How Much Control Do We Really Have Over Our Lives? with Robert Sapolsky | Align Podcast #518
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Welcome back to the Lion Podcast. My name is Aaron Alexander. This is a place that we bring together the world's leading experts in all things health and wellness to help you optimize your mind, body, and movement. Today's conversation is with a guest that I have been aspiring to have on the podcast for the last decade. Since we started the podcast, he is someone that I have been looking up to and reading and observing from afar for the last 20 plus years. He is the author of many bestselling books. The most seminal of the books would probably be Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers.

also the author of most recent Determined, Behave, a primates memoir. I have read or listened to most all of his books, at least the ones that I just mentioned. I recommend all of them to you. This is mostly today about why zebras don't get ulcers as well as Determined and a little bit from the book Behave. A really tremendous human being. He is a professor,

at Stanford. He's a neuroscientist. He's a primatologist. He has spent 33 years or seasons rather living in East Africa with baboons. We get into some conversation around that. We get into conversation between free will and determinism. Um,

The difference between acute and chronic stress and a lot. I'm really genuinely just I feel so incredibly privileged to get to have a conversation with someone of the caliber of Dr. Sapolsky. He's literally been on my short list of people that I've wanted to talk to on this podcast for the last 10 or 11 years or however long we've been doing this. So grateful to share this with you. I think you guys are going to really love it.

Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for sharing this conversation. If you feel compelled to do so, thank you for subscribing to the Align Podcast YouTube channel for a chance to win some cool prize at the end of each month. We give something right away to y'all at the end of each month on there. So pick a subscriber. We send some cool stuff out. It's a good time. That's it. That's all. Let's get to it with my guy, Dr. Robert Sapolsky.

How many years did you spend in Africa with studying baboons over the summers? 20, 30? 33. By the time kids came along, I switched over to sort of every other year, frantically short seasons, but cumulatively 33 years worth of having that as part of my life.

How much exposure did you have to what would be called pastoralists? Was there indigenous people? What were the human contacts that you were having during that time frame? Yeah, I had my camp on a river which was the park boundary and on the other side of the river started humans living there who were Maasai. So the nearest Maasai village was, I don't know, about a mile away and scattered and

Every day there's cows coming through camp and sort of I lived with a Maasai guy there for years who sort of became some version of like someone I was really comfortable with.

It's a very different world. It's a very different crowd. Were you exposed? We just did like some, some breathwork stuff before this. Were you exposed to any kind of like traditions or anything like that of the Messiah out there? Or was your relationship almost exclusively with baboons?

Unexpectedly, I sort of wound up getting involved much more in stuff there. Initially, it was, you know, I'm useful. I have a vehicle and eventually I'm useful. I've got like antiseptic cream or things like that that were just revelatory in terms of what you could do for people there. Eventually, it got to a point where I was like vaccinating a couple of nearby villages for various things.

So I got involved. I wound up, I never got to see a circumcision close-up, but I got invited to a bunch of sort of circumcision parties, which were pretty...

impressive and cool. Did they ever throw you a circumcision party? No, they did not. We never got quite that far. It wasn't until my wife started coming out that she got invited to a clitorectomy, which no one had ever said a word about to me before, showing that she was getting access to a whole side of life there that I didn't have a clue about. Unfortunately, we had to

go back home before that could happen. So we missed it by a few days. I wonder what you feel Western culture could learn from Maasai and what Maasai could learn from Western culture. And would that be a one-sided teaching in either direction? Oh, I guess some bi-directionality. I mean, sort of, you know, I...

informed this guy who shared cap

with me and then us, my wife and I, for years and years, we were news that the world was round, which was a very challenging thing to try to get across. I was able to introduce this shocking knowledge that sometimes we, like white folk, figure out how to put food inside metal things

And then you can open up a can and there's like food inside. So that was a big shocker. I guess the thing that struck me most was, oh, the nonchalance about like people dying there. Newborns wouldn't get a name until around their first birthday because of the infant mortality rate. Stuff like this other...

One time there was this old man in camp who needed some conjunctivitis or something. And one of our friends, this woman was in camp at the time, and she came up behind him and like put her hands on her shoulders there from behind. And she said when he was young, he was very handsome, very handsome. He's going to die soon. Oh, don't say something like that. I'm sure he's great. He's going to be...

like it's pretty nonchalant. You go away for a year and you come back and somebody's like 10 year old kid has died from malaria or during a seizure or something. And, you know, it makes sense. Cultures evolve to deal with the exigencies of whatever crap life is throwing at them. But sort of how, how in your face that was is,

Pretty amazing. And I've been able to carry over the lessons of that absolutely zero in terms of like panic about mortality and stuff. But it was fairly amazing to see. Originally, the fear that I've heard you communicate about was with darting the baboons was that they would attack you. There's a difference between the female baboons and the male baboons.

Can you share a little bit about the difference between males and females in relation to darting and anything else that feels relevant? Yeah. Males are shits. They're incredibly aggressive. The majority of baboon aggression is displacement aggression onto somebody weaker and smaller than you. So they're just, they're awful to each other and they're awful to the females. Males all grew up someplace else.

and migrated in typically around puberty. So none of them were related to each other. So all male baboon tension and hostility is about other males in your group.

In contrast, chimp males spend their whole life in the same group, so they're all cousins and friends and brothers. So they wind up being terrifying to the neighboring chimps and do things like have sort of proto warfare. So among male baboons, they all hate each other. They're all looking for a chance to slash each other's throats. The notion of friendship or stable, like

coalitional partners unheard of there, where females spend their whole life in the same troop surrounded by their mom and their sisters and their nieces and like big. So you dart a female and you've got all of her relatives trying to rip your car apart. You dart a male and he really, all he's doing is like figuring out, can he take credit for darting this guy? I had one guy who literally did do that one point and

baboon equivalent. Baboon falls over, he's out there and this guy, really aggressive turkey guy, suddenly comes out of the bushes heading towards him which is like your worst nightmare because he's going to attack him and I gotta get over there and scare him off and whatever and I was a little bit too far and I couldn't get there and rather than attack him he like came over and

and like put his hands on the guy's shoulder and haunch and gave this vocalization that the whole troop could hear, which is, look what I just did. He was taking credit for the damn darting. And then he marched off, pleased with himself. So yeah, the much bigger issue with the males was like nobody else understands what the hell just happened to him, but what a great time to slash his rear end

And females care more about the rank of the family and males care more about the rank of themselves within the hierarchy. Is that correct? Yeah, exactly. It even makes no sense to talk about a female's rank, just what the rank is of her family. Is she from a high ranking family, one down at the bottom, whatever. So it's a very different family.

Females are jerks and displace frustration, but not within family members. They displace it to lower ranking females. And the lower rankings are starting to bridge the gap over to humans and eventually into determinism, things like that. The lower ranking baboons, I've heard you suggest that they would express hormonally similar to that of a depressed human.

or something along those lines. A mixture of depressed and anxious. And this wasn't just, Ooh, their stress hormone levels were elevated. I mean, I spent like two, three seasons dissecting the system, not literally. But in people with depression, you have elevated levels of these cortisol stress hormones.

And is that because coming out of your adrenal glands, is that because your adrenals are pumping them out at a higher rate? Is it because your pituitary is telling your adrenals to pump them out at a higher rate? Or is it because your brain is telling your pituitary to pump it out at a high, is this originating up here, psyche and all of that? Or is it that like one of your glands is doing something different? And, um,

like a whole bunch of classic clinical tests to show that it's brain driven, elevated cortisol levels in humans with depression and doing the same exact studies on them and showing that's exactly the case with like a low ranking baboon. The brain stops listening to safety signals, which is sort of your building block of anxiety.

when you still think you may be able to do something about it and thus you conclude you got to be on guard 24/7 or when you decide the world is always menacing you and there's not a damn thing you can do that's when you start looking like someone who's learned helpless with depression so remarkably similar in that regard

What could a depressed person, which is probably a broader percentage of the population than what the population would share, because it's a shameful thing to be proud of. So I presume the statistics that we see are probably maybe even a little bit, you know, askew. What could a potentially depressed or anxious person?

human learn from a baboon that is lower in the socio, I guess not economic, just lower in the hierarchy? Like, how could we nurture that baboon back into a place of feeling more stable and balanced and equanimous within their lives? And how could a human learn a little bit from that baboon? Oh, my my baboon self-help stuff. One is one is

God, if only they had a socioeconomic system, I could have made a fortune off of those guys selling some self-help primer things. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is one of the most reliable things about stress in mammals, which is if you want to reduce your stress hormone levels, one of the most reliable ways is to take it out on somebody smaller than you. It's a total...

like tragic thing that displacing aggression is a very good stress reducer. So you got a reason why

you know, when the economy gets bad, spousal abuse rates go through the roof, child abuse, things like all of these, even down to studies. Like you got guys where their football team has lost by a larger margin than expected and spousal abuse rates go up that Sunday night. So displacement is like a very, so like at all possible, try not to do that as your stress management. Um,

I guess another thing is in terms of the psychological building blocks of stress, lack of control, lack of predictability, lack of outlets, lack of social support. If you could pick only one of them to try to do better, go for the social support. That's the most powerful variable, which of course, if you're depressed, you've cut yourself off from the world. You're doing all this like self-fulfilling prophecy stuff about how you're alone because you withdrawn. Yeah.

all of that. You go into a spiral. Exactly. I guess the bigger one, the biggest point is one that I'm like up on a soapbox about all the time. It's a disease. If like this baboon's hypothalamus is working differently than normal in the same way that yours is, and he doesn't bother trying to like go eat this thing that he just killed, this rabbit or whatever, because he's

he's helpless and somebody is going to come and take it away from him even though there's nobody around anywhere that he just gets to he picks up and walks away without a bite of it if he's doing the same stuff as you and his hypothalamus is doing these same etc etc this is a disease this is a biological disorder you wouldn't be embarrassed if you had a broken leg

You wouldn't be embarrassed if you got like, I don't know, an inflammatory response to a bee sting. You shouldn't be embarrassed that like it turns out your brain is really crappy at re-equilibrating after a challenge.

Yeah, I've heard something, another analogy that I found kind of striking to me that I heard you share is the idea of if someone is acting out in some way, they're being greedy, they're committing some crime, you know, they're doing something that would be, you know, require some punitive action.

effect after the fact of like removing them from society, for example, or punishing the person in whatever way. The suggestion was if someone's acting out of alignment, you know, they're being bad, you know, they're hurting other people.

Thinking of that as it's actually an illness and it could be comparable to a person if they have a cold and they are coughing and they are spewing their germs or virus around the room, you wouldn't punish and like abuse that person for having a cold. You'd probably have compassion for them and you'd probably isolate them from society so they don't spread it. But this gets into the free will thing.

versus determinism conversation. And I found that to be something that for me, it like cultivated a feeling of like compassion and almost ease within myself because I make mistakes as well. And I act in ways sometimes that could be hurtful to other people.

And I feel like there's a balance of like maintaining accountability, which kind of comes into like the free will conversation and then also maintaining compassion and grace, which kind of comes into like the determinism conversation. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah.

I mean, the goal is to not judge anyone and not hate anyone and not do either of those to yourself and all of that. And to realize you are entitled to nothing and you are no more entitled to have your needs being considered than any other human. And, and,

Yeah, you know, this has been sort of my philosophical conclusion since I was about 14. And I can actually function that way for like a couple of minutes every other week or so. Yeah, no one, it's hard. I get

I get proud of something I've done until I like do what at least has become a little bit automatic for me. I do not automatically live a life without judgment and petulance and all of that, but I'm reasonably good by now at two or three seconds or two or three weeks later coming back to, yeah, but how'd they become that person? Or,

Yeah, this is, I really, here's why I wound up just by chance being able to be decent at whatever I was doing.

If you take it to the logical extreme, it never makes any sense to blame anyone, to punish anyone, to praise anyone, to reward anyone. No one has earned anything. Justice being served is an incoherent concept. Anyone deserving anything is incoherent. But it's incredibly hard to do.

On the other hand, we can do it. We can do it when somebody sneezes because they've got hay fever or something. Yeah, obviously you're not angry at them. It's not their fault, et cetera. But 200, 300 years ago, it would have been their fault because illness is God's judgment of you. And like pediatric cancer is rained upon the sins of the parents or whatever.

It's intuitively obvious. It's hay fever. It's not because they're being punished by God. That one's easy. We could do that without judgment.

We have much more trouble though if when they sneeze, they don't cover their mouth or something because that we view as volitional. They have no control over the fact that they like sneeze at allergens or something, but we would expect them to show free will in what they do with a trait they can't do anything about. And that's where one of the great fallacies is like,

the biological traits you're handed, you have no control over. And what you do with them, do you show backbone? Do you show self-discipline? Do you show tenacity? Are you self-indulgent as hell? That's made of the same biology stuff, which is, I think, one of the areas where people...

most pushback against the notion that there's no free will, which is you look at someone who's pulled themselves up under bootstraps and horrible circumstances and yet look what the... And all you see is like will and discipline and willpower

willingness to study hard instead of going out and partying or, or running the last 50 meters of the marathon with your like leg has just fallen off or something. And cause it's really hard not to think that that's made out of special stuff. Like whether it's, you know, Calvinist,

godly backbone or if it's like tenacity or that it's made out of the same stuff. Like you lucked out or didn't luck out as to whether or not you got a good memory span for digits. You lucked out or didn't luck out that life either handed you a very, very

good frontal cortex that's good at resisting temptation and doing the right thing or one that didn't. It's made out of the same exact stuff and it's instead so tempting to make this false dichotomy between what you're handed and what you do with it. What you do with it is the real measure of a person and that one is just really, really seductive.

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So at least grab that guy, get the bigger panels, get all the guys. I think red light's amazing. Uh, mito red light.com. He's promo code align for 5% off. I, I personally, my lens is there's kind of a little bit of a combination of nuance and a lot of it could come down to semantics and just world view and perspectives. And a person could, uh,

create a bias towards one direction and certainly could fulfill that bias and create a really cohesive analysis of why that bias is correct. I feel like in both directions, but I'd like to bolster the determinism bias further through generational trauma.

And I'd love for you to share a little bit around generational trauma and something that comes up with me within generational trauma, like something I've heard you share about as well and heard other places is higher exposure to mother's stress hormones as a fetus will actually catalyze and cause the amygdala within that fetus to upregulate or grow.

more than a fetus that's not under a stressed state. And then suddenly that fetus, you know, i.e. human, ends up being significantly more reactive to stress. And then they pass that down, et cetera, et cetera. Could you share a little bit your perspective on generational trauma? And also, I think something that's like a kind of a weird far out idea for me is it almost becomes like, who am I?

Like, am I my parents? Am I my parents' parents? Am I my environment? Am I, like, where does I start and stop? Yeah, and is there an I? Is there a little me inside there that's separate of? Just sort of as the first piece of, like, winding up, if you, like, decide your parents are the best and all you want to do is be like them, that was a pretty dramatic display of determinism.

If you decide your parents were a nightmare and you want to do everything in your life different from everything they did, that's just as deterministic. If you want to do some of it except for that one influential teacher who got you to think about things this other way, that's just as deterministic, all of those. But in terms of multi-generational,

You know, people figured out at some point that like childhoods matter in terms of what kind of adult you become. And all the flashy science that has gone on with it is figuring out the mechanisms by which early experience, including the fetus.

changes the way your brain's going to develop, change which genes do what, and regulatory stuff, and this whole world of epigenetics. And epigenetics has two

just massive contradictory take-home lessons. The first one is if you do nothing, a lot of the epigenetic consequences of early life adversity, starting in fetal life, is going to be lifelong.

And like if you're under age 10 and you lose a parent to death, you are more at risk for clinical depression for the rest of your life. Like when you are 65 and you've retired and that turns out to have been a bad decision and you realize you have no friends and you sink into depression, that is more likely if at age eight, because, you know, on a,

A psychological level, you have learned the world is one over which you have no control over the things that really matter, blah, blah. On a biochemical level, stuff changed in your brain at that point, which is one and the same with you feeling differently about the world. So that's the case forever after. So the first big take home

from epigenetic stuff is like, if you don't do something, it's lifelong. The seeming contradiction is if you do do something, an awful lot of epigenetic stuff that people assume was lifelong is in fact reversible. And this stuff is not destiny. And when somebody like stops having trouble with anxiety as a result of successful therapy,

That's like epigenetic stuff happened in there on like the most like nuts and bolts level. When somebody stops being a white supremacist because they were beaten senseless by their drunkard father every day growing up or whatever, that was epigenetic reversal. Amid that, like all that is, is just like, here's some of the,

like reductive magic of how stuff can change in people. And one of the rules of that is, yeah, early life adversity, that's not destiny, all of that, but the longer you wait to try to intervene, the harder it's going to be. So those two things, if you don't do something, it's forever. And if you do do something, do it sooner rather than later. If you don't do something, it's forever.

then turned into the fact that this stuff could then be multi-generational. And like, big surprise, there's personality profiles of the descendants of genocides, and there's the classic, like, child of an alcoholic personality.

like yeah yeah okay so that's got something to do with it what blew people away was seeing that some of this gears and buttons and levers stuff about brain function that there were actual mechanisms by which that would be passed on to the next generation and that's like wild you see

different propensities towards psychiatric disorders and the descendants of Holocaust and things like that. You see two generations after your middle class family got out of working class, two generations later, on the average, you are going to be more anxious about losing your job than someone whose family has been middle class forever.

You still feel more illegitimate and like a fraud. This is the grandkids of the people who stopped being like fruit peddlers and smelters and an iron plant or something. It's a great book years ago called The Hidden Injuries of Class. It's still there two generations later.

Yeah, there's some of that's passed along because from day one, you're being raised by the values of your parents and cultural transmission. And my God, like the fact that I'm a descendant of a culture where you had to watch out for cattle rustling varmints. And that's why on the average, my people are more prone towards impulsive violence than like the Scandinavians are.

That has something to do with the number of barroom brawls I've gotten into. So yeah, cultural stuff being passed on, parents all that. But one of the biggest shockers is then seeing biological mechanisms by which it's passed on. And the great example is the one

you brought up, spend your fetal life in an environment filled with your mom's elevated stress hormone levels because the world is a really scary, menacing, unforgiving place for her. And your amygdala, the wiring plan winds up being that it gets bigger because of like

people know exactly which genes are doing this in which trimester so that this growth factor is expressed more in your amygdala lines of being bigger. And what that means is as an adult, you're going to have on the average elevated levels of these stress hormones. So when you're pregnant, your fetus is gone. That's none of this, you know, you get inculcated in your family's culture or whatever.

like fetal programming and that's going to change the way in which your fetus is going to experience its environment so that's been the huge this like not only lifelong but multi-generational through culture through parenting style through all of that through like

The scar tissue, there are mechanisms by which the scar tissue is passed on to the next generations. So that alongside the... But yeah, at some point, the child of a child of a child with a certain history of abuse doesn't grow up to be an abusive parent or...

that, yeah, stuff can change if you intervene. The sooner, the more assertively you do it, the better. But if you don't do anything, whoa, it's not just potentially lifelong, it's multi-generational. So two huge lessons that initially seem contradictory if you view some things as fated.

Okay, I'm fated to become whatever because of the home I grew up in.

No, that's not the case. And the fact that stuff is reversible doesn't mean nonetheless, like if you don't do anything about it, your chances are not great in adulthood for avoiding this or that problem. There's kind of two directions I want to go. One, I have a burning question for you that ties into generational trauma and things of the like, and I want to go deeper into the determinism.

But the burning question, I would love to hear your perspective of the differentiation between acute and chronic stress. And is there some type of specific characteristic or moment that the acute stress becomes chronic? And how do we navigate both of those? Because it seems like acute stress is healthy, chronic stress unhealthy is perhaps overly simplistic definition.

version of that. So what is, is there a differentiation point between acute and chronic stress? And if so, when and where is that? And what does that look like? I would say at the point that if you were trying to describe what's going on with you to a giraffe, when it begins to think you're pretty weird and messed up for the, for the giraffe psychotherapist, it would be way to,

you're worrying about dying? What's dying? You're worrying about the planet warming? Like, well, I don't understand. Like nobody's trying to eat you. What's the big deal? And for the giraffe physiologist,

It would be the first time they realize you just increased your heart rate like crazy because you're stuck in traffic and you want to scream. And it has never elevated its heart rate in its life, except when like something was chasing it or it was chasing something and said, what, what's up with your body? Um, I, and for me,

for 150 million years, and that's probably not hyperbole, vertebrates have had stress responses. You secrete the exact same molecule as some dinosaur did that was being pursued by a

velociraptor or something. And if you do it to solve an immediate physical emergency, it's totally great. And it's a brilliant piece of evolution and it like saves your life. And if you try doing that where your body can't turn on the stress response, you're dead 30 seconds after you start running. And if you do it for psychosocial reasons, that's exactly what it didn't evolve for for 150 million years until we

primates and elephants and cetaceans got smart enough in the last, I don't know, three, four million years to have developed psychosocial stress. That's the dividing line. If like some other regular old

rather than like a special smart primates would look at what you're doing and saying, I don't get it. That's like your measure. That's your metric. What's the evolutionary function of chronic stress of the nervous system or endocrine system or the overall physiology?

shifting over into we're going to kind of keep the brake and the gas pedal stuck in this position now and we don't know how to let go of it what's how is that serving us to to actually support survival uh

Two schools of thought. One is stress adversity, especially early in life, is a reasonably good predictor of what later life is going to be like. Oh my God, I spent my entire fetal life swimming in stress. It's a stressful world out there. I spent my fetal life short of nutrients, or I spent my childhood with instability. And

you know, that's a pretty good predictor. So developing the neurobiology of anxiety and seeing threat everywhere is not a psychiatric disorder. That's exactly what you need to have. So that as an adaptive anticipatory thing.

The other school, which I am fully of, is 99% of the time, there is no upside to chronic psychosocial stress. It's just, we simply, we've got ancient, ancient physiology and

There simply has not been enough time to evolve our brains working differently when we have this crazy concept of I'm going to go to hell now because what I just did, it just, it's so fundamental that, um,

It's asking too much of only three, four million years of evolution for a brain to distinguish between the things you can change and the things you can't change and contentment with that. I'm mostly of the school that there is no upside to it. And every psychiatric stress-related disorder, all the forms of depression, all the forms of generalized anxiety, and the specialized ones are all associated with shorter life expectancy. It's not adaptive.

I have, I'm fostering a dog right now. It's a Malinois German Shepherd. And so she has a lot of energy and she's coming into herself more. And something that I've learned, and this is a common thing for anybody that's had a dog, when the dog is not getting enough attention or enough play or enough, you know, they're not able to exert their energy in the way that they want to, they can start to become like a bad dog.

And they can start chewing things and tearing things up and start peeing in places and kind of like becoming vindictive even potentially. And like, I'm going to make your life bad. Something that is true about humans and baboons and certain primates is it seems like we're so darn intelligent that we have the capacity in order to make our lives a living hell for ourselves and for those around us. How is that an adaptive behavior?

Well, when it's a dog, when looking at how dogs evolved from wolves, on all sorts of totally interesting levels, they're baby wolves. Their brains are very wolf.

Wolf, but infantile. You are mommy and you will always be mommy because they're in this arrested developmental stage in all sorts of ways. They spend their whole life having baby wolf faces and doing things that baby wolves do that adults don't do, like wag their tails and get like distinctive coloration and just a whole package of stuff with that. They are attempting to elicit maternal investment out of you.

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If you don't love it, I'm sure you're gonna love it. If you don't love it, they have 100% money back guarantee. All right, enjoy. How is that a survival? Because I'm under the impression and belief that every action and behavior kind of like a deterministic lens is an adaptive pattern to bolster our survival. And how would making ourselves making choices to make ourselves sick and ruminate and make our own lives and the lives of the people around us at times of living hell? How is that

What's the argument for that to be an adaptive behavior to bolster survival? There is none because we're not choosing. You've had crappy luck and you've got an antisocial personality. You've got crappy luck and you have a tendency towards seeing menace everywhere unless your cardiovascular system is getting pummeled. It's just that's what you got handed. And

It got handed to you as a member of a species that has this really weird capacity to activate the classic old vertebrate stress response over things that are displaced over time and space. You're like devastated that

what was his name? Ned Stark gets killed in the first season of Game of Thrones. Those are pixels. Those are pixels on the screen. They're not real or real. You can hear about people in Darfur and have a stress response to that. Yeah. This displacement stuff, we're smart and we're smart without a physiology that has evolved fast enough. You know, one of the

ever reliable themes is like this mismatch deal. We spent 99% of hominid history living in open Savannah, blah, blah, blah. And that's absolutely the case. Nothing about vertebrate evolution prepares you to be able to go online and find out what parties you were not invited to because people are posting pictures. This is like totally unprecedented. So, you know, there's,

A little bit of vigilance is good. If I was sitting in Berlin in 1933, I would have hoped I was not abnormally calm about things and instead would have concluded this ain't right and I'm getting out of here and thus passed on copies of my genes. But the vast majority of the time, I think of this stuff as nothing but corrosive. An idea that comes to mind as I'm asking that that I wasn't thinking about before is perhaps the adaptive strategy within becoming a bit of a cunt.

in your life is you're actually crying for help. And so when the dog starts chewing the baseboard and starts peeing all over the place and whatever, the dogs actually communicate and says, "My behavior previously wasn't translating. I wasn't getting what I needed to feel whole."

So now I'm going to have to send these other flares up. And that could look like playing comparison games. That could look like becoming greedy. That could look like becoming malicious or vindictive or any of that. And actually underneath that is a person crying for help, which still falls into the determinism conversation, I think. Absolutely. Because again, nobody chooses to be neurotic or calm or...

have good perspective taking or have lousy capacity for empathy or, you know, it's just biological traits that life turned you into over which you had no control. At what point it's kind of interesting. I had a similar experience around the age of 14 where I became, I had, I was like kind of overwhelmed with a deterministic lens on the world. And I had the perspective that every person,

emotion that I felt or the concept of love or laughter or any of that was just almost like I was like a beaker of neurochemicals and hormones. And all of my experience felt like this banal, sterile kind of disassociated experience. And I was just witnessing physiology and chemistry that we call human.

And what happened to me within that is I actually went into a place of like suicidal ideation, not super deep. I wasn't super close, but I think the danger of an excessively deterministic lens on the world

could be one great amounts of compassion and grace for people. And then the shadow side of that could be everything's already determined. There's nothing to do. What is the point of even engaging in this life? I'm just going to check out because it's already done. So is there a danger of nihilism and apathy if one goes too far down the maybe shadow aspect of determinism?

Yeah, that's the one thing I don't have a snappy answer to. Oh my God, if people stop believing in free will, they're just going to run amok and do crimes. No, no, no, here's why that's not going to happen. You're going to conclude nothing can ever change, so don't bother. No, no, here's the mechanism by which change occurs compatible with there being no free will. Why bother?

Yeah, that one, you know, compassion. Remember, nobody had anything to do with who they turned out to be and don't judge and like wonderful and hold hands. But like, why bother? You know, the thing, you know, I love my wife dearly and that may have something to do with

my olfactory receptor genes and what vasopressin did to me and what modeling of this or that I had when I was younger. And yeah, of course it's all that stuff. But that doesn't change the feeling or it shouldn't. We're capable of functioning on multiple levels all the time. We could be experiencing a car ride and,

and say, oh my God, what a smooth turn on a curve or whatever the hell people like cars for. And you can simultaneously be understanding something about what the spark plugs are doing. You look at Gazelle on the Savannah and they're leaping and it's totally crazy. And you can spend your whole career doing biomechanical physiology and understanding how their pelvic angle

evolve so that they can leap. And here's an equation. Here's an equation that explains why they could do that and hippos can't. But that shouldn't make it any less amazing when, whoa, and they really do that. So I think something, I don't know, the

What has become not a whole lot more comforting to me than just a sound bite is we're biological machines, but we're the only ones who could know that we're biological machines.

And thus simultaneously can reflect on the fact that this is what like gazelle pelvises do. And here's the torsional whatever on their femurs or, and at the same time say, oh my God, that like, I got to see this, that this,

all filled things still make you feel awe. And it's the greatest thing possible, even if like you can describe what's going on with endogenous opioids or some that it, if you don't like give up, it's possible to have at both levels. And the thing is that things that evoke awe, even if it makes no sense at all,

just makes it all make sense. And no matter how much of a biological machine you are, pain is painful. You're, oh, we turned out to be that kind of biological machine instead of like the way redwood trees are biological machines. Um, so just attempt to float on both of those levels at the same time. That said, you know, I'm not so good at that. Um,

So, yeah, this calls for an equanimity that is not easily attained. It seems like one could kind of ride a healthy consciousness

could ride a line within that where the determinism actually creates a sense of peace and ease within the self where it's like, it's almost like what religion does for many people, you know, Christianity, I'm like guided by the Father and the Holy Spirit, like, there's nothing to do.

And it almost could transition a person in a place like this is all extra credit. I can just enjoy the ride. I can allow this book to move through me. I can allow this art to move through me. I can allow this relationship to move through me. And I'm going to be radically present for the whole entire experience because I want to eat popcorn and enjoy the movie.

And also I'm not too consumed by the experience and taking, you know, having excessive attachment to it, I think. So from like an epistemological lens, like using determinism as a tool, I think it can be a really supportive tool to lead a better life. And it can have a shadow side that could be maybe quite like apathetic and maybe like collapse, collapse of in nature in a way. And yeah,

And in that regard, the collapse of this, if like you wind up looking at the pain around you and the injustices and the inequality and all that, and you say, oh my God, just the foibles of these humans that we turned out this way. I mean, that winds you eventually being in some version of like what fools these mortals be. And then when you put yourself into the same equation, why bother all of that?

Yeah, that easily pulls. On the other hand, we're wired up so that happiness feels really, really motivating. And we can get suckered into thinking life is worth it for moments like that. And pain is really, really awful, even if we have the same basic wiring as a sea slug. Yeah.

yeah, that floods in. But if it works right, there should be a certain detachment. Um, cause you deserve nothing. You earned nothing. Um, all you can do is just be grateful that it turned out the way it did for you and keep in mind why it turned out differently for other people, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, it's not easy. I, I,

I don't remember if in Determined I had this sort of anecdote in there, but I went to one of those, like Dalai Lama gets together with a bunch of neuroscientists. We all talk about like a conference for a few days. And he brought along a whole bunch of his like all-star monks who hung out with us also. And like some of them were very spacey, but some of them were totally

accessible. And you know, this guy, when we're talking with him and he's like very, all of that. And eventually you get around to saying, so like, are you ever meditating where you say, I got to stop? My knees are just hurting. This is like really a drag. I'm really uncomfortable. And he said, sometimes I will stop meditating, but I do that as a kindness to my knees.

whoa holy shit this is like an amazingly like inspiring different planet this guy comes from but yeah this is a different planet if that's really how he functions all the time i can do that every now and then for a moment it's a whoa that something like that and i have

zero of anything insightful to say about anything like a Buddhist unselfing mindset because I'm like cliff note level familiar with anything like but it seems like some version of that

Something else in relation to the determinism front is it's interesting when you start to reflect on the decisions that we can make. And particularly in relation to a good example, that would be the judges being more likely to grant parole if it's after lunch and they're not angry compared to before lunch. And so that brings up like pause and reflection myself of like, when I'm making a decision, who's pulling the levers for the decisions that we're making?

Exactly. Can you share a little bit about that? Again, we're machines, but we're the only ones who know we're machines. And thus, we're the only ones who could learn something about where the buttons and the levers are and things like that. So like a low rent version of it, I believe.

I mentioned Dish Herman, my wife, is a musical theater director and I sort of helped out with lots of it. And like we kind of learned from the judges study of keep track of when the kids are coming into audition. Like, is it just that is the last one of the day? Is it?

Like just after, is it just before lunch? Like, yeah, that's something that happens in us as a species. Keep that in mind. Like later when you're saying, I don't know, something didn't quite do it for me with that kid.

Yeah, let's see. It was right before lunch. Okay. Keep it. You've just, you've learned something about one of the levers. You lucked out in terms of being someone who values self-reflection in that way. And like you had the luxury in life that you're doing this over like casting kids in the stupid school musical or whatever, rather than life and death. But that would be like,

If there's three judges out there who came away from all of that saying, okay, I should keep track of that. That maybe that's great. That's machines who actually can know their machines. That's like unprecedented. That's fabulous. It feels like almost there's like, there could be like an analogy to like a, a person that's highly free will would probably lean more right politically. And a person that's highly deterministic would lean more left.

And a person that's more free will would be like, there's research that I'm sure you've heard about of where they rigged a monopoly game, I think it was. And so that certain groups of people, like they had to win and they even knew that they had to win. They'd start off with more money, all the things. And then they would come up with these excuses of like, wow, I made these great decisions. And I was like, bro, you started off with, you know, $100,000 more than everybody else. And you already own Boardwalk. You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what about these decisions I made?

And so the tendency would be that the haves would be defending free will and the have-nots would defend determinism.

Exactly. Is that right? Exactly. Except... Which is ironic because you're a have, at least from a socioeconomic perspective. And it's interesting that you stand in that place of like, hey, say, hold on. Well, which is why I usually wind up disappointing myself by my first reflexes of things that, yeah, well, hold on.

Exactly. I mean, the big problem when you're really doing something corrosive, I mean, it's great if the have-nots have a full understanding about why they were screwed and this hadn't happened.

We have a society that's very, very good at constructing these myths about equal opportunity and it's a just world. And so we managed to convince a lot of people that somehow it's their fault if they turned out not to have a beautiful face or a beautiful brain or whatever. We're

So in principle, yeah, system justifying lucky people are the ones who are most resistant to the notion of there being no free will. And that's absolutely the case. You go talk to a whole audience of people about all of this. And afterward, they're asking questions saying, oh my God, well, what about criminal justice? And what should we do with this? And what they're really saying is, wait, I've got an advanced graduate degree.

I worked hard for, are you saying like I really deserve, I have a good, if I'm sitting here going to some stupid lecture on a weeknight instead of working my third job, by definition, I'm one of those who's like lucked out. You're saying, yeah,

I didn't earn it. It had nothing to do with me that there is no me. That's, that one's very unsettling. And it certainly is. If I spend my time hanging out with Uber privileged people,

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Yeah.

To even be able to have this conversation is incredibly privileged. Like for, you know, your mind's obviously significantly more, I don't know, I'm impressed by your mind, my mind, you know, I'm trying my best. But to be able to enter into this space, to be able to communicate about this, it's like, it's a wildly privileged position, you know? And I wonder from your perspective,

outside of just like pontificating on things from a privileged position of us being able to reflect on minds and consciousness and such.

Where does rubber meet the road with this concept of actually creating change in society? Or is it just the idea seeds a change of greater compassion? Is there a way that you would model, say, a lesser model of meritocracy? Or is there actually something where we could create structural shift with this model of determinism that would make a difference in the positive direction? Well, I'm a totally...

evasive social coward. I'm not confrontational. I hate any sort of interpersonal conflict of any sort. I am not going to be out there at the barricades. My makeup is such that I decide I'm like blows against the empire by teaching and writing and

stuff like that, which is pretty self-serving in terms of explaining why sitting around in my occupation somehow makes sense. I don't know. You try to

teach people. Two of my ex-students are now U.S. senators. You came through my classes and one is wonderful and the other is an utter fucking nightmare. And I don't know how that happened, but don't ask me to name names. But

Like, you know, that's my makeup is such that that's where I've had my influence. I'm the last person on earth who would ever step out of a crowd and do something brave.

when things get like that, I run away and live alone in a tent. So that's my makeup. - I think just sharing a more compassionate lens for people that we would put into like an untouchable, punitive space in culture, I feel like that is a significant difference to be able to just have that change of perspective of maybe this isn't actually their fault. That doesn't mean that something doesn't need to be done.

But what do you think of our judicial system and like the punitive nature of our prison system and such? It makes no sense. We have to, it's, it's the burning, which is at the stake justice system. It, it is completely intellectually and ethically gibberish and unsupportable. And it's gotta be gotten rid of entirely because,

over, I don't know, the next two, three centuries or something, recognizing this is a slow process and like Scandinavians kind of have it together. They're further along the curve than we are. But like, that's where you get the, oh my God, you just have people running around on the streets,

murder isn't no of course not you use a quarantine model like you figure out the absolute minimum needed to keep them society safe from them because you need to do that and you don't constrain them one inch more than that which of course is idealized to being able to know what

the cutoff is, but at least you figure out things like pedophiles should be required to be more than X distance from any schools or like constraint like that. And you don't preach to them afterward about how they have a terrible soul. And you put a lot of effort into trying to figure out root causes, how you wind up having people turn out to be that way.

And you got to do the same thing with meritocracies because nobody should be able to cut in line closer to the front because they had good SAT scores or bar in the, you know, whatever version of that. Getting rid of meritocracy is going to be a hell of a lot more difficult than getting rid of the criminal justice system because in the criminal justice scenario,

All you have to do is figure out how to protect society from dangerous things and do it in a way that's purely constraining without any moral taint to the whole process. But with meritocracy, you want to protect society from incompetent people. Like you really want surgeons to be well-trained. And the trouble is,

But that takes, you got to motivate the hell out of people to get really good at something difficult and how to do that without having a meritocratic mindset of somehow they have attained moral self-worth that is separate of the fact that they happen to be good at taking out brain tumors or good at like

fixing car engines or designing a new economic plan. That one's so much harder because in the prison version of it, you just need to constrain the person. Don't yell at them. Don't tell them they've got a shitty soul. Don't take away their toys. Just do it. But constrain them in the meritocracy. Yeah.

In the meritocracy version, you got to make this person be willing to work really, really hard for a dozen years if they want to get the solution to this problem. And you got to do it in a way where they don't come out thinking that they're thus intrinsically a more worthy human.

That one's so much harder. Do you believe that the feeling of pride is a bug or a feature? It's a feature, but it's an uphill battle. I mean, I have...

no trouble going through why pride never makes sense whatsoever and I can actually function that way every now and then when I instead feel pride about how amazing my kids are that's getting more complicated because it's a little bit detached but it's not really detached you know but yeah in principle there's zero room for pride stuff

Could there be value in pride, leveraging pride as like a fuel source, even if it's kind of an illusion? No, absolutely. Punishment, reward, pride, shame, all of those are perfectly admissible as purely instrumental tools. Yeah, that's great.

I don't know if you could make a sea slug feel proud when it has acquired some conditioned aversion task, but you certainly have gotten it there by differential application of reward and punishment. Yeah, they're instrumental tools. Keep in mind it can feel pretty damn good to punish.

That's like a perversely rewarding mammalian thing to do. So be suspicious when you think you've decided that punishment is the instrumental tool that's really called for in this situation. And how valuable the person or...

entity or whatever to your ego structure is for you to have someone to punish. Because if you have someone to punish, that inherently puts you in a place of being elite, you being high. So you actually are the person that you are punishing and you guys are inextricably tied for your identity structure to exist the way that it does. Yeah. Because you could never think of yourself again outside the context of comparison. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. You can say thank you to whoever you hate. Whoever you think that you're superior to, you can say thank you. Exactly. Because otherwise, what is there to... That like strong feeling that you have within yourself. You're like, ah, it's them. Like you created this story for yourself. Yeah. It's

So, yeah, they're perfectly fine as instrumental tools, but be aware of the psychological pitfalls of doling out reward and punishment because they take on a life of their own. And it's often a very self-interested situation.

Life of its own that reward and punishment take on when you get to be the one righteously doling it out so does this have conversation have any room for concepts or realities or whatever like spirit and God or is this just purely scientific conversation that is Kind of outside the confines of entering into that realm purely mechanistic purely reductive I

you know if I I was 14 where in one very mysterious night I stopped believing in God and I intently I was very very religious orthodoxly ritualistically so before that one night where that evaporated a belief in free will evaporated a belief that there's any purpose in the universe evaporated and I haven't

had a shred of capacity for any of that since then. And I sure wish I could. You know, I miss a lot of elements of that and like, I don't know, getting to be an ecstatic Sufi or something must be pretty wonderful. But no, no room for that at all. I'm incapable of it. Amid that,

Humans are our source of goodness and gazelles still are amazing and make you like grateful that you turned out to be alive to see that all, but nothing that transcends the nuts and bolts. Yeah. Have you, do you have experience with psychedelics at all? Have you explored anything in that realm?

Actually not. I have never had a sip of alcohol in my life and I have never taken any drug whatsoever.

Basically, when I was about 15, having much to do with deciding there's no purpose to life, I decided my neurochemistry was vulnerable enough without messing with it in any way at all. Plus, I hated going to parties where people were drunk. So I just kind of decided then that I've never...

had either. Yeah. I stopped drinking alcohol quite a long time ago, but I, I, that's, I feel like that's another kind of interesting wrench into the conversation that doesn't need to enter this conversation, but entering, you know, ayahuasca and psilocybin and, you know, some of those experiences that I think it's like eight out of 10 people statistically that experienced those, those, those, those moments considered to be like some of the most

top most valuable experiences of their lives. And it's like this transcendent experience that disproved everything they thought they believed and was began a long process of like unlearning everything. And it happens so consistently with so many people wearing these human suits that I think it enters like another interesting kind of turn into these conversations. But-

And if I ever get to the point where it's finally time to do one of those things, it sure as hell is not going to be like having a glass of wine over dinner. It's going to be exactly trying one of those. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's very intriguing. Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate your humanness. And it may make sense that you have the perspectives that you do because you clearly understand

in your communication you have like a lot of ease and compassion and like playfulness and um you know i've obviously been blowing smoke up your ass this whole conversation because i've looked up to you for a very long time this has been this is like a highlight for me of getting to conversate with you i know for you you know whatever um but i i really appreciate you and everything you've contributed and even though you didn't do anything i appreciate

the Eunice that is projected to me, to my meanness and, uh, to get to experience that it's been really a pleasure. I appreciate it. Good. And I think the fact that you use a word like project, uh, is a pretty good safety measure. The external person and the internal person are very different deals at times, but I think this was a totally fun conversation starting with the breathing.

Yeah, it's a helpful thing. So what would be a great place to go from here? Perhaps the book Determined or what would be a good place that we could send people if they want to go deeper into these conversations? Yeah, hell, why not that? Yeah, sure. Well, I appreciate you so much. I'm sure people here appreciate you a tremendous amount.

And that's it. That's it. That's all. Thank you so much for tuning in. And I'll see you guys next week. You guys enjoyed that conversation. Por favor, if you did share it with somebody, you know, I think this is a cool, helpful conversation for the world. I think it's one that could be

promoting of spreading compassion and care and love for our fellow humans and ourselves. So I think it's worth sharing. Thank you for subscribing over at the Align Podcast YouTube channel. To get the video version of this, you can see my home studio here as well as Dr. Robert Sapolsky's big ass beard. It's a notorious beard and it will surely not disappoint.

That's it. That's all. Thank you guys for reviews. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for doing you. I'll see you next week.