Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Robert Sapolsky (on human behavior and free will)

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

Dr. Robert Sapolsky (Behave, Determined) is a behavioral scientist and author. Robert joins the Armchair Expert to discuss why he was drawn to studying the social habits of baboons, how their behavior relates to human psychology, and what we learned from Phineas Gage. Robert and Dax talk about how conditioning helps people get through stressful situations, how culture affects the development of the human brain, and how child raising is different in a collective society. Robert explains the myth of grit, how praise and punishment are used to try to shape people, and his view of free will.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dick Van Dyke and I'm joined by Lily Winsroll. What? Why were you saying the P word? Because you were Dick Van Dyke. Pussy Von Willow? Yeah. Okay.

Our guest does not deserve this. He's sincerely smart as he even is on the entire planet. We like to keep it mixed messages here. Oh my God. Because it's Sapolsky. Listen, you guys have heard me talk for a couple years now about what I think is the most comprehensive book I've ever read in my entire life.

It's absolutely mind-bending. Behave. That's the book I've been obsessed with forever by Robert Sapolsky, Dr. Robert Sapolsky. He is a behavioral scientist and best-selling author. He is currently a professor at Stanford University. His books include Behave, which I am a disciple of, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, and his new book, Out Now, Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will. I was scared of him before we met him.

Me too. Because I was like, oh my God, how he's going to say all this stuff that no one can understand. Yeah, right over our head. But absolutely not. Professor Playful should be his name. Yes, I really liked him. Yeah, he's so fucking relaxed and cool. And he made it all layman's terms.

Yeah, it's really incredible. Speaking of being nervous, I gave myself an ulcer leading up to this. Because zebras have them? That's right. Ding, ding, ding. Because I'm a zebra. Zebras don't get ulcers.

Yeah. But yeah, I was so afraid to try to synthesize his brilliant thoughts. But he was so helpful and wonderful and playful. Please enjoy Robert Sapolsky. Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends

find a place on a beach with a pool and a marina and a waterfall and a soaking tub. Expedia, made to travel. He's an option expert. He's an option expert. Made to travel. First of all, what a nice dog. Yeah, you have a really handsome four-legged friend next to you. Very nice. And he's looking at the bowl of kibble here, the little pup.

He is using every neuron he's got in his head to look at it right now. I feel like I'm watching a little child in the marshmallow experiment. Maybe he's promised a long walk if he can resist the kibble. He's not going to be able to

resist it. And that means that he's never going to be able to resist it. He's just that he's never going to be able to resist it. Yeah, he's just a little boy. Oh, perfectly. You immediately dovetailed into determined. He has no free will in this situation. Once Kibble's on the scene, no free will, right? It's so nice to meet you.

I'm Dax. This is Monica. Hi. Hi. I just want to be up front and say this is the most excited and nervous I've been for an interview. I'm such an enormous fan of yours, and your work is so ever-expanding and comprehensive. It's very daunting to try to summarize. I see my mother got you on the phone already, so we're set to go then.

I already told Dax that he should not try to sound as smart as you because then no one will understand any of this. I have no illusions. That's coming later, hence the anxiety. But first, I guess I'd just love to tell you that I was introduced to you through Behave and I was so blown away by it. It, to me, seemed to combine three of my other favorite books, which is The Weirdest People in the World. I don't know if you've read that one. It's so good. It's so important because it throws out about 99% of research that's supposedly telling us about humans.

Right. And it's just telling us about college graduates, right? Yes. And then also a colleague, I suppose, if you're at Stanford, Anna Lemke's book, Dopamination. Which is great. Our kids went to school together. And then I'll also throw in Their Body Keeps the Score, which was a favorite book of mine. And somehow this book

has every one of those in it. It's almost impossible, but it is the most comprehensive look at why we do what we do I've ever read. And I just was blown away by it. And I've been excitedly encouraging people to read it now for a couple years and been wanting to sit with you. So I just want to say how much I love that book. It's such an accomplishment. Let's first talk because we share this in common. We both have anthropology degrees, which excites me greatly. You started at Harvard and you were doing biological anthropology and then you very shortly thereafter start studying baboons in Africa, yeah? Yeah, about a week after graduation.

I got shipped off there and I had been hoping to be doing that since I was about 10. So this was pretty spectacular. Getting to do this, I had decided very early on in life that I wanted to be a primatologist and was somewhat obsessed. What started the fire for primatology? Well, in some ways, it was the natural transition from like how many brontosauruses could beat up a T-Rex, kind of such a little boy thing, to mummies and dead stuff in the ground and then bones and then suddenly primates. I was in New York City and Museum of Natural History there

is the most wondrous place on earth. I was growing up in there and all those dead, murdered, taxidermed primates in their primate hall, something clicked and I decided early on I wanted to live in one of those dioramas. My understanding is you had a teacher that kind of invited you. Now, had you picked what primate you would have studied, would you

have picked baboons? No, my first love was mountain gorillas because they are beyond cool and they were totally unsuitable for the sort of research I wanted to do. And I happened to wind up in a baboon bioanthropology little fiefdom rather than a mountain gorilla fiefdom. So after I had spent four years brown nosing efficiently so that this guy would ship me off to there afterward, it was baboons. But they turned out to be perfect for the sort of science that I'm interested in. And my understanding is that you were originally interested in what effect on survival social status has in the troop. Yes. By then, I kind of had morphed into half a primatologist and half a neurobiologist. And the common theme there was stress.

What I was interested in in the lab was what stress does to your brain. And 40 years later, the answer is it doesn't do good stuff. So that's what I found out. And it's relevant to brain aging and dementia and depression and anxiety and all sorts of stuff like that. And what the fieldwork was about was trying to understand who gets the stress-related diseases. And in the context of baboons, it was, what does your social rank have to do?

Where are you placed in the hierarchy? What does that have to do with your blood pressure, your stress hormone levels? Which is what I went about trying to study. Did the higher ranking males have less stress or more stress than the lower ranking males? Well, I thought I was getting a very clear answer on that, which is if someone gives you a choice in the matter as a male baboon, you want to be high ranking. It is a ruthlessly unfair, stratified society. And these guys are violent, displacing jerks. And if you sit on top of the hierarchy, you've got all the psychological advantages because

you got control and you got predictability. And if you're in a bad mood, you could dump on anyone who's smaller and you can force people to groom you and things like that sort. So you've got all the psychological building blocks of stress management support. You looked at their bodies and it turned out that things differed dramatically depending on your rank. And what was interesting to me was when I was eventually doing some fairly nuts and bolts studies on these guys, it turns out if you are a low-ranking baboon, you chronically activate your stress response, your blood pressure's up, your immune system doesn't work as well.

And in terms of some of the circuitry in your brain, you look an awful lot like a human with a major depression. Depression, the soundbite is, it's the disease of learning to be helpless. If you're a low-ranking baboon, that's exactly what you learn. So this seemed great. This was 20 years into it. I thought I had shown that this was all about dominance and stuff. And I eventually figured out that all of this was completely wrong and not very interesting. And I had wasted two decades because it turned out there was much, much more interesting stuff going on. It was not just your rank, but it's what your rank meant at that time. Being at the

top of a stable hierarchy turns out to be a very different experience than being on top of an unstable one because the peasants are rioting just outside the gates of your palace during unstable periods. All the good physiological advantages of being dominant go out the window and you're now doing worse than the most subordinate guys out there because you're in the thick of it. And then it turned out even more so it was a function of your personality. I don't know when you were doing anthropology, but when I was, if you said the word personality and you studied other species, they immediately kicked you out because you obviously couldn't be a scientist if you're talking about monkeys having personalities. And you got some baboons who were self-actualized

and some baboons who were type A. You spend enough years with them and you see they were like that back from the beginning. You're a male baboon. You're sitting there minding your own business. You're snoozing. You're scratching at your toes. And your worst rival on the whole planet shows up

and sits down and snoozes 20 yards away from you. And what do you do at this point? And it turns out some baboons at that point do exactly what they were doing because whatever, this isn't a big deal. And about a third of baboons get completely crazed at that point. Look at that son of a bitch the way he's snoring. I hate him. You can't continue what you were doing. Your ongoing behavior is disrupted. You get all agitated. You beat up on someone smaller. If your worst rival sleeping on the other side of the field makes you do this, after controlling for rank, you've got about three times the stress hormone levels in your bloodstream as a guy of the same rank who sits there and says,

this one's not a big deal. Personality turns out to be a huge factor. And then social support. Are you independent of your rank? Someone who's got other baboons to hang out with and shoulders to cry on who will back you up? That turned out to be as big of a predictor as well, and eventually expanded the operation enough to be monitoring a number of troops. It's the same animals I went back to for 33 summers. And it turns out another factor is what's the culture of the troop you're living in? Another term that used to get you denied tenure if you study monkeys, but is a real term, is this a troop that has lots of social support? Are there a lot of affiliative animals? Is it one that really brutally displaces aggression?

There's different cultures and different troops. If you're going to be a stressed, woebegone, low-ranking baboon, there's some troops it's definitely better to be in than others, and your body shows it so oh rank determines everything that's destiny turns out to be idiotically simple-minded and that was 40 years later figuring that out well and indicative also of our great hiccup in all thinking which is we're trying to find the one foundational element that will predict all other things and only to discover oh fuck it's more complicated. Oh, so there's two things. Oh, shit, there's three. Now there's this. Oh, the weather? I was interested to hear that you were in charge of darting them so you could take these cortisol

measurements and whatnot. And this shocked me to no end that you were fearful when you darted one that perhaps they would attack you. But then what did you find out instead? If you darted number three in the hierarchy, what would happen? Him attacking me was like once in a decade sort of problem. You could buy like a commercial blowgun kit. There's this company where it comes in the mail and there's this brochure with all of these guys with like John Deere tractor hats and pictures of them with their blowguns. I have no idea what they're doing with them, but I got my blowgun kit. I imagine little boys who've seen like an Indiana Jones type movie ordering them out of the back of something.

Exactly, exactly. Unfortunately, someone opens the package at home before they do. So I got mine, use the blowgun system. And you've got all these constraints. You don't dart someone if he's looking at you. So he doesn't know what happened. And they react as if they have sat on a thorn for the 40th time that day. They jump up and sort of scrub their rear end for a second and then go back to what they were doing. You don't dart him if anybody else is looking. You don't dart him if he's injured that day, if he's sick, if he's

just had a fight, if he's just had sex. You try to dart him the same time of day as everybody else you dart. And this is a tranquilizer? Yeah, yeah. Well, crazy enough, and I've earmarked that, you were using PCP, which blows my mind. I don't know who thought to do that. Well, one look at me and you can just guess how long I have to talk to people at the DA to get a license for that. Angel Dust has a well-regarded history as an anesthetic. If you use so much out of it that you hallucinate for about four and a half seconds before you pass out, just before they would go down, they're making facial expressions of baboons who weren't there and things like that. And they plop down. I assumed all along the big problem was, oh, my God, baboons are going to rip me to shreds. But that wasn't the problem.

You dart number three and he sort of looks all puzzled. And about 90 seconds later, he starts wobbling a little bit and looking all drooly and everyone's wondering what's up with him. And that's exactly the time that number four decides this would be a good time to slash his throat. Oh, no. Isn't that nuts? No, I was not protecting myself from baboons. I had to protect the guys I darted from his beloved co-members of this troop. 99% of what I did was on males. And one of the problems with darting females is they spend their whole life in the same

troop. So they're surrounded by their mother and their sisters. You dart a female and she goes down and her entire clan is trying to rip you apart. Yeah. I like that. That's why you want to be matrilocal. That's why you want to be a woman. Well, in a matrilocal setup. I was much too scared to dart females, but with the males, if I could get them out of there before anyone noticed, that would work just fine. And the best thing about using PCP on them is that that dose, it's a retrograde amnesiac. You dart the guy, you spend the day taking blood from him and hooking them up to your little battery-powered EKG and whatever else you're doing out there.

And he wakes up the next morning in a cage. He has no idea what's going on and how he wound up there, but he's freaking out. And all he knows is I'm the guy who comes along and lets him out. Ah, you're a hero. Wow. What a great guy. I'm sure going to hang out close to him from now on. You know, in AA, we would call you the guy who steals your wallet and helps you look for it. But there's these neat parallels between us and them. The thing I always try to bring up on this show is that I think we underestimate our own predisposition for status

and what an enormously powerful force it is at all times and absolutely unable to transcend in many ways because it's so imperative to survival. And you see an example like that, yeah, where number four would immediately kill number three. You see like, wow, yeah, it's as serious as it gets, this ranking and status thing. You meet a baboon and ask him what he's about.

And if it's a male, the first thing he'll tell you is his rank in the troop because everything revolves around that. And you meet a female and you ask her and she'll say what rank her family has. They inherit it. Yeah. High ranking lineages and low ranking ones. And they are just as awful if you're a high ranking female or a low ranking one as the males are. But it's a somewhat different picture. Like some poor flea bitten, low ranking female will like sit down in the field and there's some

root thing that she's digging up to eat and the alpha female comes over makes her stand up and walk 10 feet over there so she can sit down there and then our omega female digs out something else to eat in the new spot and the alpha female comes over makes her get up and move to she will spend like the whole morning doing this to her just emotional torture yeah reminder don't forget yeah yeah yeah i'm still here the other interesting thing about them or a parallel i see is that like them when we were hunting and gathering societies we were only spending a few hours a day foraging and or hunting and these baboons are only out there foraging for three hours or so. They have nine hours to fuck around with no objective.

And so often that's where the stress comes from, as is the case with us, right? Exactly. They got nine hours a day to do social anthropology with each other, which means to gossip and maneuver and backstab. Baboons are big. They got big canines. Lions don't mess with them very often. No one predates them very frequently. And then these big troops, this was out in the Serengeti, which is like heaven for a baboon. You're only working three, four hours a day. So he got the rest of the day to devote to generating psychological stress for your other baboons. They're perfect models for us and our westernized lifestyles. Yeah, because explain the modern human now that's got all this great hard wiring and

architecture to be dealing with real threats for running, evading, killing, all these things, which we don't do now, and that most of our stress is all psychological now. And that makes no sense at all. There's this molecule cortisol that I've spent half my life thinking about and almost without question guaranteed a hundred million years ago, if some little twerp dinosaur was being chased by a big one, that little dinosaur was secreting the same molecule that we do. The whole stress response is probably 150 million years old. You do it to fish, you do it to birds, you do it to reptiles. It's like ancient, ancient stuff. And for 99% of beasts out there, what the stress response

is good for is saving your life. You get energy to your muscles, your heart beats faster, adrenaline, all of that. And then suddenly in the last couple of days, like maybe 5 million years ago, primates start getting smart enough that they could just psychologically stress each other all the time. We're sitting there and you're thinking about the planet melting. You secrete cortisol exactly like that dinosaur did, and it serves us no purpose whatsoever. You do it enough and you get sick. I mean, if you increase your blood pressure dramatically because you're running away from some predator, that is a good thing. If you do it six hours a day because you're psychosocially a wreck, you're going to blow out your blood

vessels after a cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Your immune system will be over activated. You'll give yourself autoimmune conditions as I have. Exactly. So essentially, we westernized humans and baboons and a few other species have the luxury of just sitting around and making each other sick through chronic social stress. Okay, so I have one quick question that was not in my notes, but it just occurred to me. Is adrenal or cortisol fatigue a thing? Do animals ever fatigue and it stops making it, or just the response changes because you're used to it? How does that fluctuate? Let's take a hypothetical scenario of the Navy SEAL who, under conditions that would normally cause a ton of cortisol in anyone else, they're experiencing none. Is that because they're fatigued or because the amygdala is not firing? They're conditioned.

These classic studies, 60s or so, looking at, I think it was the Norwegian army, looking at parachuters as they went through training and their first jump, and then they do a gazillion to them, and they were looking at these people's p and heart rate before and immediately after their first jump and their 30th and their 60th and the very first time it's exactly what you would expect five hours earlier their stomachs were already lurching and their total wrecks and five hours after the jump they're still total wrecks and then you come back on jump number 60. And while they're in the air, their body's doing the exact same stress response as it did the very

first time. But two seconds before they jumped, they had no stress response. They were thinking about lunch. Someone taps them on the shoulder and says, your turn. They turn on the stress response. They jump, they hit the ground. And five seconds later, they've turned it all off. What conditioning is about is you have just as big of a stress response, but only when you logically need it. You get rid of all the psychological anticipatory nonsense. You get rid of all the hours later you're still imagining, what if I had splatted? You enhance your signal to noise ratio you secrete the stuff when you need it and you don't need it the rest of the time and that's what conditioning is about sounds ideal yeah what impacts are there on the brain

with this endless stress what kind of brain outcomes do we have from that this is where I spent my lab life in that case I wasted a couple of decades worth of work by looking at the wrong part of the brain. It's part of the brain called the hippocampus. It's how you find yourself on the campus. It's your spatial relations, right? That's the trick. Chased by hippos. It takes a long time in Africa to realize that they're about the most dangerous animals out there. They stop looking like the hippos dancing in Fantasia when you actually see how many people they've flung into trees in the villages around you. So hippocampus, part of the brain that's all about learning and memory, Alzheimer's disease wipes out the hippocampus.

The first work in the field that I was part of starting as a grad student is if you're really stressed and it's really chronic and you secrete lots and lots of those glucocorticoids, cortisol has been one of that family, enough of it and you damage the hippocampus. Neurons there stop being as excitable. They retract their circuits, disconnect them and all of that. You stop making new neurons there. You can even kill neurons. You accelerate aging of the hippocampus. This is why if you've been stressed by doing an all-nighter the next morning, you can't remember any answers on the final exam because your hippocampus is in a coma at that point. And if you're doing that

every single day, it increases the risk of dementia. And so that certainly seems like bad news. My lab spent about 25 years figuring out what molecules are being screwed up and can we stick in genes that would protect hippocampal neurons from stress. But then it turns out stress was doing some cool stuff in other parts of the brain as well. Next door to the hippocampus is this part of the brain called the amygdala. Amygdala is about fear and anxiety and aggression. So you got on the hippocampus with lots of stress, lots of these cortisol. The problem is the hippocampus doesn't work as well as it's supposed to.

In the amygdala, lots of stress and the amygdala works better than it's supposed to. So the hippocampus is atrophying, but the amygdala gets larger, right? This is where you can change the structure of your brain. Brain imaging, like people with PTSD, the neurons grow new connections, they become more excitable, all of that, which just from the science standpoint, that's totally cool. Wait a second, here you got this hormone interacting with this usual receptor, and if it's in a hippocampal neuron, you turn off growth factor genes. Whereas in the amygdala, the same exact thing turns on growth factor.

Whoa. Well, what sucks about that is, right, it becomes kind of self-perpetuating now. Yes, because as soon as you got an enlarged hyperreactive amygdala, you see threats that other people don't. And you push the system. And what are we explaining here?

This is the biology of why stress puts people more at risk for anxiety disorders and things of that sort. So that's not good news. Then people started looking at this part of the brain using this neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is about reward. It's about pleasure. Cocaine works on dopamine systems. Actually, it turns out it's more subtle than that. Dopamine, it's about reward in some

circumstances, but much more so it's about anticipation. Yeah, baby, novelty. Yeah. And what does chronic stress do there? The system gets depleted of dopamine. This is why stress increases your risk of clinical depression. But then comes the most interesting part of the brain in all. And this is the one where I was saying, damn, why wasn't I studying this brain area all along? So there was stupid hippocampus, frontal cortex. Frontal cortex is the best. We've got more of it than any other species. It evolved more recently than any other part of our brain. It's the last part of our brain to fully mature. It's not fully online until we're about 25 years old. And what does the prefrontal cortex do? It makes you do long-term planning. The marshmallow test. Yep. All that

stuff where you're tempted right now, but if your frontal cortex stops you from doing it, believe me, you're going to thank yourself in the long run. What does stress do to the frontal cortex and these hormones? The exact same thing is in the hippocampus. Symptoms become less excitable. They disconnect. They atrophy. This is why we make incredible dumbass decisions

at times when we're super stressed and it seems brilliant at the time and we regret it. This is why judgment and impulse control and all of that goes out the window. Well, we'll be jumping ahead, but I know from you that 25% of people on death row inmates have had a brain injury that have impaired their frontal cortex. Before the incident? Before the incident. Oh my God. Yes. And actually in some of the studies, just as much as 75% of guys on death row, you know, get a big old whopping concussive head injury in there. So you take out this part of the brain and you could tell somebody the difference between right and wrong. You could write long essays about it and win prizes for it.

But when it comes to an emotionally aroused juncture, you're going to do the damn wrong thing every single time. The midbrain's going to win. Yeah. All the emotive, limbic sort of stuff wins out every time because the break has been damaged and the part of the brain that says,

I wouldn't do that if I were you and says it over and over and over and you occasionally listen to. It's been like this gaping crater hole ever since the accident back when damaged that part of the brain. And you get somebody who knows the difference between right and wrong, but they can't regulate their behavior. And that's pretty damn relevant in a courtroom. I think it's a good time for you to tell us about Phineas Gage. If you're like a neurobiologist, there's this huge social pressure to name your kids after Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was this railroad line construction foreman in Vermont in the 1840s.

And he was the foreman. He was competent. He was God-fearing. He showed up for work every day. Like an elder. Yes. Even though he was like 20 at the time, but he had it together. He was on top of that hierarchy. And one day somebody did something stupid with the dynamite that they used to blow holes in the tunnels they were making. And a metal rod that he was holding, a 13-foot long metal rod, lasting up through one of his eyes and out the front of his skull and landed 20 yards over and took his frontal cortex with it.

13 feet passed through his skull. No, no, no, no. I got it wrong. Take my license away. It was a 13-pound metal. That's worse. Only about four feet tall. He was shooting through, and you can go to Harvard Med School's library

and see his skull. Oh, it's there. This eye socket is gone, and there's a big gaping hole there, and this blew out and took his frontal cortex with him. And as the first bizarre thing, it went through so fast and explosively that it cauterized all his blood

vessels there so he like gets up what the hell was that did you guys hear something wait how did he not bleed out the thing was probably so hot that it cauterized all the blood vessels and prevented him from oh my know, like they would in a surgery. Oh, geez. Yeah. Basically, somebody runs and gets the doctor and doc whoever shows up on his horse and he diagnoses Gage. He looks in his eye and says, whoa, there's like this big gaping hole. That's your problem.

And the amazing thing is Gage was okay, except as it was stated, Gage was never again Gage. He became this foul mouthed, aggressive, abusive, alcoholic bully. He could never work a job stably again. He became a hell's angel. Yep. He started the logo, all of that. All of the constraints had been taken out of him. Some doctor at the time summed it up with like medieval insights saying, oh, this part of the brain is responsible for reining in our animal energies. And 180 years later, that's exactly the best way to describe it. That's what the frontal cortex does. Yeah. So then you look at some interesting things about stress. Suppose you're two years old, you're stressed at home because you're growing up in

poverty and your food's lousy and your parent or parents are never around, they're stressed as hell. By age five, you take kids in kindergarten and the socioeconomic status of their families is a predictor of how high their cortisol levels are going to be when they're just sitting there quietly. And you put them in a brain scanner. And by age five, if you make this stupid decision to be born into a poor family, your frontal cortex is already maturing more slowly than average. You're already starting to pay the price for it. It is so screwed. Okay. A study last year, brain imaging techniques, first couple of studies where you could now do imaging on a fetus's brain. You look at fetal brains and you look at mom's socioeconomic status and what her cortisol levels are like in her bloodstream, which gets across the placenta and into the kid's brain.

And during fetal life, your mother's SES is already impacting the grade at which your brain is growing. And presumably the amygdala is growing as well at an asymmetrical rate. Yep. Get exposed to a lot of your mom's stress hormones while you're a fetus. And as an adult, you'll have a bigger amygdala. Oh my God. Be more reactive.

And here's the real horror of it. As an adult, you had a bigger amygdala that's more reactive and secretes more stress hormones. And thus, when you get pregnant, your fetus is going to be exposed to more of your stress hormones and get born with an enlarged amygdala. And it goes multi-generationally. A cycle. And when they say trauma is passed down, that's a biological reason why. Yeah. In addition to maybe also epigenome as well, right?

Mom's passing down her epigenome. Am I right about that? Yep. Experience doesn't change your genes, but it changes the regulation of them. And have a whole lot of those stress hormones coming all over your fetal brain. You do epigenetic things. You futz with it so that certain on and off switches are stuck in the off position forever after and others ones in the on position. And you got that now. That's part of the instructions of what kind of brain are you constructing so that you either go out and succeed or don't in the world.

Oh, gosh. That's depressing. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Sasha hated sand, the way it stuck to things for weeks. So when Maddie shared a surf trip on Expedia Trip Planner, he hesitated. Then he added a hotel with a cliffside pool to the plan. And they both spent the week in the water. You were made to follow your whims.

We were made to help find a place on the beach with a pool and a waterfall and a soaking tub, and of course, a great shower. Expedia. Made to travel. I want to touch down on a couple things I loved about Behave, and then I would love if you would indulge me with doing a maybe condensed version of the holding a gun in a riot analogy, because I think that's the perfect way to sum up the book is just going backwards and backwards and backwards. But just the first thing I loved was it attacks this erroneous distinction between nature and nurture. It's like we've all grown up with this endless debate. Is it this? Is it that? And you so elegantly point out that there's no such thing

as a division. You can't ask what a gene does. You can only ask what it does in this particular environment. You can't ask what environment does. You can only ask what it does to somebody with this genetic makeup because the same gene works differently in different environments. The same extreme environment will shred one person and not the other because of their genetic makeups. They're absolutely inseparable. So nature or nurture or genes or environment, they're completely intertwined with each other. Yeah, like trying to separate where culture and our biology ends or begins is so true. And if you read The Weirdest People,

it's also a great exploration of that. But just it changes our actual physiology, our culture. It changes the shape of our brain, right? The fact that we read has changed the shape of our brain. And you get to look at cross-cultural differences. Different ecosystems centuries and centuries and centuries ago made certain types of people form some types of cultures and other types of people form others. Were you in a rainforest? Were you in the desert? Were you growing crops?

Were you hunting? Were you herding goats? Those are two worth exploring, just rice production and then pastoral nomadic herders. They make an impact. And if you're a nomadic pastoralist, people can come like low down sneaky sneaky varmints, can come and rustle your cattle or your yaks or your sheep or your camels or whatever in a way

that somebody can't come and rustle your rainforest. If you're a hunter-gatherer, people who are pastoralists develop cultures with warrior classes and cultures of honor and revenge. Among other things, they invent religions that have one God. Monotheism is the invention of desert pastoralists going with their sheeps through the Middle East. Rainforest dwellers invent polytheistic religions and people like Jared Diamond has done totally cool work explaining, hey, how is it that the desert pastoralist monotheists are the ones who conquered the entire planet instead of rainforest hunter-gatherer polytheists? Well, because they're militaristic as hell. And they have the culture

of honor and death is preferable to compromise. Don't come back from that war unless you come back victorious or in a coffin. Yeah. The Irish resettle in Kentucky and you got the Hatfields and McCoys. Like, it's incredible. Exactly. The South developed a culture of honor from herders. Irish and Scottish past was too wound up there. And that's why you got the highest rates of violence in the country in the South. And it's why you got the highest rates of violence in the country in the South. And it's a special kind. It's not from people like holding up liquor stores. It's people shooting other people who they know. University of Michigan, this guy, Richard Nesbitt, who's the king of some of these cross-cultural studies. And he grew up in the South and

he went to grad school at Harvard. And he gives this hysterical talk where he says, yeah, so I then went up to Northeast for grad school at Harvard and it was the weirdest place. People would get together there for like a 4th of July barbecue and nobody would shoot someone. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Whoa, what's with these people? The third cousin comes onto to your partner there, and that's one time too many, and out comes the gun, and you've just had a culture of honor. Robert, I'm not exaggerating. I'm from Detroit, so most of the people that I grew up around, my whole family, all from Kentucky. So then all those culture of honor people migrated up to the auto industry, right?

And I grew up there in the heart of that. And I moved to California, and I was at a Caro's's restaurant and I locked eyes with a guy at another booth and I just held my gaze. And I know how this ends in Michigan. It's either he looks away, I look away, we keep staring, stand up and walk outside and fight. And I keep staring and I noticed he just kind of gives me a smile. And I was like, what? What just happened? You can look at people here in California and not have to go outside. I mean, it was shocking. These cultural differences are heavy duty. And where the neurobiology comes in is these cultural differences from centuries ago influence how your mother raises you within minutes of birth. The classic contrast in this field

is between collectivist cultures. They're always talking about our rice growing groups in Southeast Asia. And the whole village turns out to plant your crops. And the next day you all plant that guy's crops and you maintain rice paddy irrigation canals for hundreds of years and collectively 50 villages versus individualist cultures, which is the U.S., like the poster child for it. Women who got raised in collectivist cultures, on the average, sing lullabies to their babies more softly than mothers from individualist cultures. The average number of seconds a baby cries before mom picks the kid up differs between the two. And you sure could bet which of those cultures wants the kid to cry it out.

The age at which kids wean, the age at which kids start sleeping alone. In other words, turning cultural anthropology into a branch of neurobiology, within minutes of birth. The ecosystems that made your ancestors value this and not value that was shaping how your brain was being constructed. Totally cool stuff. Okay, so the best part of behave is it answers a question that all of us are kind of obsessed with.

Or even if we're not obsessed with it, it's on our minds. Why did the person do the thing they did in our lives? And especially, I think if you come from the background I did where adults were often drunk and they were erratic and they were violent, it became even more important to try to figure out what is leading to that so I can avoid it and see the signals coming, right? So there's so much that goes into that behavior.

By the time you see it, and you have this great analogy of, let's just say a man, he's holding a gun, he's in a riot, and someone's approaching, and they pull something out. It looks like it could be a gun. The man shoots, and we say, what happened one second before he shot? What most courtrooms will ask at that point is, what happened one second before? And once we know the answers to that, we're set. Did the guy intend to shoot? Did he realize what the consequences would be? Did he realize there were alternatives? He could have done something else. And the answer to all of those is yes. And you say, okay, that's it. There was intent. He should be held responsible. The problem with looking at one second before, one minute before is you're not asking where did

that intent come from in the first place? Not if he had that intent at the time. Where did that intent come from? It had something to do with if the guy was hungry or stressed or sleepy or afraid or happy that minute. It's got something to do with what the guy's hormone levels were this morning. If he was secreting a lot of cortisol, his frontal cortex wouldn't be very good at saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop. That's not a handgun. That's a cell phone. Don't do it. Don't do it. Did the guy go through a trauma in the previous couple of years because the structure of his brain would have changed? And then you're back to adolescence and you're building the last year prefrontal cortex and childhood and culture and prenatal environment.

Again, your mom's poor and already that's having an effect on your brain and your genes. Right. And then if you have this one gene, right, MAO alpha, what happens then? It comes in a couple of different flavors and studies from rats and monkeys and stuff suggested that if you had one of those flavors, you were more likely to be violent. In a courtroom, somebody even once had somebody's sentence lessened, citing that they had the, quote, warrior gene. And then really beautiful, thorough studies looking at people where you know what their genetic makeup is, and you look at them from birth, and you're saying, which of them have had antisocial violence by age 25 or so? And the answer is, if you had the

bad version of that gene, were you likely to be more violent than average by the time you were an adult? And the answer was yes, if and only if you were abused as a child. It like turns that gene on almost. Yes. If you weren't abused, it didn't matter if you had that scary variant. It's not genetic inevitability. It was genetic vulnerability, gene environment interaction stuff.

And there's genes where, in principle, if you've got the bad version, you should be more likely to get clinically depressed as an adult if and only if you went through major stress as a child. Other genes, in this culture, if you have this gene variant, you're more likely to become alcoholic than chance. But in this other culture, doesn't have any effect. Why did that person pull the trigger? And you got to understand what was happening a second ago and what was happening a million years ago and everything in between, because all of that went into who that person was going to be at that instant.

And I left out, also, it's important to remember, your amygdala fired before any other executive action took place, right? And the amygdala is going to fire differently if it's an outgroup, so generally a different race. If it's a male, if they're big, right? Your amygdala is way ahead of your decision. Because you would think, okay, so your amygdala is about fear, anxiety, and you look at a snake, and that's scary. And so what happens? Your eyes see it, and it tells the part of your brain that

does vision, and it starts this whole science fair project of figuring out those are dots, and turn the dots into lines and the lines into shapes and eventually like three weeks later it's a snake and then that part of the brain lets the amygdala know and by evolutionary standards you would have been dead long long before that's not what happens the very first spot in the brain that that scary snake information goes to, it's going to go on to your cortex and start that whole complicated thing. But there's a shortcut that goes straight to the amygdala. And the amygdala knows before you do, before you are consciously aware, because the visual cortex has to go through all those layers and then say,

oh, it's a snake. That takes about three quarters of a second. It takes about a tenth of a second and your amygdala already knows. And that's great if you want to run away from snakes. That's really lousy if you've got a fraction of a second to be certain, or am I looking at a handgun or at a cell phone? It's also a system that has evolved in an era

where you only saw in-group members, or if you saw out-group members, they pretty much look like you. It's vestigial kind of programming as well, right? It doesn't account for a complex multi-ethnic world we live in. Exactly. There's this whole like asinine literature about the supposed inevitability of people doing us-them dichotomizing along the lines of race and skin color and gets inevitable. And you look at, for one thing, race didn't evolve until like two seconds ago from the standpoint of human evolution. And the other thing is, if you're a hunter-gatherer in the Kalahari, you are not going to see anyone who looks Asian or Caucasian or whatever in your

whole life. The nearest one is thousands of miles. All you're ever going to see anyone who looks Asian or Caucasian or whatever in your whole life. The nearest one is thousands of miles. All you're ever going to see in life is somebody who's the fourth or fifth cousin. The notion that we've been sculpted by evolution, that things like conspicuous physical signals of differentness, whoa, we have been selected forever to have the alarm bells go off. That's total nonsense. And the best way to see that is you take all those studies where you put someone in a brain scanner and you're flashing the pictures of faces. And in your average person, about 75% of the college freshmen psych volunteers, in your average person, you flash up the face of someone of another race and the amygdala activates in under a tenth of a second.

Holy shit, what are we going to do? This is inevitable. Now you do the experiment a different way. I'm in San Francisco. The person's a Giants fan. And now you're flashing up pictures and each face either has a Giants cap or a Dodgers cap. And you do that, and the amygdala isn't caring about skin color anymore. You flash up the Dodgers cap, and it activates in a tenth of a second. Inevitability of racism, my ass. Baseball is only, what, a couple hundred thousand years old? And already, your amygdala, you could switch from who's an us and who's a them in a fraction of a second. There's nothing inevitable about it. Yeah, there's so many categories we can assign to make us and them. And so often it's laughable on

the outside what groups were us and them, right? Their neighbors, their brothers, their family in the Civil War. Or what color sneakers you're wearing if you're in a gang, whether you wear this type of cap or this type of cap when you're praying to your God, whether you're wearing if you're in a gang, whether you wear this type of cap or this type of cap when you're praying to your God, whether you're willing to eat cow or not, and you're willing to kill people over that, and you're willing to die for that, or something idiotically symbolic like a piece of cloth that has a flag. Some colors and shapes, yeah. Weird stuff. You read the history of the Civil War, and what would happen in these battles is there's somebody carrying the colors of their union

or the rebels or whatever, and they're going into battle, and somebody shoots them and they fall over dead. And, oh my God, we need to carry our flag. So somebody picks it up and somebody shoots them dead, and somebody comes over and picks it. Whoa, these people were getting mowed down just because they were carrying this stupid thing around with them.

And each one was jumping at the chance to be the flag bearer. And why are you doing that? Symbols have a lot of oomph in the human brain. And we're willing to do really irrational things over purely symbolic stuff. irrational things over purely symbolic stuff. One of the things I heard you talking about in my research, which was so disheartening, was inner city kids, their level of PTSD versus returning war veterans. Pretty high in both cases and pretty logical. There's a lot of ways in which you could be taught that it is an awful, awful world out there that you have no control over and come out with this medical phenomenon of PTSD, there's lots of ways of getting there. Here's one of the most interesting

things that the PTSD field is still trying to make sense of. What's PTSD about? It's the trauma caused by you being under severe threat or your buddies next to you in the trenches and this trauma that you've undergone. And then you take this whole new species of soldier that evolved in recent decades. You get this guy, and he lives in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. And he gets up in the morning and gets the kids off to school. And they talk about, don't forget to pick up the laundry at the dry cleaner. And he gets in the car and there's traffic. So he gets a little bit freaked out because he's going to be late for

work. He goes into work, which is a building that's nice and air conditioned and comfortable. And what he does is he sits in a flight simulator all day and controls drones on the other side of the planet and takes out people with his missiles. At the end of his work day, he goes home and let's pick up some pizza on the way home. And the next day he comes back and kills people on the other side of the planet, drone operators. And something that blew people out of the water is the rates of PTSD among drone operators are at least as high as among combat pilots and ground troops. No one's threatening them and they get PTSD at at least as high of a rate. So it is turning that whole field over because what these people do is they spot a target, a suspected terrorist, and they follow him for days. With the viewing capability,

they watch him in his backyard, and they watch him with his kids. They watch him eating a meal. The other guy, his partner there, comes in for the meeting, and that's the day you let the missile go and wipe him out, and maybe the whole family in the process. And then what your job is, is to now follow everyone to his funeral. You've just spent weeks seeing this guy playing with his puppies. Then your infrared cameras show you as the heat leaves his body. That's what the trauma is about. And that is completely up into the field. It's not about the threat to you. It's about the things that you turn out to be capable of doing. You know that book on killing? Have you ever heard of that book? Yeah. Dave Grossberg. God, you're fucking exceptional. How did you just pull that right

away? But yeah, he makes a distinction in that book and I don't know how well it's held up under experimentation, but he said one of the big predictors of whether someone will have PTSD or not is do they think the kill that they were a part of was justified? Does it fit into their story of who they are? And when it doesn't, and when they start questioning what the overall agenda is,

that that's really when you see a ramp up in the rate of it. The dissonance there is this is the highest tech sneak attack in all of history. And there's been studies done on Japanese pilots and the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were shamed and undone because they were told they had already declared war on the United States. And that didn't come till afterward. That was horribly traumatic for those guys because it violated their code of ethics.

I snuck up on them. That wasn't fair. That's not what our culture values. It's one thing to say, I kill bad guys. It's another thing to say, I kill dads. That's very hard as your identity to take on. Also, he was saying in the book, yeah, if you're responding to being attacked and you kill to save your life, you're good.

Right. You're going to pretty much walk away from that experience just fine. Or to save your buddy. Yeah. If you have that in your mind, it was us or them, that's pretty easy. But at a Salt Lake City, nameless industrial complex,

it's hard to tell yourself it was them or you. What Grossman also emphasizes is rates of PTSD. You don't see a lot of it in the people releasing bombs from 30,000 feet up in the air. You don't see much of it in the guys who like send some artillery shell. You see more of it in someone who shoots somebody from across the field. But where you really see it is the hand-to-hand combat people, the ones where you've run the guy through with a bayonet and you get to watch it. That's where you see the PTSD because it's the, I didn't know I was capable of that. And the brilliant,

cynical thing about his book is that as people have learned this, what military training has done in the last century is desensitize people and make up close hand-to-hand combat feel more like a video game. That's what military training is about now, to make it automatic. Okay, so I love behave. And obviously behave would lead so organically to determined. Because what you've done in behave is point out all the complexity that leads to behavior. And so Determined, in my opinion, picks up very naturally from where Behave got us to. Which is not to say you have to read Behave to read Determined and enjoy it. But just it's a great primer for that because we're pretty well versed with the complexity of behavior and decisions and outcomes.

But what I want to say first about Det, it can be dense as was behave, but I will say it's equal parts or more. It's abnormally funny and playful. I mean, delightfully so. And now that I'm talking to you, that seems very natural and organic. I can't imagine you could have helped yourself from being playful and humorous, but there's a good deal of it.

I'm curious, does an editor ever say like, we're getting too much into the comedy zone here? Well, about three quarters of the footnotes wound up on the cutting room floor. The footnotes are where you're really cutting loose. Yeah, so it's not a surprise that I had to be written in a great deal on that. But so much of this stuff is just absurd. When you decide you're a Martian trying to make sense of the species. Yeah, the absurdities and the black humor and everything in there is pretty damn dramatic. Yeah. So the premise of determined a science of life without free will, it's very triggering to me.

I have to be honest. I come into this as like a devotee of yours. I idolize you. You're so brilliant. I've enjoyed your work so much. And I literally look at it and I go, oh, no, I don't want this to be the topic. I just picture Sam Harris, how excited he'll be to talk to you about this because he doesn't believe in free will either. And I'm kind of overwhelmed with like, oh, how am I going to make peace with this person I know is vastly more intelligent than me and more informed and the ultimate polymath. But I'm going to say right

out of the gates, you do a really admirable job of making very, very strong steel man arguments for the opposing view. So for the views that I hold, and as you point out in the book, probably 90% of philosophers and legal scholars hold. So I guess my first thought is just, was there any part of your brain that said, why fucking try? I know what the stats are. Why am I going to pick this fight? What's better than eggheads throwing mud at each other?

I'm pretty interpersonally non-confrontational, but doing it on a page is totally fun. And I guess at the end of the day, the bigger reason, I mean, I've kind of been thinking this way. When I was 14, I decided there was no free will. And you spend enough time studying behavior and test tubes. And at some point it stops being, behavior and test tubes. And at some point it stops being, okay, which part of the brain activated before which other part of the brain? Or is this a gene that's inevitable or is it one about potential? And down in the muck, they're trying to sort that out. And at some point you realize what this is about is the entire world runs on the notion that it's okay to reward some people and it's okay to punish some people for things they had nothing to do with and no control over.

For people who say, oh my God, if people stop believing in free will, that's so depressing, or that's so scary, or that's so demoralizing. If people stop believing that we could run a world of reward and punishment based on things that people didn't earn and are not responsible for, it's going to be a much nicer place to live. Well, we could almost start backwards. We've overcome larger leaps in thought. We've had bigger paradigm shifts. Maybe let's talk about epilepsy. paradigm shifts. Maybe let's talk about epilepsy. Epilepsy is one I'm sort of entranced by because 400 years ago, if you were some goitrous peasant with like gut parasites living in Paris and somebody had an epileptic seizure, essentially every single Western European country from peasant on up to royalty had the same explanation. It's because you're demonically possessed. And it was usually not that you were invaded by Satan against your will. That's apparently what the ancient Greeks and Romans thought, so that this was someone you now felt sorry for. This is someone

who went to bed with Satan. Made a deal with the devil, yeah. Exactly. And seizures was evidence of it. Monica has epilepsy, so she's feeling very seen right now. I think that's correct. Making a deal with the devil. It's a pretty appalling history. And that was it. And that was totally logical. And you burned about the state because you were worried about witch waves the way you're worried about crime waves these days. And you want to keep society safe from these people. And as long as you're at it, let's go burn the lepers and the Jews as well. And about 200 years ago, some people began to figure out this is actually a disease. Here's the tools we have. They were mostly ignored and they were publishing incredibly

obscure journals. And it took about 100 years for it to become commonplace where like your average person on the street knew this is a neurological disorder. This is not something you get from being satanic or masturbating too much or whatever, like Victorian mothers were telling their kids. And what we've seen is over the course of 400 years, it's gone from you slept with Satan to you got screwy potassium channel genes in this part of your brain. And that's why this happens. And it's a much nicer place now that people with epilepsy aren't burned at the stake. This is an improvement. And starting in around the 1930s to the 1980s, if your child in adolescence develops schizophrenia and you took your child to the best expert and specialist on earth and they confirm your

worst fears, yes, it's this disease, schizophrenia, and we can't cure it and it's awful. And you say, how did this happen? What causes it? And throughout half the century, the best people in the business had the answer absolutely straight in their head. They would turn to the mother and say, you did because of your mothering style. What? Because of this psychoanalytic Freudian bilge that we came up with during the time that schizophrenia is caused by mothers with an unconscious toxic hatred of their child. Oh my God.

You're already dealing with a fucking child that you're terrified about. And now you're burdened with the blame. It's psychopathic. The analysts during that period, all of them were like refugees from Hitler and came over and brought Freudian psychodynamic thinking to the United States. And before you knew it, schizophrenia was caused by mothers who secretly hated their children. Autism was caused by mothers who were cold and incapable of love. The jargon was refrigerator mothers. And then in the 1980s, people started having brain scans. And what do

you know? The brain is different in people with schizophrenia. The genes are different. In the 1970s, every single psychiatry department at every medical school in this country was being chaired by a Freudian analyst. And the change finally began to come. And when I was like Stanford was recruiting me about 1986 or so. And as part of it, they said, we've already taken all of our analysts out in the psychiatry department and shot them. They said, UCSF, San Francisco, just up the road, they're doing it now too. This is a good place to be. We're getting rid of those folks. Yeah. But in 86, that's how long ago. Yeah, that's two seconds ago. And you know, at some point they figure out this kid in your classroom isn't learning to read.

Centuries of intuition tell you to say, I don't know why this kid isn't motivated. And then it turns out there's something screwy that goes on in one layer in one part of the cortex and letters with loops in them you reverse them and you got dyslexia you hit us both listen i'm a seven on the a score and i'm dyslexic so we're gonna have a field day here in a second stay tuned for more armchair Expert, if you dare. Now, I can't imagine you're going to get a tremendous amount of pushback on reducing our blame and judgment. I feel like people are going to be more open to that. I think the thing people are going to really have a hard time with, and there's a chapter about it, is also not celebrating,

not congratulating. So that is very scary to us that we didn't, through hard work and dedication, arrive where we're at that we're so proud of, myself included. So tell me about the myth of grit. It's fascinating lecturing to audiences about this stuff. Of course, like who's going to show up for some damn lecture about this on an evening? These are lucky, accomplished people who have enough food at home and they have shoes. So you're going on with them and you're saying, oh my God, are you saying you can't condemn a murderer? But what they're really saying is, oh my God, what if I didn't really earn my salary and my degrees and my executive parking spot

or my corner office or whatever it is where I think I worked hard as hell, I am entitled. And it's clear to me that is much more upsetting to people in our world than just something trivial like murder and running around. Truly, it threatens my story because I read this free will thing and I go, well, hold on a second, Robert. High on the ACE score, dyslexic, any algorithm worth its salt is predicting I'm still an addict. I'm threatened by that. I'm like, what are you talking about?

I didn't bust my ass to overcome this impossible thing. What we have is an incredibly strong reflex is to say, you're made of better stuff than me. I couldn't have done that. And you're made of different stuff than me because I couldn't have done that. But okay, it's biology, whether you're like tall enough to be an NBA center.

It's biology, whether you have perfect pitch. It's biology, whether you have perfect pitch. It's biology, whether you have a good digit memory span. Yeah, that's the stuff we come with. And some people got better versions of that than others. But what really matters is what you do with your attributes. Do you show tenacity and fortitude? Do you squander your gifts? That's where you really find out the essence

of somebody. And translated in sort of the world that I come from, what you're saying is a long digit span is made of molecules and neurons and biology and the physical world and tenacity and willpower is made of stuff you get from the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny. It's the exact same stuff. If you get somebody who grows up in a certain type of adversity where there's not enough protein in their diet, they're going to have a shitty memory when they're an adult. If you grow up in a certain type of environment where it's a certain type of trauma and stress, you're going to have trouble resisting temptation because your frontal cortex didn't grow as much as it could. It's made of the same stuff. But there's this enormous intuitive pull that we have that what you do with it, that's really the

measure. And thus, when you look at some person who was able to overcome the addiction and someone who was not able to, or some person who's so smart, but they never worked at it, or some person who, oh my God, Muggsy Bogue, he was five foot three inches and he played in the NBA. And all these inspiring or discouraging things. There's this one finding, Fortune magazine, I read this, and 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation. Tenacity and pull yourself up by the bootstraps and Horatio Alger and debauchery of people who have such gifts and they spend all of college partying. And that's where blame and praise and judgment just comes pouring out because there's this incredible dichotomy. One part is made of biology stuff and the other is who you really are inside. And both halves are

made of the exact same biology. And that one's hard to resist. It could be a very good thing to tell your child who is struggling that because they're not naturally adept at something or other to praise them because they work hard, not because they are biologically more entitled as a result of that, but because praising for effort is very good. We're incentive-based animals, right? We respond to incentives. Exactly. And in the same way that while punishing somebody for something they're not responsible for ultimately is appalling, sometimes, you know, bopping somebody over the head makes them less likely to do that thing.

Yeah, praise and punishment can be used instrumentally just as a shaping tool, but don't tell the person about what their soul is like afterward based on that because that's got nothing to do with it. And that's the area where we just want to hear those tales of who overcame whatever, or we want to gloat at whichever great grandson of which billionaire has just wound up in the slammer. We love that because we've got that intuition and it's totally wrong.

And we run our planet on that intuition. Who's admirable? Who do you want to emulate? Who just doesn't have what it takes and who indulge themselves and who doesn't have a shred of self-discipline? And what it comes down to is the biology of you can't will yourself to have more willpower. It doesn't work that way. Now, where we see eye to eye, I think a lot of people's fear immediately when they hear this is you won't want to hold anyone accountable.

And I think you do a beautiful job with your car and the brakes analogy. And I think you should alleviate people's concern that, no, you very much feel like people still need to be in a quarantine model. Yeah. And that's where people really lose it first. So you're saying just have murderers running around on the street. Oh my God, give me a break. If your car's brakes don't work and you don't know how to fix them, you don't drive it because it's dangerous. You put it in a garage, but you sure don't lecture the car about how it's got a crappy soul. Yeah, it's not its fault. Or there's a circumstance where some humans can be incredibly dangerous to other humans, and you've got to keep them away to keep people safe. And that's if your

kid has a runny nose and you keep them home from kindergarten that day so they don't get everybody else sick. You don't put them at home and say you can't play with your toys today because you're dangerous. You do the absolute minimum to keep people safe from them and don't do a smidgen more and figure out how you can make a world in which people's breaks don't break down as often and you don't preach to them in the process. And there's a flip side to this, because the only logical thing that comes out of all of this is a criminal justice system makes no sense at all because no one's responsible. Nonetheless, you got to keep dangerous people away just as surely as you keep your five-year-old when they've got a cough away and the world runs better on a public health model of quarantine. And flip the other way, just as the criminal justice system makes no sense at all, meritocracy makes no sense at all either. And where people freak out at that point is saying, oh, so not only are you going to have murderers

running around the streets, but the person doing brain surgery on you to take out that tumor, you just picked them at random? No, you got to protect society from dangerous people and you can do it without having judgment and entitlement and all of that built around it. Your neurosurgeon should be competent and you should have people capable of doing their jobs. That's a good thing. And if you spot somebody who's going to be really good at fixing car engines or playing the oboe and makes people happy by doing that. That's good

if you set up their life so that they're the one who's going to be taking out your brain tumor, but you sure don't run society for them to think that they have earned their prestige. Or that they're inherently better than anyone else. Yes. And that they've earned their higher salary or their better health care, or the fact that they're more likely to have the police just politely ask them for their driver's license and shoot them. All of those things. And maybe you don't even give them more money than anybody else heading off running in that direction. But if blaming people with a criminal justice system makes no sense at all, a meritocracy where people measure their self-worth by what college's diploma they've got makes just as little sense because we didn't earn it either. Yeah, I definitely see that it's immoral.

In my opinion, it is immoral to be punitive. be taken out of the general population that we're a part of if they're dangerous. But to then try to punish them or get retribution to me does feel amoral and pointless and maybe the worst side of ourselves. And it's a much subtler version when having the exact same mistakes and intuitions going in the opposite direction. same mistakes and intuitions going in the opposite direction. When you got this college, Stanford, that sends me a paycheck now and then, and you look at these great kids who go there, and they're wonderful and all of that, and you notice, whoa, an unbelievable percentage of them had parents who read books to them and were upper middle class and never had to live in a homeless shelter.

And you realize it's a really, really tough challenge for them to not feel like they're earning something because they're capable of working really hard and focusing and skipping that party or going to the party and still being able to think clearly the next morning and all of that. It's the same set of intuitions running disastrously down the wrong way. And it applies there just as much. And that one's really hard for anyone who ever decided not to go to a party because they had to study that night for the rest of their life. They're really going to believe that gumption and tenacity is really the measure of somebody. Nah, you just had a couple more frontal neurons than your roommate did.

Yeah, I've had all those aces and I had all this thing, but I probably have something counteracting all that stuff. I did love reading. I'm glad you said this. This leap, I think people will be scared, right? That there'd be no punishment, that we would give up, that there'd be no point in trying. If we don't have free will, why even try to self-correct? Those would be the fears.

But it is a beautiful parallel you lay out between what I've experienced many times in life being an outspoken atheist, which is, well, if you're an atheist, then how could you be moral? If there's no God, why would you be moral? Which to me seems insane, like, well, because I care about humans and I actually don't need a deity to tell me to be kind to other people. It seems to me a little more, you know. There's that enormous bias there that if you feel people can't be held responsible for their actions because of all the science stuff, they're going to run amok. And if people believe no one omnipotent is ever going to hold them responsible for their actions, they're going to run amok. That's the fear. And what the research shows is when you get someone who has thought long and hard about what counts as right and wrong,

and what are the sources of human goodness, and who am I, and who do I want to be and why are we here and all of that stuff. What you see amazingly is if at the other end you conclude we have enormous agency and free will, or if you conclude I got no free will whatsoever, if you conclude there's a God or gods who love me and are watching what I'm doing every second, or if you conclude there's no God at all, as long as people have thought long and hard about this stuff, they're going to be equally and very ethically based in their behavior. It doesn't really matter if you've decided the source of human goodness is God or the source of human goodness is human. You've done the work, and what the studies show is if you do the studies right and ask the right questions, exactly

equal levels of ethical behavior between theists and atheists. Yeah, donating blood, all these little measures we would have. And between people who say we're nothing but free will and people who don't believe in free will. If they've done the work, just a handful of studies where there's a gazillion studies by now showing that about atheists and theists, but it's the exact same punchline. As long as if you sit there and someone says, what do you think of these most fundamental questions about why we are here and who you are? They say, whatever. That's the one whose ethics will go out the window if you whisper to them

that there may not be a God or we may not have free will, or that's the one who will be nice to somebody because you whisper in their ear about the fires of hell. That's who you worry about, regardless of the answer, the ones who thought hard about this. Same level of ethical behavior every time. These are my little pushback questions now. Why did you have to position it as binary? That there's free will or there's not free will? I think that's my main objection. I can concede that probably 90 some percent is pretty predictable if you knew every atom in the body,

what it was doing at all times and you had the computing power. I do believe it's in the high 90s maybe, but I don't know if I agree with the impulse to make it binary. In the same way that every time we make something binary, we're embarrassed by that decision, be it nature versus nurture, right? They're all on continuum. So I'm just curious why it has to be black or

white and why it can't be a continuum. Which is a really good pointed question, because what biology teaches you is continue out the wazoo all of that the answer is you think that way and i think exactly the same way most of the time when i'm just running on automatic because we're like nice liberals and we've been taught to be compassionate what we've been taught is there's basically free will but sometimes all of us kind of have less free will than we think if we're tired, if we're stressed, if we're drunk. And you know, there's some really unlucky people who have less free will all the time because of their low IQ, because they were a fetal alcohol syndrome. So there's generally free will, but keep in mind those special cases and go easy on them.

So you're making yourself elite again, kind of like I'm making room for it to be true with other people, not me. Is that the assessment? In effect, or it's reformist. Don't forget some people who you mistake for witches, like, oh, bad luck. Your teeth just fell out because they had gum disease. They're really not toothless crones. So don't burn them at the stake. Let's reform our witch not toothless crones. So don't burn them at the stake. Let's reform our witch justice system here and make sure we don't burn the wrong people. That's free will exist.

But keep in mind those special circumstances where it goes out the window for a little while or the really unlucky people who never got to have it in the first place. So be nice about them. But otherwise, here we go. We're all set to go. That feels wrong to you.

Show me neurons that do stuff independent of what your fetal life was like and what your great grandparents did for a living and what happened to you for breakfast this morning. There's no place to find room for partial free will in there because any version of getting any of it there, at some point, you got to invoke magic. Because at some point, you got to have the physical universe working in a way that it doesn't work. Okay. So if you're talking about religion, if we don't have free will, then we don't choose

whether we're religious or not. Or we don't choose whether we spend the time to debunk the ideas and then can make ethical decisions on that. If truly everything is determined, then we don't even have a choice in that. Exactly. I got brought up very religiously, and at some point I stopped and became an atheist. And then you look at someone who got brought up just as religiously, and they didn't stop. Or someone who brought up secularly, and at the same age I lost faith, they found faith. There's reasons

why. Different levels of resentment towards authority figures, different security about their place in the world, different genetic makeup built around how anxious you were made by novelty, different stress hormone levels that morning when somebody asked you if you believe in God or not, different desire to conform, different desire to whatever you do, do the opposite of everybody else because you're pissed as hell at your parents. Your environment, you meet someone charismatic who has a life you would like to have as well, and they think a certain way and you adopt that. Yep. And you read their biography and are inspired because someone along the way taught you how to read. You had the opportunity somewhere along the way taught you how to read. You had the opportunity somewhere

along the way to have respect for knowledge derived from books. And because just before you read the book, you weren't chased out of your town by warlords coming through rampaging on camels because, because, because. Nobody's choosing not to believe in free will anymore. And nobody is choosing to believe in free will or God or trickle down economics or libertarianism or that flipper was the greatest dolphin of all time or who knows what. Everything that came before brought you to that moment. Okay. So then my very last one is if I believe, yes, it is very easy to look at the outcome and then look backwards and explain it. I believe it. Why do you do this? Oh, let's look at his cortisol level. Let's look at his adrenal. Oh, here's our recipe that added up to that. That makes sense. But I don't think you

can predict forward. I don't think any quantum computer that knows every single atom in the universe sees Archduke Ferdinand get murdered and immediately it goes, okay, now there'll be World War I. The Germans are going to lose. There'll be Treaty of Versailles. Hitler will come about. He'll kill six million. He'll give rise to Stalin. As a result of that, inevitably Hugh Jackman is going to get a divorce.

Yes. Anyone could have predicted that. Do you believe that prediction is possible? It depends what you want to predict. I think you can do probabilities, which goes back to my continuum issue. Well, you look at some kid growing up in a hellhole of like an adverse environment, and you can make predictions about them. And every now and then they turn out to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner

instead of somebody who doesn't function very well as an adult. Who could have predicted that? You can't predict that. But what you can predict is if you look at people who grew up in households that involved both physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, there's this percentage chance that they are going to be involved in antisosocial violence by age whatever if you throw in on top of it that somebody in their home carried a weapon you've now moved at the percentage a little bit if added to that you now throw in that they had teachers who were good role models you've now pushed it down yeah you can't predict about this person

but you sure know enough at that point that it's not right to run society on the notion that if somebody has antisocial violence by age 20 with a history like that, that they had anything to do with that. You can't predict in this atomistic way under the microscope, but you sure know that there's enough predictable things on the average that we are running things immorally by saying, here's how things work on the average when it's completely incorrect. So is the future known, though, in your mind?

No, not on that level. That doesn't feel incompatible. We're getting into total over-the-top stuff here, like chaoticism and systems and emergent complexity and stuff like that. Self-organizing complex systems with divergence and emergence. It's the coolest stuff ever. And as soon as people started learning about that stuff, there was always this temptation to decide, aha, chaoticism, that's where we get free will from,

or aha, self-organizing systems, that's what we self-organized free will or quantum indeterminacy. And you really study those subjects and always there's still one step of magic in there when someone is saying, that's how you get from that. And in this particular realm, like focused in on your question, the point where things go off the rails is when people decide if something is unpredictable, it was not determined. Chaotic systems are by definition unpredictable. And no matter how big your magnifying glass is, you're still not going to be able to predict it. And it's not your limitations. It is implicit in the system, but it still is a deterministic system. Right. It still has cause and result. Exactly. It's just not possible to know what will come. And every theory that pulls free

will out of that requires you at some point to confuse unpredictability with indeterminism. I'm very comforted to think that you don't believe the future is written. I'll take that as just my silver lining. I do admire you so greatly. I am so fucking flattered you gave us so much of your time. I guess I could have only hoped reading Behave that I'd get to meet you like this. So I just want to thank you for all your time. And Determined is great.

This has been a very fun challenge. It's so enjoyable to read your writing and learn all the many, many examples you cite. It's such a pleasure. I hope people check out Determined, a science of life without free will. Thanks. This was total fun.

And thanks for having me on. And I don't know, let's- Party? Please. In effect. Are you out of kibble? I guess that's my question. No, no.

He finally got tired. He's sleeping now. I wore him out. Each piece of kibble, he had to trot across the room to get it. Okay, well, it's such a pleasure. I hope we get to talk to you again soon and be well and good luck with the book. Same. Thanks.

Take care. Next up is the fact check. I don't even care about facts. I just want to get into your pants. How you doing? First of all, your background surrounding is really nice. It's very New York, huh? Yeah, which one are you at?

What one is that? This is the Bowery. Oh, it is. I've never been in one of the rooms, only the lobby. Can you pan left? I want to see the rest of the room. This is the out. I have a little outside. Oh, it is. I've never been in one of the rooms, only the lobby. Can you pan left? I want to see the rest of the room. This is the out. I have a little outside.

Oh, Jennifer. And what day did you get in there? Yesterday morning. Okay. And how was, not Claridge's, but something similar? The Carlisle. It was fantastic. Did you go to the bar?

I went to the bar once and had a gold fashioned. What's a gold fashioned? It was an old fashioned with some extra stuff and it had some gold on it. Like goldschlager? Did it have a fiery rum or whatever the fuck goldschlager is? It has real gold, right? Goldschlager? I mean.

That's what they say. Does it? I mean, I find that hard to believe. Yeah. I wanted it because it was rainy the first day uh-huh and so i needed something warming did it warm your cockles yeah how are your cockles are you back are you down now to zero percent yes i'm fully healed oh wonderful so like one week and you're you got back to your fighting. My fighting weight? Not your fighting weight.

Your fighting training. I don't know. Bad analogy. No, no. Oh, God. Good night. Oh, my God. For the listener, Monica's phone just fell off.

Yeah. Well, you know, as you understand because you've been through this recently, when you've been constipated and then when you're not anymore. It's like a new lease on life. Well, there can be an overflow. Right, right, right. Yes, yes. Which is really exciting the first three, I'd say. Would you agree?

Yes. You're like, oh my God, that's over. Thank God poop has arrived. And for me, I'm like, wow, that's so much. Thank God that's getting out. God knows how long, you know, there's a sense of health associated with it. Toxins. Yes. But then on the seventh or eighth, you start going, are my organs being digested? Where is, did you have that? Where is it coming from? Yeah, and I didn't like that it was happening on the first day of my trip.

Oh, sure. You were in and out of the commode quite a bit. Yeah, and then, you know, it's like mixed with travel. So there's just a lot happening with the body. But I'm back to norms. You are. I think so. How many days of frequent trips were

there? One day of extremes. And then the next day, none. So I was getting anxious. I was like, oh no, we're getting into a bad pattern here. I don't know what the deal is. But then today has been normal. I've had two regulars. Okay. Wonderful. That's great. Yeah. Although it's a little early in the day, so that does have me a little nervous that you're actually entering back into a phase of massive evacuations. Well, but it's 2-11 here.

Oh, okay. Good point. And none have been, they've been solid. Well, that's good. And you have a teddy bear on your bed, I see? Yeah, there's a teddy bear here. He looks like a butler.

Is he there to serve you? Yeah, he's a little butler bear. And he's really cute. And when they do turndown service, they tuck him in. Oh, come on. It's so cute. It's really, really cute. Would he be as cute if you found out that that's the same bear that's been in the room for the previous 300 guests?

And they were like, we're trying to see how much love he can absorb. I mean, I like that spin on it, but yeah, I wouldn't like that too much. A little communal and in the rack. Yeah, it's lovely. New York in the fall. Forget it. They've made movies about it York in the fall. Forget it. They've made movies about it. They've written novels about it.

There's a lot of lore and it's all true. And I took a picture by some pumpkins. It was so picturesque. I don't think of pumpkins when I think of New York fall, but of course I should. You should. What do you think of? What's the image you immediately think of when you think of New York fall, but of course I should. You should. I think, what do you think of? What's the image you immediately think of when you think of New York fall?

That one thoroughfare through Central Park with the leaves turned and a couple of lovers in sweaters holding hands. Oh, that's nice. What is yours? Mine is Meg Ryan and You've Got Mail. And I do think she is holding a pumpkin. I can't remember if she's holding a pumpkin, but in my head she is,

and she's walking down the street with her pumpkin. Okay. You know, pumpkins, they're a big item, and shelf space is at a premium in New York. So it's a real luxury to have a big pumpkin probably, and they probably cost much more. Oh, maybe I'll stop in a store and see how much they cost. Oh, God, you might need to buy one. If you see one that's like $300. Limited 12-pound pumpkin.

Biggest in the city. I wouldn't put it past me. And then you're going out of town tomorrow. Are you ready and willing? I'm not ready, but I'm very excited. Very excited. Barton Springs is calling. It's whispering in my ear.

But let's talk about the more important thing on the table. Yeah, let's include the listeners that you went to the era's movie. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I didn't even know this was on the docket for the weekend, but Lincoln wanted to go, so it was either Kristen or I were going to take her. And I was like, well, I didn't see the concert, so maybe I should go check out the thing. And then let's start with some, like, base knowledge, which is I've always liked Taylor's music. I've enjoyed many of her songs. And I saw the doc, and I think she's like very prolific. And that's where it ends. And so go to this movie, and within, I don't know, 90 seconds, two minutes, I'm starting to cry, both because that's my sweet spot. Female singers expressing themselves. But way more than that, I'm turning and looking to my right, and Lincoln is singing at the top of her lungs

with this unbridled joy and happiness, and it was so pure. It was so, so pure. It was so moving. It just made me love her so much. And then, as you might expect, which blew my mind, now everyone's up. Now everyone's leaving their seats, and they're heading down to the big area between the screen and the seats. And now there's a sold-out movie theater, but at least half of the people are now in front of the screen dancing.

And it's mostly young girls. And they are so happy. And now I'm in real trouble. Now I'm like, I'm crying to that point where it's embarrassing me. And so I'm laughing kind of self-consciously. And then eventually Lavender came on. Lavender Hayes. And it pulled me down there. It really tugged me down to the dance area. And I danced as hard as I've ever danced for probably three songs. What an

experience. Yeah. Told you. And you did. You told me. And then I was, it was so powerful and like nothing I've ever witnessed. My brain was so active. I'm like, what is happening? Like, what is the secret sauce here? Why is this so incredible? I think if you're a girl or a woman and you watch her, she represents 100% freedom

in a way that I don't know that we've watched a woman live out loud. She's completely independently wealthy. She is being judged by her substance, which is wild. She is a big, huge star because of her substance, because of her work ethic, because of her substance, because of her work ethic, because of her creativity, because of her dedication. She's not there because she was a homecoming queen and she looked great on stage.

That is not why she's there. She made that reality for herself. And she is a one-person matriarchy. It's there. It's like the ultimate wish fulfillment. It might be the only example I can think of that I can just see that she has transcended the entire structure she was born into. And it's really cool. Yeah. Pushback. Yes. I don't want to because she's my favorite and all I do is defend her. So I don't want to not do that. I think that's all true.

I mean, I do think there are others. I think Beyonce is that. I think— But Beyonce is a—you got to add, though, Beyonce is a homecoming queen. She's like an angel that you get to witness and be in her orbit. We didn't know girls like Beyonce in elementary school. We know Taylor Swift. I know Taylor't know girls like Beyonce in elementary school. We know Taylor Swift. I know Taylor Swift.

She was in my elementary school. I know exactly what girl she was in every single class. Beyonce has this feeling of like, she's from another planet. Yeah, I see what you mean. The Taylor Swifts in my school were the homecoming queen though. I don't know.

She sings about that. So I think that's definitely a draw. She is someone who aligns herself. And we've talked about this on a fact check before, before you were a Swifty. Well, hold on, hold on. I'm not a Swifty, but I am very, very grateful to have experienced and witnessed what she's created. It's unbelievable. But I'm not willing to start arguing

with strangers about her and stuff. So I don't want to join that crew. But, oh, let me say, I had two big realizations, but I want you to finish your point, but just earmark, I have two big realizations about that, about the Swifty vitriol and then also the gift. I want to talk about the gift to the crew. Okay, but finish what your thoughts on her.

Yeah, she represents the girl on the bleachers, literally. That's her, that's the song. And that's most people. And she made her own destiny. Like, that's why it's such wish fulfillment, I think, because we all feel normal. None of us feel like Rihanna or I don't. She's the girl next door and she feels like us.

But through her own dedication and talent and work ethic, she said, no, I'm still I'm going to be the biggest star in the world. I don't really care if you voted for me for homecoming queen. I think that's the wish fulfillment part. This this probably is going to be controversial, but I'll say it. I mean, I want her to do absolutely whatever she wants in this world without judgment. I will say that for some reason,

I've been rubbed a little bit the wrong way. I've been like, what's my issue with this Travis Kelsey thing there's like a little thing going off in my head and I and I took me a second to realize what it was and I did I think it's because I am obsessed with the narrative that she is now the biggest selling stadium tour ever. She's a fucking superstar on her own. It's so impressive. She's holding the U.S. economy on her shoulders. I love that so much. So I think it bummed me out a little bit for like very quickly the story to turn into her and this guy uh-huh and nothing to do with her choices I want her to be happy and date whoever she wants but I was like no no no can we go back to talking about how much money she made and how

awesome she is on her own but it's in very much concert with the thing I'm suggesting everyone loves about her, which is, yeah, the girl next door got the ultimate football star. So, like, it's more wish fulfillment. It's like, yeah, don't listen to them. You be you. You show everyone through force of nature how valuable you are, and then you'll get the high school quarterback. Now, what I would be upset,

I think the thing that would be interesting for you to be upset about is, why him? Why the high school quarterback? Granted, I know he's not a quarterback, but you almost want her to get the equivalent of herself. I could see that being a little bit of a criticism. Like, don't, don't, don't,

like, break out, you broke out of the criticism. Like, don't, don't, don't, don't, like, break out. You broke out of the whole thing, and you're redefining it, so don't get sucked back into it. I guess. I mean, she, she's dated a lot of people. She's never dated an athlete. So I will, I. No, but she's just dating popular people.

I guess what I'm saying is, like, you want her to find the accountant that's as unique and cool as her and say, fuck you to the hole. that was the last boyfriend. Oh, okay. I don't know enough about. He really wanted

a private life. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. And it really is, you know, it's too hard. You know,

Travis, I do like though, what happened, he went to her concert. Okay. And he had a bracelet with this phone number on it. Like in one of the Swifty bracelets. He made one and put his phone number on it.

Was trying to get it to her. But he couldn't get it. Like, I don't know. He couldn't get it to her. He has a podcast, ding, ding, ding. And with his brother. Okay. And he was talking about it on the podcast and saying,

oh, I had this bracelet. I couldn't get it to her. And so somehow that made its way to her. Okay. And then the power of podcasting. I guess all this is about the power of podcasting as it should be. Yeah, it is.

Well, I'm really glad you felt that feeling. It's very hard to know unless you've been there. Yeah. I think that for me— And I want to be clear. I can't feel it the way you can, but I could observe it. Like, it was so salient to me, the effect, right? Yeah.

And I did get swept up in the people around me. Yeah, I don't want to act like I had some experience. But, like, it's undeniable. Also just the community. Like there are just so few, you know, I said this after the concert, it was like this singular, I mean, I know not singular,

but essentially this little baby was born and grew up to have the ability to get people at a movie theater to run down and sing and dance. And it is so spectacular. I mean, it is so special that there is a person who can rally a group like that in a positive way. Yes. Yes. Okay. So my two earmarked things, because I have this opinion, right or wrong, that's my takeaway, right? Like what she represents is so strong and so powerful and she represents freedom

and an escape from the patriarchy in a way that's really, I think, important. I have not loved how vitriolic the Swifties are, but once I realized like, ah, I get it. They're defending this impossible thing she accomplished and they do not want anyone trying to undo that or to mitigate that or dissolve it. So it's like, it's what she represents that they're also so vitriolic about. And that I understand. Like, I don't like it that she's a deity. That was my previous assumption was just, she's a deity and now people are acting

irrational because of that. But really I think it's such a noble and wonderful thing that any attack on her is seen as an attempt to break down what she's accomplished and to take away this thing this one woman has been able to do. And then another one, and this one's really bizarre. You might buy into it or not. When it was announced that she had donated 25 million or, you know, gave bonuses of 25 million to her crew, I had seen numerous women in my life talk about that so excitedly. And I had seen almost all the men have this same reaction, which was, yeah, if I made a billion dollars on a tour, I would give 25 million to people.

Like that was the knee jerk reaction. I myself felt that reaction. So I'm sitting there trying to analyze that. And I was thinking, okay, I think this is what went on. For every man who witnessed someone they love talk so excitedly about this quality somebody had that they know they could never have. They can't, they're never going to be able to give anyone 25 million. They can't be that generous.

And they're seeing this person they love that holds this into the highest level and they can't compete with that. And they're never, and it just feels immediately like, well well that's something she's not gonna love about me and then you point out like well guess what if i had a billion i would give away 25 you know like you you feel like i want to tell you i'd be that person you're obsessed with and love too if i was in a position to and then for women i think the reason it was so incredibly exciting there are these legendary stories there There's Keanu Reeves buying everyone a Harley on the Matrix movie. There's Magnum P.I. buying everyone Rolexes on the last season of that show. Men have got to be generous and get attention and be benevolent in a way that makes the news. Look at the Gates pledge. It's 100% dudes. It's Warren Buffett. It's Gates.

It's fucking Mark Zuckerberg. It's all men. There's no women that you're hearing about making the Gates pledge. So you guys finally had someone. You had a woman who's a fucking billionaire who can do that. And it's so symbolic. And it's like, yeah, she's a boss. There's a fucking boss on the scene.

And I can see why it's more than just what it was on the surface. Yeah. There's also just something really beautiful. Anytime you hear it, if you hear it, anyone, who's just really seeing everyone. Because the narrative about Taylor is she's one person she's a singer she writes all her songs she's it's just her and tough for her to say no it's not like I know that these people are critical for this I was I think the thing up specifically about Taylor it's not like Adele or Beyonce or Rihanna. It's her songs. It's not her voice.

I'm not saying she has a bad voice. I think she has a great voice. But it's the song. It's what she's saying. It's the lyrics. She's written every song, at least a co-author on. And you feel that. You relate.

When she's singing, it's personal her and then it's you it's not like any other person even with ungodly talent right um yeah but i'm really glad you went i'm really really glad and i'm glad you got a taste of it oh it was it was uh it was incredible we should go in lond In London to her show. To the concert. Oh, I would love that. Now I definitely want to be there in person. Oh, it's so fun.

Speaking of being in other places, I've ran into some incredible arm cherries in New York. You have some Big Apple arm cherries? Multiple. It's so fun. I like the Big Apple cherries. Oh, they're good. They're a very good strain of cherries. Okay, also switching gears to not a woman superstar.

Have you started the Beckham doc? No, because I've committed to watching it with Lincoln. And we had such a busy weekend because we had that. And then all day yesterday, we finished her fort completely, put the metal roof on, did all this stuff. And yeah, it was too busy of a weekend to get to it. But I'm dying to start. Are you in it?

It's good. I finished it. You finished it? Yeah, I can't wait. It's good. I want to debrief with you about it when you're done. Well, this is for Robert Sapolsky. Oh, snap.

And as you can imagine, it's hard to check facts on Robert Sapolsky. I'd argue impossible. If you were to check a fact, the odds are the reference piece would be an article he wrote. Yeah, so that part was tough. I looked up, he said there was a study on Norwegian parachuters studying the cortisol and stress response. I did find that there are actually a few articles about it. I didn't see that they were Norwegian. They just said parachuters and it said military and stuff.

But he probably knows that it is Norwegian. Yeah. Paratroopers? I think he said parachuters, but I'm sure they are paratroopers. Yeah, death from the sky. It's a very common shirt in the Army, Navy supply stores. Paratroopers, death from above. Oh.

Okay, how many deaths by hippo? Killing at least 500 deaths a year. Pachydermis killers. Big time. 500 a year. That's a lot, actually. It sure is. What a fucking gruesome way to go, too.

Death by pachydermis. They have those huge tusks. I know I'm looking at a picture right now. They're huge. They're like three feet long. They also, they can easily outpace a human averaging 20 miles per hour in short bursts. Yeah. You got to change direction a lot, I think.

That's the move. It's surprising because they're so big you wouldn't think that. You may recall from the African dance video, Bless the Rains Down in Africa, that there's a moment in that video where about 35 pachydermis, aka hippos, are coming down a river, coming to attack us. We had like a little moment in time standing outside of the car, and they were screaming and yelling. They were so pissed we were there.

And they came flying down there, making these crazy noises and huffing and puffing, and they wanted to come kill us. They want to kill humans. Yuck. Yeah. Do you think they killed you and you're just back for a new life? It's been a suspiciously good life

since that video was made. So yeah, I think that's likely. Oh, wow. Yeah. Let's see, what else do I have here? Oh, I wrote down that I looked really stupid because the day it was raining really bad here. I borrowed an umbrella from the hotel

and it kept doing that weird thing where it goes out the other direction. Right. Goes from concave to convex. Mm-hmm. And I looked so stupid and it was really embarrassing. And then I just had to own, you know, I live in Los Angeles. Do you know how to reset that on the ground?

It actually came back really easy. I think it was, to be fair, I think it was a problem with the umbrella because later I had another umbrella and I didn't have that issue. Okay. But it was one of those, like, tell me you live in Los Angeles without telling me you live in Los Angeles. Right, with your inside out umbrella. Yeah. I look stupid.

I had to buy some stuff to feel better about myself. Were you able to do that? Yes. I'm so sorry. I left something out because it's completely unrelated but during eras i understood for the very first time what the saying revenge is a dish best served cold means what do you think it means i mean to me it means oh wow i guess i don't know to, it means to have like a cold heart when you're acting out of revenge. Right.

So what I think it means is what I came to and I was just like, oh my God, of course, now that makes so much sense, is you don't want to exact revenge immediately after something happens because you'll get caught. Like someone cuts you off and then their tires are slashed the next day.

They know it's you So let that dish get cold Whoa Yeah, do it later Not when the dish is hot Not when the first insult is hot It's a dish best served cold Huh

That has to be what it means, right? That sounds right Yeah, I've never thought of it like that wow me neither i just thought it sounded cool but i didn't really know why it made sense but now i think that's what it means is like let some time pass let the dish cool and then serve it straight up the ass kapow i like learning stuff that seems like a riddle. Well. That was it.

The hippos was it for Sapolsky? Yeah. Hippos in that I wasn't so sure it was Norwegian. Parachuters. Parachuters sounds like a hobbyist, right? He said it. I wrote it. I wrote as he was talking. He said it. I wrote it. I wrote as he was talking.

I believe it. I believe it. But I just, in general, parachutist sounds, or parachuter sounds like a hobbyist. Whereas if you're parachuting for the military, I think it's gotta be paratrooper. Okay.

I don't know. That's just what I'm thinking right now. Anything else? I mean, I won't talk to you for a while. No, I'm just very jealous and excited you're going to eat at Emily Burger tonight. I'll think of you. It'll be delicious. Can't wait. All right. Well, I love you. Love you. Have a great rest of your trip. Thank you. I hope you have a wonderful trip too with the boys. Thank you. I think I will. Barbecue F1 in Barton Springs. Sounds pretty

pretty good. Alright, love you. Love you, bye.