training d training, retraining, sensitivity, detoxing of doping? Um oh wanna .

know i'm trying to be polite and I call IT bullshit, but thanks for calling the bullshit. Um it's because people get pulled in one particular direction with IT, which superficially is correct but is not really the case in the reality is like so much more interesting amid ID this depine nations stuff. That's a great phrase.

The equivalent phrase i'd have is where the species that wants and wants and wants and bones and it's for much the same reason. Okay, what everybody thinks they know about dup mean what all the the seven thought they had shown for a long time is dope means about reward. Take a person, take a monkey, take a rat, give IT a reward matter nowhere.

And IT releases dopamine from the dopa energia reward circuits in the brain there. And yeah, it's about reward. Cocaine releases tones of doping, like nothing the natural world could ever do.

So that, by the way, afterward you've deplete ed your own dopamine stores. So if you want to 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, know that the racing downward of addiction.

But I D I gress and a preachy matter. Okay, so do means about war. That's totally straighforward. All these, all these euphoria released open mine case closed. But now you do the experiment a little bit differently.

You take that human, rat, monkey, whatever, and, you know, you put him in a room. And here's the deal. When a little light comes on, IT means if they go impress this lover ten times, then they're going to get a reward.

great. You learn IT very quickly, light work reboard, light work reboard. And he 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 he go up when you get the reward? No, not.

Once you learn this contingency, doping goes up when the light turns on because you're sitting, they're saying, yeah, come on top. But this, I know, I know all about this lever, pressing stuff, peace and cake. This is going to be fabulous.

Dopa means about the anticipation. It's not about the reward. It's about this is going to 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 ways. First off, IT begins to hint after a while that is not the pursuit of happiness, but it's the happiness of the pursuit. Yes, that sounds like i've never patented that, but that should be on little doilies.

And everyone is kitchen and the 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 bomber is what you now have afterwards 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 motivate us. Second cool thing. okay. So now do the experiment a little bit different.

Um what I just described was you press the lover, you get the world world press lever, get the reward, hundred percent predictability. It's would be clear. Now shift things to you, press the ever, and you only get the reward about half the time.

What happens to dopa 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 wow, maybe drives the system nothing on earth. Okay, i'm detecting that my dog is radically different because his ball has rolled under something. Let me go help him out in his pathetic ness. I'll be right. That okay. Cake, never.

Oh, yes.

yes. You, yes. That okay, often comes. So let you see how. Now the other dogs here also let me see if I could keep them by wrapping among the nose here and pretending to between the pole and 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 gona mess up but no on on top and you're just tearing there and that's motivating like nothing on ad in some uncertainty. And if you get the right social engineering going on like people do in loss vegas, they will take a one in a thousand chance and convince you you actually have a fifty fifty chance is something wonderful. Ly, and you just press that lever over and over again.

Um i'd say the third thing that's cool lest about IT as you do all this with a monkey or a rat and this is about like you press the lever and then after a ten second to lay, you ve got 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 going to get a reward. We're going to go to heaven after we die, if like you pray, wow.

We can lever press like an entire lifetime. We can lever press for whether able to maintain that anticipatory doping like nobody else out there. We can never press in anticipation that are 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.

Yeah, I find IT so interesting that IT seems like the kind of the bulls ee of happiness is things were about to get slightly Better than I thought they were going to be like that's pretty much IT, right? It's just at that moment, just there. It's before that happens, right?

It's not it's not when the foods come out. It's when you see the way to coming over with the food. And he found to put IT down.

And okay, here's one of the most cynical things I ever heard someone say. This was a guy down the hole in the dorma college. He said, a relationship is the Price you pay for the anticipation of IT.

Wow, yeah. Yes, he had one disasters relationship after another, after another. But yes, the word almost, wow, that's that's really powerful. And like that are we, you know construct cities and like sequence the human genome and build pym's and all that. Like just keep pressing the lever because that's going to be amazing when they stick your mummified corps inside that big parameter thing. So it's going to be worth IT.

What about dopamine sensitivity and and driving that either down so that we become more sensitive to so we we have detrained ourselves from dopamine e so much. There is advice online. You don't have any stimulus for thirty days.

IT reset things in the brain. How long does IT take? Is IT is IT locked in for life?

I win the lottery once, and now every paycheck to me is forever going to seem poultry. I've hit, hit the lever and got a million bits of food. And now no amount of food is ever going to feel satisfying to me.

Well, well, I I feel fairly confident that if he didn't need for thirty days, food would be amazing afterword.

IT would IT would have said in a traumatic way um you know here's just one piece of that story and again, kind of the world I come from, if you're feed us and you're exposed to a lot of stress hormones among all the other things going on and there you make fewer doping neurons in that part of the brain, you're going have fewer them isn't adopt. You are going to have less capacity for feeling pleasure and anticipation. You are going to need stronger stimuli to get the system kicking into gear.

What have you? Early life stress and vulnerability to substance abuse. That's exactly a mechanism for IT.

So yeah, how many of those non do you have? How good to they making dopamine? How quickly do they run out of IT if they run out of IT? How fast can they rebuild if the system habituated? How fast as a reset.

And every single one of those things has a nuts and bolts explanation in each of us. Every one of those differs in each of us from somebody else. And every one of those settings is an extra genes.

And what happened to you when and all of that. And that's why you get people who like, go to listen to a vogler Opera for four hours and find IT to be wonderful. And other people who like, if they don't like, you know, shoot up right now, they're not at last another minute or so. Everything, individual variation, all right, system works differently.

We're talking about stress. We're talking about europe transmitters and hormones. And it's some of that stuff s contentious, right? But largely people are interested in how to reduce stress and how IT works and how the oxytocin in the service, tony and stuff all come together.

Why did you decide to descend into the helsa? Pe, that is the free will discussion. Like why is IT so important to discuss this that you would put your own mental health on the line?

Um well, when I was a fex, there's this thing .

that happened 哈哈哈 哈哈哈。

well when I was almost back to a feast， I I was fourteen when I decided there's no free will whatsoever um as long as I was added that was one very to multiple with night. I also decided there's no god and there's no purpose to anything that is a huge.

empty, rough evening for a fourteen year old.

Yeah, yeah. I've been paying for those insights ever since. I even this was literally a two. The morning I woke up during a rather like distressed week with all sorts of like oxy 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 freeway and there's and I even quickly wrote down notes, which of course, we're incoherent because 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 you 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 that are best and worst and it's basically why do we do what we do in the answer is because of what happened one second ago and one minute ago and an hour ago.

And back to childhood, fetal life and genes and what culture your ancestors invented because that's how your mother treated you and evolution all that and you got to take all of that into account and literally seven hundred ninety pages agonizing lead later no this is this is what we're about um and the aftermath just a lot lecturing and like you'd go through a fifty minute version of all of this and q and a afterward and inevitably there would be someone who would say, wow, you know, if all if this is how stuff works, we we may have less free will and we Normally think next thing you think you think and I realized like for a surprising number of people who would do something is ridiculous to go to a lecture on a week night or something. This was revoked ory and say, okay, I thought this the obvious after, like, almost eight hundred pages of this, download the time to write something that says, yeah, not only is there are much less than we think, there's no free will whatsoever, and we got to start functioning a little bit more as if that's the case. And thus, i've SAT know collecting cobweb for the last five years, writing a sort of the sea al to that book, goods coming out october, is called determined, a science of life without free will.

And I take what is far and away a lunatic fridge 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 but I kind of figured I would like go try to convince some people of that and fully expect that's going to be like wildly unsuccessful. But like at least I don't have to try to frame my arguments in coherent paragraphs anymore.

Why do you think the conversation about free will is so animated?

Um because at first gLance and for the first hundred fifty years, so gLance 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 poll show is like ninety ninety five percent of philosophers who think about this are what you call compatible lists, which is they're willing to admit we're not made out of magic like the world is made out of molecules and stuff like that. But somehow, somehow, somehow, this is where we still managed to have free will.

And when you read between the lines is because half of them are saying, because dam, that would be depressing if, because we get such, we are me on 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 and lsc cases, all of that.

But like bomber IT doesn't work that way. And you know, I go through like this agonizingly long book. The first half is like, why IT we have no free will and is the brains and the genes and you know, all of that.

And the second half of the book, which took me much longer to write because I still not really have any good answer 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 world? That agency is a myth? Oh my god, like what's the world supposed to look like? And the second half of the book is very fewer attempts at trying to get at that.

And hopefully in the process like the t constructing, uh, people's resistance to the ocean that we have, uh no freewill. Um the first thing, everybody immediately freaks out over everybody. He's going to just run a muck because there's no responsibility if you feel like there is none.

And what a lot of science as shown is we're not going to run a buck. We may run a buck for the first afternoon. We're convinced of that. And like interesting research has shown, if you like unconsciously prime people to believe lesson freewill, they are more likely to cheat at a game twenty minutes later, stuff like that. But when you get people who have for a long time believe there is 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 is abundant free will, and that makes sense to hold us responsible for our actions.

And just as ethical as people who believe there is a god who is watching in judging all of that and sort of the key coming out, and he is, if you've spent a lot of time thinking about this, what's the source of meaning? What's the source of human goodness or any stuff like that? If you spend a lot of time thinking about IT in lots ways, that doesn't matter.

If your conclusion as 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 going to wind up being much more ethical than average. That's we're not going to run a mock um but then people freak out saying that still still they're going to be some people that run a mock and what you're going to do nothing about them.

You're just going to let mr run around on the street because they they're not responsible for their actions. And you know that's an assi worry because we've got some great parallels. If if you ve got a car and the brakes don't work, it's not safe, it's dangerous.

You keep IT off the streets because it's going to hurt people. And what you do is if you can't fix IT, you stick in the garage and the car can 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 ah this is actually .

from that yeah I guess this sort .

of criminal side of this is a really interesting implication, right? Like if does IT does does no free will mean that there's no such thing is blame and that punishment and retribution and vengeance and stuff are always indefensible, right?

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 giving that just desserts in summer regard. And you need to use that as a um a tool of discouragement for other people to do IT in future that needs to be a societal signal. But we also know that it's only like a bit OK at that. There's many people who don't care about whether or not they get call, many, many people who almost prefer to be in jail and prefer to be outside people who become so habituated to their existence in the so yet, 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 are now being prosecuted for.

Well, sort of the the new watch response I have to that is the entire damp system is irrational. N bd, while I 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've like to punish one of the most reliable releases of dopamine. Our brains is get to be righteously punishing of someone. Uh, yeah, that's good to be an option battle because 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 reconciliation ceremonies and and 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, lots brew link could work Better. This system makes no sense at all because IT is predicated on the starting notion of its a just world in which people are punished for things they had no control over. And that's the only possible logical outcomes of this is where people freak out and no murderer running around on the streets.

And all you have to apply is the same public health care and teen model that you do with a car whose breaks don't work. You keep IT in there. But that doesn't mean like you'd .

then the hood viciously every single. It's not a car.

okay? We do one version of this like all the time with a type of human whose dangerous third 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 hold from kindergarten because they're going to 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 kindergarteners from sneezy kids with running 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 play with your toys because you know why you're sneezing. Don't you care about how you're going to harm other people? Wow, we've managed to do that, and we keep kindergarten safe for those goals. And society hasn't fall in apart. We've attracted out a notion of responsibility and society, not only functions of functions Better because kindergarteners not only don't get sick, but you don't tell five year olds they've got like the evil dim and in there that's making them sneeze or something.

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 quarantine building along with other people who also have the same bad things for a period of time, and then we let them out.

Um no because is 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 switching more, not an inch more than that, because there's no reason to take away your child's tories 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 that way, I mean, we've gotten to the point where, you know, a kid is sneeze zing. We don't view them as a moral blight. But yeah, don't bring them to kindergarten tomorrow.

They are good. My kids. Second, that's gonna a disaster. We've subtracted that of we've subtracted that out of IT in some even more meaningful romes.

Schizophrenia, a like one of the all time horror ble diseases, usually gets you in late adolescence, early adult, and for decades and decades and decades, like somebody y's child falls in, discuss ophite nia and he had taken to the doctor, and is 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, 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 twenty years century, the best, most compassionate psychiatrist under have had an answer for you, which is, you caused IT.

You caused IT by your crappy parenting. And of course, he was always directed with the mother at your quote, schizo friend, agent ic, mothering, which, amid sort of the floridian builds that fueled on some unconscious level, you hate your child. You hate your child and it's your fault.

Your fault. And i've talked to like support groups of like family members of people with chizen hernia and the first generation of people where they figured IT out, oh no, actually it's a neuron etic disorder of brain developmental abNormalities that had nothing to do with your mothering. And these are all women in their nineties now.

And IT is amazing to talk to them about the moment when they truly grass. 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 out fault of mothers when IT comes to discuss a honey of 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 than the absolute minimum needed, 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 that that people who live in poverty dive like diseases of aging when they're fifty years of what go do something about root causes and its the same exact like moral imperative, imperative, public health people like dig wells so people can get clean water, do things of the people don't grow up thinking that is 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 accomplish that like put those pieces together and yeah, it's obviously an uterine transformed world. But that's exactly what we're doing with kids. You 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 check at 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 like at pressure, but like don't punish them beyond that. And well, we could run the world that way and we could run the world that way to kiss ophrys a now. And we need to move to the point we were running at that way with the whole bunch of other stuff because it's the exact same profile and the exact same ways in which we make all certain people's lives miserable for no reason. And like, we've done that before. So yeah, let's go do that again.

okay. So after we shit on the rights retribution that people want for criminals and people that have done bad things from a great height, another pillar that people are very, very attached to me included is meritocracy.

Yeah.

people being able to be the architect of their own successes. And I had some Harris on the show about three months ago, and this was one of the things that we didn't get to talk about, kind of wish that i'd brought IT up to him. And he talked about the myth of the self made men.

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're the architects of their own successes. And a landa button from the school of life gave me this beautiful framing years ago, this great video he did, where he said, in ancient greece, the beggars on the streets, the word that was used to describe them was, unfortunately, that lady fortuna, the goddess that has the the scales that SHE hadn't blessed them.

And that's change. Now, into the moon world, the nomenclature that we use is a loser. right? A loser is the person that hasn't been able to get themselves up and and sort their life out.

It's been taken from something that would almost be stored on you by an outside a serial force to know something that was completely within your evolution and totally under your control as a sovereign agent in the world. And the implication is, if the losers are the architect of the losses, then the winners are the architects of the successes. And this MIT of the self made man.

All of the rest of IT, i've made a lot of changes to the way that I exist in the things that I do in the texture of my mind. And I made lots of changes over the last six years. And that does sound to me quite dim, powering 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 mind to choose my capacity to have that effort, wasn't mind to choose my desire to, and choice to put my foot on the peddle of whatever that effort is. Wasn't mind to choose in the executive function to piece IT all together into a structured ordered organisational framework to do IT also wasn't mind to choose or to deploy IT makes a quite a sad world as someone that wants to try and to become .

something IT sure does, which is why this is totally depressing. And yes, ah this is actually a good thing. Mean, for starters, everything I just said about the criminal justice system, just like say opposite words in the same sentences and the plays exactly the same to mirror racy IT is just as irrational and just as a need of being like chunked all together.

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 learned IT. And so that's going to go also. Okay, so what's the equivalent panic to? Oh great.

So you just got to have like murder. Is you running around on the streets saying, oh great, you're just going to have like a random we selected person taking out your brain tumor? no.

Well, like you gotta have like skill, people being their surgeons, and some people IT 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 in competent people from hurting people as well and like your nurse gets, will still have to go through a lot of training. All of that.

That means the incentives need to be there, right? You have to have the incentives in order to be able to justify them going through all of the training and .

doing the hard things yeah and what we went through was like the usual incentives were punishment have to be subtracted out because the sentence are built around you, a rotten person, and you could be cured.

Go talk to the chaplain or whatever and the same thing in the case of the blood brain search and flip the other way um like the only logical conclusion is thank out they are capable of doing this but they're not a Better human because they can do this. They don't they're not entitled to have their agent life considered more than anyone else is so where when sentence come from? Major like, oh my god, like almost buddhist crap this got is going on about right now.

We are motivated by the desire to attain prestige and power and respect and entitlement in all of that. And in the case of like how they were talking about those poor unfortunates s not bless my 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 want to those people who has the potential to like be able to go specialized .

to introduct that why should you feel gratitude for something that you had no choice .

in that happening um because do you locked out? You do you're not living on the streets.

I guess I 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 roll the double six.

Yeah, this is assi. This is like utopian beyond words. But like somewhere in there, we recognize that like there's a certain amount of irrational attribution of of a claiming someone when they turn out to be seven foot four interest tall, they're amazing in the NBA.

Okay, that kind of you that may begin to explain why there the nb, i'm not kind of thing. Oh yeah, that one we've gotten to the pointing society that that one has something to do with versions of like your growth hormone receptors. And that was not a moral like triumph.

H, to grow all enough to play in the NBA. We can kind of deal with that, and your society has been 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 out here is like this enormous false the economy we do in our heads, which is like most people don't believe in infinite free well, they say, yeah this stuff we have no control over like not everyone gets to be seven foot for, not everybody gets to have perfect pitch. Not everybody gets to have the right lutin ate receptor makeup so that they've got an amazing memory. And you know, there's a luck.

There's the biological attributes that we get gifted with or cursed with. 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 function?

Do we like when they're going gets tough, do we get going or do we we squander our gifts, do we endure ourselves and this opportunity, that's the measure of who we are. That's this, like, totally false economy. That our attributes are made of biology. And like what we do, IT is made a fairy dust, whether like that tests are souls.

And like that, like the most seductive thing about like, how could you not be like, I know these these seven footers playing the MBA? And like a wild, there was this guy, Maggie bog, who was five foot three inches tall, and he played in the N. B.

A. Because he was like, amazing. And how could you not be inspired by that? And the one out of gazillion kids born into power, verity, who somehow now the C.

E. O of something that like, there's so dam inspiring and looking at the squandering is like so pleasingly appalling to watch. I saw forms magazine last year. Seventy percent of wealthy families have lost their fortunes by the second generation because I just wanted, and no, my god, who could resist that? IT, yeah, that's the arena in which we are convinced that, like god, and say, in our ARM wrestling, what you do with what your hand that at you, and like if you show self discipline or not, if you have admirable impulse control at a highly stressful moment, or if you failed dismally, if you any of those things, it's made of these act, same stuff as your memory span and whether you a good sprinter or not, because the muscle makeup with your size and whether it's the same biology, it's, in my opinion, a much more interesting biology, and is got lost 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 nightmare adversity, not only is your brain could have developed in a way that you probably your knockdane a great digit span, among the other consequences, you are going have terrible self control on the average because your frontal cortex didn't 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 junction. They do the wrong thing. They do the self indulge thing, and is made of the same stuff.

But yeah, again, there is kind of this problem that like I I see this all the time, you start to bunch of people who have come out to hear a lecture about the brain and that sort of thing and yeah and they all gulp, if you've convinced them in the slides that free will is is a pretty suspect concept they all gold and say, okay, well, we d have a whole different view about punishment oh, I mean, containing dangerous people and cries before it's over with where I have to be, like the scandinavians. And well, this is going to be hard. And I got a lot of visual stuff and got have to over come there.

But if you want to really know what i'm going to 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 gift the parties and went and studied to that's where people really begin to panic because that's going to be the much harder one. This philosopher, Daniel, who's like a leading compatible list and is very influential and he's is like a charming speaker and writer and his his media evil in how he thinks about free will and entitlement and all of that and like this quote of this that went up in all of his youtube talks and interviews and stuff, where is going on about how like we need to hold on to the concept of free will, regardless of whether it's true or not? I happen to think it's true, he says, add here my completely unsupported scientific opinions about IT, but none's because we don't want murders.

And read this running around all over the place. I and what's going to happen if we don't feel a sense of accomplishment in our prizes? Wow, that's what he's actually worried about.

You know, fucker, with the murderers running around, what's gna happen if I can't feel as if I earned my pride? This is a verbatim quote. If we can't feel a sense of accomplishment for the Prices we've earned, yeah, yeah, oh, now we know what the problem.

Brilliance for all these people will send your chairs and 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 a good to 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. Is biogen like its environmental lock? So like, you know, suck IT up and be an adult with this. Wow, that's good to 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 when 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 looked to have genes that make them destiny for obesity or any for most people on this planet. The news that you are not responsible for, how I turned out, is the most humane damn thing you can tell anyone.

And there is this gigantic sell selection problem, which is the people who are going to come and listen to some like nutty lecture are exactly the people who are going to be saying, oh my god, maybe I didn't earn my college degree. The people for whom this is like deliberating message, they're sitting. They're wondering how they're going to pay the rent at the end of the week.

but they have no idea who robots suppose key or .

determinism is and like front of cortecs, because there their work in three jobs. And like for most people on this planet, the news that all we are are in products of all the things we had no control over beforehand is the most humane possible news you can get in a world that is just to thinking that way.

You know, it's a very good thing that we decided not to take all women with no teeth who live off by themselves on the edge of the hamlet, and decided they are fault that there was an earthquake and burn up at the stake. It's a more humane planet that we've learned something about, which is, in the biological reality, every one of these things is going to 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 bomber, 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 I could do make the world Better. So this is a good thing. I sure can't really think that way most of the time because most of the time i'm saying, oh, my god, but what about the fact that I have a job they pay me? I've got like a good salary. All of the world, I sure we're hard to nobody is saying this is going to be easy, but all that happens at every step. When we have tract responsibility out of our perception of where human behavior comes from, IT becomes a nicer planet.

Yeah IT seems to me that taking the free will red pill 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's like A A flattening way to the ultimate egalitarian, an philosophy right it's as flat as .

flat get yeah because if you do the impossible and really, really think this way all the time, and I sure is how can but the only logic inclusion from this is none of us are entitled to anything more than any other human on earth. There is no person out there whose needs are entitled to less consideration than yours.

So 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 conscious ously and just smoke 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 with A U bi. Or something like free will based universal basic income. I am guessing that that's not your proposal for like a society structure.

Well, good luck with that. Yeah, that's not going to be easy. On the other hand, we've got a world where from very early on in life where training kids, cultural myth settle exactly the opposite. Um I don't know if we put a lot of work into teaching people to just recognize IT a share other chance that they want up being who they are and if you had the good luck, uh, you know some gratitude would be a good thing. Okay OK my Christ, i'm going to a start. I'm gna bring joe bias here in a moment, unlike her Walker or something to talk about the you tobe and like, yeah but we do IT a little bit and pieces um you know like there's there's like hallmark ds you can get and give to somebody that says, well, what a 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 could be my spouse s or yeah, it's going to be really hard and I can function this way less than one percent at the time. And I constantly show that, like amid believing this stuff on a total hypocrite, because I can't really act on IT emotionally, the vast mature.

But every now and then when IT really, really, really matters, like think about IT, when you're try to make sense of why IT seems okay, that this person gets less concern, then people like you do, or try to think that way every now and then when you are 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 uniformally worry about the world and that they're wonderful. And a huge disproportion person to them came from ridiculous material and and or intellectual privilege.

And most of them spend a lot of time trying to wrestle with this because they realize, you know, it's not by chance, they wounded up there. And I was just and that you know, when you dig beneath the surface of those kids who were like calling off to help run a free clinic and nepal or whatever, it's not just to get into medical. It's on some level they realized where they're at and like go look at a bunch of people and the prison a mile away for palo alto and the fact that we are their way disproportionate like to the uh to not have parents who read books to them or like lived in neighborhood where you could walk home at the end of the day and feels 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 turn IT.

I sent a forty minute original, forty minute clip of sam telling joe organic on his podcast. I think he was maybe eight years ago when I came out, and I think about five years ago, send IT. I used to work in nightclubs.

He was funny that you mentioned early run about about clubs I gave IT to. I listen 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. Look irish with fascinating guy I D F I D love to learn a little bit more about that I sentiment. And he was spiral into a deep depression for two weeks because I had sent him in this forty minute video, and he came back two weeks later.

He had to take me to one side, and he said, a, may I need to have a word with you? I was thinking, god, what have I done now? Have I let something in that's not got the right? I D, or is one of our boys done something like that? Some Harris video did you sent me like, yeah, I didn't get out of bed for like full weeks because of that.

I've used to all of my sick days and like at work and all this shit so can you provide people with some glimmer of a White pill that makes them feel a little bit less respondent about the fact that why shouldn't I just not do anything, all of the things? Because I do think you, even if on mass and over a long of time spend, people end up just going back to their sort of habituated routine with a slightly ambient supose key in the back of their mind, reminding them that it's not the it's not not the architect of their own successes. It's uncomfortable right to to genuinely trying grapple with this.

Uh, it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable in the same way, is realizing that eating factory farmed animal products is basically like paying, sending creatures to be tortured for your pleasure. And people need a little bit of help to get them across the line. Do you have any video to help them get through this slightly difficult situation?

But well, this once again is going to be A A pretty lame cancer may amid the absolutism of there's no freewill, what's ever all of that like go do something incremental once a week when you realized you're about to judge somebody and harshly, like like, don't.

Or once a week when you're like making you know pounding on the desk of some poor buster where you're insisting that you had an appointment and dear important and they're delaying you are whatever. Like do one of these things once a week, like at some point, like look at somebody very different from you and really try and exercise. And they had absolutely nothing to do with how they wound up. Or, you know, a little little instead of small random acts of kindness, small random acts of rejecting free will. And like, okay, I can do much Better than that, but I go to that, go to that every now and then.

I think again, I feel like somehow has been here in the conversation with this. I had when I had him on the show, I asked him kind of something similar to do with mindfulness, because i've done a lot of meditation in, especially over the last five years, and I mentioned that IT IT felt like kind of pressing down on the accelerator of a car that I can achieve even good momentum.

But as soon as you put your, take your foot off IT, the momentum starts to slow and sometimes wake quicker than you would like. And I was asking, I wanted to know whether ultimately i'm going to reach some enlightened, blessed out state man, while I just lie on the trees, man in love, life and what like. I think it's important that what you've sort of come to is if somebody wants to take this particular free will red pill and even if the ethical philological implications are super universal and kind of everything gets offended and the entire world would be totally different, the sort of day today practical instantiation of what you're saying is just think about this a little bit.

Just bring these together, string these kind of insight moments together every so often, or as often as you can, or as often as is useful. And sam had something similar to do with mindfulness. You know, he mentioned he was late for the show.

He was late getting out of the door and he was rushing and he was rushing in him and his wife, who were getting ready at the same time in the work, going past each other and what, whatever. And then he said before he got out of the door, he caught himself and realized that, you know, even this marriage with this woman that he loves, and he just took ten seconds to scoop up and give a kiss. And then he left, and he was like, ultimately, mindfulness comes down to springing together as many of those individual instances as you can.

I I love that. I love that is an idea, because IT seems so much more graspable to me. IT seems so much more achievable for me to try and do ten times a day.

My mind just be where my beach fucking for once, right? And then maybe I can do twenty times a day. Maybe I can do thirty times a day. Maybe some weeks I don't do IT at all.

And then I come back and I try ten times a day, twenty times a day, three times a day, and maybe with the free world thing, maybe that's the same too. Maybe IT helps us to be less judgmental. Maybe IT helps us to feel less fucking superior and and and vengeful. And yeah, maybe this, maybe this, maybe you need to speak to someone and get, this is a part of a meditation course so that they can not go resentment.

God, no, not that anything, but that up. Yeah, I like, I wish I had sams growing capacity for spiritual solace. And the more drugs.

More heavy, more drugs. You need to take more heavy psychedelics and see if your capacity for freewill is is maintained through that, through no freewill of your own.

If yes. Well, my problem is I never did none of that stuff. But yeah, which there's something oxyde moronic in that which is saying, oh, like this, reform under cut s revolution, reform, oh, let's try to remember this person circumstance before we walk away for fifty years, instead, six years. Oh, reform, little incremental stuff that there's no free will.

We need a total revolution and suggesting here that implementing this revolution in this little baby step, incremental reformist kind of but like, yeah why not I mean, on a daily basis, like if any of this stuff is true, that makes is little sense to hate somebody is to like hate of volcano. Um so every day I try to find the means to not hate Donald trump or vat amir putin or that bastard kid. I was incredibly mean to my son once, twenty three years ago and like, okay, let's let's work at this you know a little bit at a time.

I really appreciate you a work. I really appreciate the way that you put this stuff together. I've had to know for a lot of fun together. Been a long time coming to get you on the show. I'm really glad that I finally did well.

thanks. This was a blast. This was a really fun.

Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with .

the things that you're doing? Well, this book coming out next month, october OK, once again called determine the signs of life with, oh, shit. Motile determined the signs of life without free will. Think I have that once sort IT out, I know.

five years writing.

and you can remember, my poor public is just had, like apple plexi. If listening to this, okay, determine decision of life without free will. Uh, penguin random house in your neighborhood grocers. Soon all of that you know, everything i've ever set her thought in the last five years i've written down there so like, I got nothing else useful to say than that and even that may not be but okay, that's that's where you could find a go go help jeff bezos get Richard available there too.

Fantastic of IT. Thank you for the day.

sure. Thank you.