Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Is There Free Will? The Unsettling Science Behind Our Everyday Decisions | Dr. Robert Sapolsky

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

In a world where choices seem endless, could it be that our 'free will' is nothing more than an illusion? When it comes to things like choosing a morning run over an extra hour of sleep, opting for an apple instead of that enticing pint of ice cream, or quitting your job on a whim……What's truly guiding these decisions? Is it willpower, biology, environment, or perhaps a unique strength of character we've built over time?Or… could it be something else entirely, something beyond our control?Here's where our guest, Dr. Robert Sapolsky - a renowned Professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at Stanford University - offers us a slightly unsettling, yet eye-opening, perspective.He suggests that every decision we make - from the podcasts we tune into, to judges making a case verdict, to choosing our life partner - isn't shaped by any sort of conscious control or free will. Instead, he believes our actions are driven by factors beyond our grasp and influence.Now, Sapolsky doesn't just challenge our perceptions of free will — he presents a compelling theory that could very well dismantle widely accepted beliefs in this arena.So, whether you're a leader interested in innovative ways to think about decision-making or someone craving deeply intellectual and exciting insights for your next dinner party, this conversation promises to radically reshape your perspective.And I can't wait for you to dive in!_________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. The only logical extensions of this are that you've earned nothing. You are entitled to absolutely nothing more or less than any other person out there. Your needs, your pains, your desires deserve no more consideration than any other human on this planet. And then as long as we're at it, number two, hating somebody for anything makes as little sense as hating an okay welcome back or welcome to the finding mastery podcast i am your host dr michael gervais by trade and training a high performance psychologist and i am so stoked to welcome

a thinker that i have had the highest regard for. And I've been wanting to have this conversation for a very long time. He is a rich thinker. He's funny. I just can't wait to introduce him to you. And so like, just start it this way. If you had a bowl of M&Ms and a bowl of kale in front of you, which one would you choose if you wanted to choose health? Okay, well, our guest today believes

that you wouldn't actually have a choice at all. Today's episode is with Dr. Robert Sapolsky. He is a renowned professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University. And his expertise on topics such as stress and free will and the intricacies of human biology and behavior, it's remarkable how deep he can go, how light and available he can make the information. And throughout his career, he's penned several bestselling works of nonfiction, including in 2017, a New York Times bestseller. It's called Behave.

It's amazing. I mean, this book is deep and it's rich and there's so much humor in it. I think it's foundational. I think it's foundational for our entire community to read this book. And I don't want to put it up on too much of a pedestal, but I really think that it's a meaningful book for you to read if you are interested in how psychology behavior works together for a better life. Now, in this conversation, Robert explores the profound ideas presented in his latest book, Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will. So he challenges the conventional notion, what most of us hold is that there is free

will. And then he offers a compelling perspective on consciousness and reason and emotion. And he makes a thought-provoking, very logic-based approach that there is no free will. And so his words are that it's a myth. And if so, we talk about how this impacts our sense of self and responsibility and how even a judge's level of hunger not only influences but determines the verdict in a court case. Okay. Talks about how our biology deeply influences our decisions.

Talks about why understanding the absence of free will doesn't lead to chaos but may pave a path for a more humane world. And we get into so much more. I mean, I want to encourage you to prepare yourself. I want to challenge you and maybe prepare you to embark on this conversation without anchoring yourself to my philosophy or his philosophy and just go through it and be open and enjoy the position that he's taking. And the position he's taken, by the way, has cost him dearly.

His sense of joy and happiness, I think there's some sort of compromise that he's trying to figure this out because his logic is so sound. So I want to encourage you to go with the conversation, feel your way through it, see where you start to put up some blockers, and just feel and think your way through this. And have conversations with other people about this conversation. It'll take you somewhere. I mean, the whole tapestry of human behavior is complicated. And the guided wisdom of Dr. Sapolsky is awesome.

His mind-opening philosophy and his skillful storytelling makes his research compelling. And the depth of the evidence to back his position is awesome. Now, for clarity here up front, he and I disagree. And we have fun with it. It's so stimulating how I felt in this conversation. And I hold that we have agency and he says that it's that's silly. And so I encourage you to go on a ride here. So let's jump right into this week's conversation with the legend, Dr. Robert Sapolsky. Dr. Sapolsky, I'm really excited. I'm nervous to have this conversation. It's an absolute thrill to have the opportunity to sit down with you. I've been wanting to do this for a long time. And the nervousness is after spending time reading your philosophy and your position, it could change everything. and you feel to me a little bit like a radical human with a match in their hand running around grass huts and promising that it's going to be better if we burn the whole thing down.

I just want to say I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. Well, with an introduction like that, I'm even happier to be here. So thanks. Glad to be here. Okay. So there's 8 billion people on the planet, somewhere around there. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the majority are aligned with the idea that we have free will, that we have agency in our lives. So are they wrong?

Well, let me be a good constrained guest here and say, yeah, they're totally freaking wrong, which is why I'm sort of way out in left field on this stuff. I think we are nothing more than the sum of biology that has brought us to this moment over which we have no control, and its interaction with environment over which we have no control. And this is relative to saying who we are. This is what we are. Okay.

So if we don't have, well, let's start with some defining characteristics. Help ground us. What is free will? What is determinism? And let's just start with some grounding, some definitions, if you will. everyone's operational definition of it misses the boat dramatically. And this is by people who really kind of should have this one down better, which is prosecuting attorneys and judges and juries and things like that. Okay, for most people, especially for them in a courtroom, what free will seems to be about is intent. Like 90% of what's going on in a trial is, did the person intend to do this? Did they understand what the consequences were going to be? And did they realize they could have done something else? There were alternatives.

And if the answer to those are yes, that's it. Lock them away. Case closed. And there's an equivalent to this there are these amazing studies done about 40 years ago sort of the scientists who fought over free will um have gotten embroiled in virtually the same issue of intent this was famous studies this guy named Benjamin Libet did this in the 1980s and blew people away because he seemed to have proven we have no free will unless you disagreed

with him and unless you disagreed them with the people who disagreed with him and they've been fighting about it ever since it's essentially sitting there and saying you stick somebody in a brain scanner so you could see what's happening in their brain and you ask them to choose to do something at some point. Just press this button whenever you feel like it. In other words, when do you have the intent to do that? And this entire literature revolved around the notion, did your brain decide to do that before you consciously thought you were intending to do that?

And this is what Libet seemed to be showing. Look, we're not deciding. Our brains have already decided by about a half second. And people have been arguing about what his measurement tools were ever since. And like in the last year, somebody has published a paper with a title almost like Libet had no idea what he was talking about. Like people have been arguing about this one forever, which is exactly when do we form intent and when do we become aware of our intent? And this is another version of what they're doing in the courtroom. And this is the totally wrong question to ask and gets at sort of where I'm coming from with free will because sort of the metaphor I use is asking like whoa did they intend to do that and when exactly

did they intend to do that is like reviewing a movie based on only seeing the last three minutes of it because what none of them are asking is the key question, oh yeah, where did that intent come from in the first place? And that opens up the only domain where you should be trying to make sense of free will. And you try to answer that question, and that's where it occurs to you. There isn't a shred of it in there.

So let's ground it here. Free will is the idea that we have the ability to choose our actions. Or it's the reality that you actually do as opposed to us telling ourselves that we do. And your position, I was kind of hoping your position was that there's a lot of biology that gets into our decisions and genetic coding and environmental conditions, the neighborhood you grew up in. There's a lot of stuff that goes into reducing what you might think are available options. And I hope you'll tell the story about judges who, depending on whether they're making decisions on an empty stomach or on a full stomach and how that outcome goes. But this idea that there's so much complicated influence to our decisions that our potential responses are more narrow than we might believe.

And then you drop the hammer right on page like eight that now I don't think there's any free will. And so I, this is where I start to get confused. And the confusion is one, I mean, I'm 50 years old and I've been learned and thought about free will since I was, I don't know, five years old that that's, it's my choice, whether I, you know, I eat the candy bar or I eat the vegetable. Like I'm making a choice here at some level in my life. I'm, if an alcoholic is making a decision to pick up the drink or not drink, like it's a choice. And so of course there's choice. So how do you help to, to square those two in a way that some like somebody like me like a second grader could figure this thing out okay so suppose making a choice you're sitting there

and looking at the bowl of m&ms and the the kale or something in the bowl next to it and you say okay look I'm health conscious and I know all this stuff and damn, those M&Ms look good, but I'm going to eat the kale. I'm going to just reach over and eat the kale. And you reach over and you get the M&Ms. What happened just now? What went on? And if you're somebody who's like trying to figure out whether you should be found guilty of that and jailed if you're in a legal setting, or if in the realm of scientists who think about that aspect, try and say, okay, when did you intend to go for the M&Ms instead of the kale and all of that? That's not what you should be asking okay so you could ask what went on in your brain one second before in that fragment of time when your hand moved from like being on a straight path to the kale and instead

wound up with the m&ms what part of the brain did this what part of the brain turned off and like okay we seem to just figure out what went on there that's not what's going on because you got to ask all sorts of additional questions. What went on in the minute before that, in the seconds before that, that triggered your brain, that triggered you in that last quarter second to switch your arm over to the M&Ms? How intensely do you smell odors? How intensely were the colors of those damn m&ms like just mesmerizing to you at that point when did you eat how much did you sleep last night are you in a distracted state of mind okay so that's part of it because there's a whole world of science showing you can manipulate stuff like that and you can change people's behavior and they won't even know what happened,

but that's not enough either. Because then you have to ask, okay, how about like a couple of hours ago, what were your hormone levels like? What were they this morning? What were they when you went to bed last night? Because what those levels are, are going to have influenced how sensitive your brain was to memories and thoughts and stimuli and all of that. Like if your testosterone levels were elevated this morning, they're still going to be having their effect. And you're looking at a face that most people would sit there and say, yeah, that's a neutral expression. They don't look angry. They don't look friendly, just neutral. If you have elevated testosterone levels at that time, neurons in your brain are going to work differently. And you are more likely to say, that looks like a threatening face. I feel threatened. Okay, so that's part of it. But now you got to say, so what's been going on in recent months? Suppose you had some horrible trauma months ago, or suppose you found God months ago.

Like, that changed your brain. There's this whole, like, trendy term neuroplasticity. Like, I don't mean something subtle. Like, go through some strong experience, and different parts of your brain have gotten bigger or gotten smaller over recent months. And that's good to determine how you're responding to the hormones that will make you more or less sensitive to what the stimuli and your vongole. And from there, you could see we're just off and running. What was going on in late adolescence? Because that was the last time you were doing a major construction project on a

part of your brain that's got everything to do with whether you're going to go for the kale or not. And what was going on a child and what was going on when you were fetus and what about your genes and what about culture and evolution. And at some point you say, Hey, how did I become who I am? What made me suddenly switch over to bm and m's because of everything that happened from one second ago to a million years ago and everything in between and there's no room in there to shoehorn in free will okay quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation finding master is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true.

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for 60 days at linkedin.com slash deal. That's linkedin.com slash deal for two full months for free. Terms and conditions apply. Finding Mastery is brought to you by David Protein. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat and the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And. I'm pretty intentional about what I eat. And the majority of my nutrition comes from whole foods. And when I'm traveling or in between meals on a demanding day, certainly I need something quick that will support the way that I feel and think and perform. And that's why I've been leaning on David protein bars. And so has the team here at Finding Mastery. In fact, our GM Stuart, he loves them so much. I just want to kind of quickly put him on the spot. Stuart, I know you're listening.

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and peanut butter. I know Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Let's jump right back into the conversation. I thought about how you and I were going to have a conversation. And I was thinking about your experience in this conversation over and over and over again.

And I have a compassion for you because you must be terribly bored talking about the same first core principles because this is ground zero of consciousness, behavior, purpose in life. It's like a ground zero conversation. Well, it's so much of me doesn't want to have it, but, but so I have this, I have this feeling for you. So I don't want to exhaust you out of ignorance and I don't want to exhaust you out of yeah, but, so I'm not going to do that. No, no, that's very kind of you, but this is so exciting this is like so yes i'm not i'm not bored okay so okay good so all right so here's the thought that to me sounds like and your job is not to convince me

right this is me just wanting to deep deeper understand and look this is a real book so this is not for the faint of heart. Like you've put some real muscle into this thing. And so I respect it and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. So here's where I go. I would love for you to open up the idea about, to me, that sounds like deep influence. So my state, whether I'm fatigued, hungry, testosterone is elevated or not, that's a state of being that I'm in or a person is in. And that confluence shapes and influences my decision. meaning I decide, as opposed to I'm deeply influenced. And you're saying determined to choose the kale versus the M&Ms, or the M&Ms versus the kale.

So how do you square that? That all of those influences that lead up to the moment that you take action, you are determined to take the next natural step as opposed to you're more influenced than might you imagine well the stance you've got is one that most people will go to if they like reflect on the fact that you just manipulated them into choosing X instead of Y. And whoa, I thought I was, okay, how do I make sense of all of this? All the stuff that came before is influencing me, is bending me a little bit in one direction, then modulating my likelihood. Well, at the end, what I've got is like this image that people have had for centuries.

There's a little man inside your head. There's a little homunculus, a little soul in the machine there. Yeah, it like pays attention to the news and it tries to read up on like science blurbs in the People magazine to sort of keep up with stuff. It kind of gets sleepy if he reads too much about it. And yeah, he's getting distracted because there's an itchy mosquito bite on his ankle that he got last night and so like he's yeah he's got to make a decision and yeah he's okay let's see what the genes have to tell us oh christ they're always going on about that and what what did what did mom say to me when i was okay all of that and then you

think about it and say okay so here's what I'm going to do. This notion that there's a you in there that's sitting there separate of all this biology gunk. Yeah, the biology gunk can influence you. And sometimes it's pretty impressive because it's really loud or it's something that really hurts to like try to go. But there's a you there there's a you there that's separate of all of that that could sit there and somewhere in there is the captain of the ship and there's no you in there people have gone looking for it the people who like try to do the neurobiology of consciousness which there's no thing in there that's separate of the sum of all that

stuff even though it sure as hell feels like it when we decide that like it sure as hell feels like it when we eat the m&ms and we feel like we've been a failure and and or when we go for the kale and we feel like we simply have more self-discipline than your average human walking around on this planet because we function very very easily and intuitively on this notion that there's a me in there that could be influenced by this stuff but ultimately decide and there's no me in there there's nothing separate of all that stuff going on. Yeah. That's where your kind of first principle originates is that there's not a consciousness. There's not a me or a watchless watcher. There's not the I in the system. And I really appreciate when you say it feels like it. And then the thing that i've been wanting to ask you is it's hard to prove anything

and um it's hard to prove things it i think that is a the all the disciplines of science are trying to prove something it is hard to prove, especially hard to prove or point to something that we can't see. And just because I can't see it or you can't see it, I hear you saying, well, then it doesn't exist. And then I hear you say, but I feel like it's there. And so that intuitive feeling like I'm choosing, now intuitive, the language escapes me here. And you're better at this because you've been thinking more about it. But this sense that I have that I'm choosing just because I can't see the I, I'm not sure that that means it doesn't exist. So that's what I'm trying to square with your point of view. But help me understand why so many of us have that sense, felt, experience that there is an I.

There's the watchless watcher. There's that sense of self that is making the decisions to, we're stuck on kale versus M&Ms, making the choice to choose one or the other? Because we're living in our place in time and intuitively this just makes so much sense because those are the intuitions of our time. By the way, just to do my Mr. Science 101 thing, we scientists don't really prove anything

because if we're really being scientists, you should come up with counter evidence and you'd say, that's it. All of my beliefs are wrong. The world is round. We plates move underneath our continents. But yeah, nonetheless, the general theme there. It seems so intuitively right

but let me give you two examples um if it was i don't know 300 years ago and we're like educated americans and sitting there and like we even have compassion and we've like eat our vegetables and all sorts of stuff and it would have seemed intuitively right that it is simply simply the case that some people need to be slaves because they are so fundamentally incapable of doing things on their own that in fact you're doing them a favor and if it was 500 years, and we were just as like nice, bleeding heart liberals as we are now, but the versions of the 500 years ago, and somebody says something mean to someone else, it just makes perfect intuitive sense that that person has slept with Satan. And that's what they're about now. And it just makes sense it just makes sense it just makes

intuitive sense until something comes along and you say whoa i had no idea biology had something to do with that or i had no idea that isn't how it worked and all we've been doing for these last 500 years is stripping away more and more realms of where we think we understand what just happened. And then it turns out, no, there's stuff happening we never even expected. And with any luck, you start viewing the world and viewing your me-ness differently at that point. So with the advent of good scientific investigation, We know better about, like we used to think that a hysterical person,

they had their, they had their, a woman had her, her organs running throughout her body. And it was, it's just, it was, and that's like,

that's like, no wonder they shouldn't vote. It just makes sense. What, what is that in your background oh okay okay after this this is our national geographic clock which we've had since the kids were little and every hour on the hour it makes a different animal sound which it's always like interesting i think somebody in the living room here hasn't been in the area before and like suddenly there's something quacking in the background and we don't notice and the dogs don't notice and they're saying what the hell is that because we've habituated to it years ago yes so that's our national geographic okay so we we have just entered the hour of the, I don't know, the hyena or something.

Okay. So we are better in our understandings of neurobiology by much of your contributions and your peers and certainly better with psychology, thinking that the hysterectomy or schizophrenia was evidence of a cold mom. We're so much better. And, and still how do you, what are you pointing to is evidence that there is a deterministic approach to life. And then I'll get off the subject because I want to move into like, what do we do about it? Or what do we do? So what is the evidence if we can't see the eye? Right.

And I hear what you're saying about the intuitive. It just makes intuitive sense. But that's the framing of which we're understanding the human experience during modern times. So what do you point to to help people understand that that's absurd? Okay. So you're keying in on the two ways to take it down, which is, okay, I give up. Yes, we don't believe in Satan anymore. We don't believe in this. We've learned some stuff.

But what about this? What about that? What about that other thing? And I don't want to do that with you. No, no. That's exactly what you should do. It an itch it's more of an itch no no because it's totally lame for me at that point to say yeah but i bet if you come back in 10 years or 100 years we're going to understand that's not going to work um and a second version of that is one i i kind of have this hobby by now that I work with public defenders offices on murder trials with people who like their brains were not working right at the time.

And I'm supposed to like teach a jury about the brain and all of that. And this is after like my guy, the public defender is like holding my hand and we're going through my song and dance. And then the prosecuting attorney gets up and gets to cross examine me. My guy, the public defender, is like holding my hand and we're going through my song and dance. And then the prosecuting attorney gets up and gets to cross examine me. And if they know what they're doing, they're going to shred me within minutes because they're saying, OK, so this guy has brain damage. He had a car accident when he was 10 or whatever. And you're saying it's involutional, all of that. Would every single person who had that type of brain damage had just, would they have just killed 11 people like this guy did? Could you have predicted it? And I have to say,

uh, no, no, we can't do that yet. And he says, ah, like, don't listen to this guy turning to the jury or whatever. Um, yeah, there's stuff we still can't explain and we don't have strong predictive abilities, but here's where I turn into a total pain in the ass because I flip it around and say, okay, suppose you just did something. You, you just were stuck with this. You just picked up that M and M and here are the four motor neurons that told your muscles to do that. And they just did that.

They just did that. And at this point, like I trot out a challenge and here's the challenge. Part one, show me that those four neurons would have done the exact same thing, no matter what the other 80 billion neurons in there had been doing. But that's not enough. Show me it would have done the exact same thing if the room smelled like this. And if you had had this for breakfast, then show me it would have done the exact same thing if your hormone levels were completely different this morning. And if your last three months have been different, and if your adolescence and your childhood, and if you had a completely different bunch of genes and if you had been raised in this culture instead of that culture

change every single one of those things and if those four neurons had just done the same thing that's it you just proved it there's free will i give up and go and prove that and nothing we know about how the universe works and the physical laws of it could show you that those four neurons would have done the exact same thing because they wouldn't have been the same four neurons and you wouldn't have been the same you and go and show me that and you've proved it that's your proof what do you think is an easier position to point to that or to defend a position? Is it that there is free will or that there is not free will? Definitely that there's free will. And this is where like if I'm being a good dinner guest or something, this is where I try to like not be in their face too much and find a nice middle ground. And the middle ground is something that like a contemporary, humane, progressive, informed insight about the

world would bring you to, which is, yes, yes, yes, we have free will. There's times when it stops working in us. If I'm stressed enough, if I'm scared enough, there's points where all of us lack our free will and stuff takes over. And there's some people who really have a whole lot less free will than us if they have a certain type of brain damage, if their IQ is, if they have fetalal alcohol infant or whatever. But all of this, these are the edge cases. These are the exceptions. Overall, try to keep that in mind if you're on a jury or try to keep that in mind if you're totally frustrated with somebody who's got this neuropsychiatric diagnosis.

But basically, we've got free will, and this is stuff superimposed on top of it. And this is basically the stance. It even gets a label and it applies to 95% of philosophers who think about it, which is compatibilism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You admit we're made of atoms. We're made of the same stuff that comets are made of or like warthogs are made of. Yeah, we're made of stuff and it forms into molecules, neurons, all of that.

But here's how that nonetheless is compatible with the notion that at the end of the day, there's a me in there that can make stuff separate of that. So the nice comforting resolution is, yeah, that's basically how things work. But keep in mind the exceptions. And don't be a jerk and yell at somebody for something they really couldn't control because they're one of the exceptions. They've got dyslexia. And all you're doing there is drawing an artificial line between where you think the biology ends and the you and the them and the essence takes over. And there's no way to like, they're not just edge cases. This is not just how it works most of the time. But keep that in mind before you give somebody the death penalty. This is all there

is to all of us all the time. So it's a question of where the line is. And you've just backed the line all the way down to ground zero. Yeah. Until there's no line. Yeah. There's no arc. Yeah. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors.

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all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FINDINGMASTERY20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. I don't think there's some research around politics and political positioning that when you argue a political position, very few, if any people change their mind, you know, like moving a left to a right is like that takes time, right? Would you agree with that finding and with that statement? Actually, what I think the really

depressing research shows over the last eight years or so is that if you show somebody absolute proof that their extremist stance isn't true, they're going to believe even more afterward. Oh my God, they're really bringing out the big guns with the lies there if they're trying to. Yes, I agree with you completely. So I think our community, most of our community is attuned to agency and free will and this posture in life to do your very best and to be a out some of the biological impulses that those depraved humans at one point, you know, could only respond to because they didn't have the willpower. They didn't have, yeah, let's use willpower, or they didn't have the discernment or the fortitude to not choose the sugar over the health choice or whatever, you know, if we stay there one more time. So I wonder if, and let's kind of, let's move into

like natural selection and let's move into that frame just a little bit. How does not having free will support a position of evolution by natural selection? Okay. How about this? Let me give you the opportunity before we pivot to, damn, what does this all mean? And why are we holding onto this? Okay. Give me one last chance to convince every single person out there that they have at least happened. Okay. Three examples of stuff that has scientifically been demonstrated. And just picking three from the one second before to a million years before. One second before.

If you take people, stick them in a room, and give them a questionnaire about their political views, their social politics and their economic views and their geopolitics and all of that. If the room smells of stinky, horrible garbage, people become more socially conservative. This has been replicated. This was a Yale group that originally showed this. And how's this for the flip side? If the room smells of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, people become more generous when they play an economic game. And you would say to somebody, wow, that was really a nice offer you just made. Why did you do that? And they're going to tell you about like, I don't know, Christ's sermon on the mountain, they're not going to say because this room smells like cookies. So that's in the one second before you make your move. Second example, your fetus, your fetus, and like some of these neuroimaging techniques have gotten good enough that you could do neuroimaging on a fetus and see how their brain is developing,

which is like amazing. And studies are now showing the socioeconomic status of your mother while you were a fetus is influencing how well your brain is developing. What the hell? Because poverty elevates stress hormone levels and stress hormones get across the placenta and influence how you're making more of this part of the brain and lesser that part of the brain. And it works this way. Last one. So how do you feel about immigrants? How do you feel about it? And like people in different cultures feel differently about people who look different and pray differently and love differently

and all that stuff. And what are one of the significant predictors? 400 years ago, what was the infectious disease load that your ancestors were dealing with? Because if they were dealing with a whole lot of infectious diseases that was wiping half of them out, they didn't like strangers coming in because who knows what stuff that infectious disease load 400 years ago predicts the tonal basal level of xenophobia in cultures today are you kidding me because the culture they invented 400 years ago from oh their ecosystem is one where there's a lot of these like diseases where you like

major organ failure and you're dead two days later because of some little bacteria that that guy brought into our hamlet that was the culture their kids were raised on and their kids kids in there and that was the culture you were raised on and what people show is within minutes of birth there are cultural differences in how mom is interacting with you so the smell of the room one second ago whether mom was worrying about how she was going to pay the rent when you were a second trimester fetus to what your ancestors were doing like back in their like Savannah or whatever, all of those are part of what made you, you once again, just to be my jerk on the way out from this, show me that none of that stuff made any difference.

Okay. I'll leave you alone now. If that, if that doesn't work, if people are saying, Oh my God, smells in the room when you were fetus, when you're okay. So let's, why would we be so resistant to this? I'm betting is where we're heading. Well, yeah, yeah. You've yeah. Yes. But let's stay here for just one more minute because walk through the finding about judges and their sense of satiation and how that influences their decision from the bench. Okay. This is one of those studies that looks like I was so happy being a scientist when I first read this one. This was a study that came out, I don't know, about a dozen years ago, published in a very high quality, prestigious journal.

This was a research group that looked at a whole population of judges in a small country, the judges who make parole decisions. Some prisoner comes, they review the whole deal, and they either decide this guy can walk free or this one goes back to jail. And they studied all of the parole decisions by all of this country's judges over the course of a year and was like thousands of decisions and tried to figure out what was going to predict when a judge would let somebody go free. And it turned out the single most powerful predictor was how many hours had it been since the judge had eaten a meal. A peer before the judge right after they had had a nice lunch and you had a 60% chance of being paroled by four hours later, a 0% chance. Oh my God, what the hell is that about? How long has it been since you've eaten determines your blood glucose levels. Blood glucose levels help determine how well your brain works.

And it helps determine how well the most expensive part of your brain, something called the prefrontal cortex works. And what does that do? That's the part of the brain that says, wait a second, before I make a decision, what's the world look like from this person's perspective? How did they turn out who

they are? Because they sure had experiences on their perspective taking, trying to think about how they think about the world. That takes the most expensive part of your brain to do its job. And there you have it. That particular study has been mired in controversy ever since because all sorts of people have come in and sniped about the statistics and stuff. And I, you know, this is kind of the stuff that I'm trained to do to pour over the people who've been complaining about it. And the authors knocked down every single objection to that. And since then, it's been replicated. You go into a bank and you ask for a loan. And the length of time has been since a meal influences how likely this person is from an out group, if it's someone from some minority. The number of hours it's been since this doctor slept will increase, will influence

how much implicit racial bias they have when you give them some little formal psych test. This stuff's going on all the time. So the hungry judges phenomenon has stood up to all sorts of criticisms, and it's in all these different realms. So that's an amazing example of it. That's the most irresistible one out there. Same with misdiagnosis and nutrition or feeding time. When docs are hungry,

there's an increased risk of misdiagnosis as well. Exactly. Okay, two fast ones. If you were a prisoner and you're coming up for a parole judgment, really, if you got any choice in the matter, do it on your birthday. Because on the average,

sentencing decisions are a little bit shorter if the judge knows it's your birthday, especially if you're the same race as the judge. Surgery, go into surgery and pray and hope that it's not the surgeon's birthday, because there's slightly a higher mortality rate when surgeons are operating on their birthdays because they're thinking about something else. No, these are not big effects, but this is just one more little piece of it. Your birthday and judges decide to go a little bit nice on you as a result. This is amazing. Unless this hungry judge effect, unless you're appearing in an Islamic country, and it's during Ramadan, and you're hungry because you fast every day. And you're doing that because you're thinking about your fellow man, judges in Muslim countries become more forgiving,

if they're starving during Ramadan. Now, if it's a regular old day, they become more punishing. So you got your blood glucose, but then there's culture and like religious, and whoa, yes, yes, yes. None of these are gigantic effects, but put all these little effects, some of them are big effects, but put all of them together

and show me that those four neurons would have done that no matter what. And it's not there. I love all of these findings. And it doesn't quite still square with me. Sorry for being slow. That those, help me understand the difference between like a radical influence below the surface, below conscious awareness.

There's these radical influencers that are shaping behavior or influencing choices as opposed to determining. And actually, before you go, maybe I can, I'll tell you where I think you might go and maybe we can play that game. You might say, look, we know some of them, but if we knew in totality and our science is not there, our understanding of science is not there, if we knew in totality all the confluences that are taking place in a nano of a second, of course, one day we're going to know those things better, but you don't have the agency you think you do. You don't really have any. And that's because we can't quite point to all the things, but we have a better sense now that it's not going to turn out the way you hope it does. Yeah. And this is the, at the end of the day, no, we can't predict what you're going to do next. If we want to go into it and it's like agonizing 30 seconds of why chaos theory doesn't prove free will and why the fact that there's quantum determinism doesn't, but this is like way

out in the left field. No, no. I think that these are worthwhile because it's something that I know that my friends will point to about chaos theory and they'll point to the quantum determinism or quantum, what's it called? You just said it. Quantum little stuff. Quantum determinism. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think it's worth a tour here. And then I'm going to get to like, why the fuck does all this matter? You know, like, okay. Like, like I, I'm not sure this is good for people at, at, you know, so

I mean, there's, there's like this magical myth that you're in control of your life and do good. And we're all better. And this is a path of happiness. There's, I do want to get to that. Okay. But let's, let's play with, let's do the exercise.

Let's take a tour of the two factors that we're just talking about. Okay. And like, just to make you feel better, because you keep saying, you know, this is interesting, but I'm not convinced.

I'm not convinced. 99% of the time, I'm a total flaming hypocrite because I can't function this way. Every now and then I'm able, you know, people piss me off. I know. Yeah, right. People piss me off or somebody compliments me. I feel kind of good afterward. And like, oh, I've just violated my intellectual and ethical standards because I can't do this because I'm a person of my place and time. And like, I got to sit and work really hard and say, wait a second. It's not really their fault. Or wait a second. You really didn't earn that where somebody just complimented you about something. And so, yeah, I'm in the same, but this is not easy. I'm not saying this is going to be easy for anyone. Okay, chaos theory, total revolution swept through about 40 years ago, totally amazing, which shows that there's all sorts of obscure stuff where we simply cannot predict what is going to happen. And what has gone on is it's gone from obscure stuff to all the interesting stuff,

like how a cell works and how a brain works and how a society works. This chaoticism, there's unpredictability in the system. and this is like the butterfly effect and strange attractors and all of that and what everybody does with it is says oh if only we had a bigger magnifying glass and we could look at this phenomenon closer we'll be able to see how it really works because this is reductive like science for the thousand years. But this is this domain that turns out to be everywhere where there is implicit unpredictability in it. And this is the coolest thing on earth, and I love it. And this was like religious revelation for me the first time I learned about this stuff. But then there's this whole irresistible urge to say, aha, that's where the free will is. Because look,

we can't predict this stuff. You can scientifically prove that we can't scientifically predict this stuff. That's where the free will comes in. And you get there by this gigantic flaw that takes down the whole house at that point, which is deciding that unpredictable is the same thing as there was no determinism going on there and it turns out they're two totally different things and everybody who like is why betting on the horse whatever the cliche is that chaotic unpredictability is where we get freedom from determinism it just doesn't work that way. And we can go through the agonizing details, but that's where that mistake comes in.

Quantum mechanics. I don't understand this stuff, but you go down to this itty bitty subatomic level and things happen, not because of what happened just before that things just happen. There's uncaused causes of this like einstein went to his grave hating this and like in terms of how so you look at this on a very fundamental subatomic level the universe is indeterminate that's what most people have been forced to admit after a century of physics on this so whoa then there's the whole stripe of people who say that's it

that's where you get free will from quantum indeterminacy and you get like amazing like snake oil salesmen out there selling self-help quantum indeterminacy love and quantum indeterminacy wealth and quantum immortality and quantum indeterminacy free will and that one falls apart also uh three things that do it in these are subatomic particles that are being indeterminate nobody still understands how it works but like it's indeterminate and time can go backwards down at that level there's no arrow of time and all sorts of screwy stuff. It's at a level where you would have to have every single one of those subatomic particles of which there's more than you could count in one molecule of one like neurotransmitter

in one corner of your brain. Every single one of them would have to do their same random thing at the same time for it to bubble up to the level of affecting their behavior. And it simply can't. The second problem is, and it simply can't because yucky stuff like living tissue makes it impossible for quantal events to all synchronize like that. The second thing that does it in is even if quantum effects all bubbled up to that level of determining

what it is you just did, that wouldn't explain your free will. That would explain why you do totally random bizarre things. Exactly. Which is like, if you want to base your view of your moral foundations on randomness, you got some problems there. Quantum indeterminacy trick that they then use to pull out of the rabbit's

hat, which is okay, okay, once the me, the me that's floating up there, the me once you grant me that our me is able to reach down and somehow futz with the quantum indeterminacy and harness it, harness it for free will. And there is nobody on earth, but like shamans and people whose physics faux physics impresses no one who knows anything about it, who says it works that way. It doesn't work that way. It's weird as hell that like time could run backwards when you're a gazillionth

of an inch smaller than your like smallest electron, but that's not where free will can come from. And now one final word from our sponsors. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft.

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first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. And with that, let's jump right back into our conversation. In some respects, there's a liberating sense in this conversation, and there's also a bit of depression. You know, like to embrace something that reduces agency to zero, right? Like there's something really depressing about that state. Are you interested in joy and happiness for your personal life? agency to zero, right? Like there's something really depressing about that state. Are, are you interested in joy and happiness and for your personal life? Yes. Okay. Because, okay. Yeah. Sorry. And you know, because you're wrestling with really complicated, you know, and I love this. I, I, I appreciate this. how has this wrestling impacted your sense of joy and happiness in life has it enhanced it do you feel free and liberated or um because you have deeper clarity of

the the source code or um or do you feel utterly defeated and And what am I going to do with this knowledge or this insight I have now? Like, really, what am I going to do? Well, it depends on the day of the week. And I may have just been a jerk and pulled in through the back there. I'm like, what glucose levels? And I always slept less and I ignored. But yeah, most of the time, this is totally demoralizing to me. And like you, I figured out very early in life that I was very skeptical about a lot of this stuff.

I was 14 when I decided there was no free will whatsoever. And like, I've been like teetering on the edge of this like existential void ever since until like trying to finish this damn book two years ago and the there's no free will part was easy that was like the first 300 pages that was a piece of cake like the last 200 pages of oh my god what if we actually start believing it i was making no headway at all because i couldn't get past yeah this is pretty demoralizing. And we're machines. We're machines that could know we're machines, but we're machines. And we're machines that could know that our feelings are machine-like and that could make the feeling seem suspect. Oh my God, this is a total drag. Until I finally had this insight that if I'm bummed out by that, if I'm bummed out by the fact that I have like a college

diploma and maybe someone's going to say, whoa, you can really earn that. Or that like I helped an old lady across the street once and everyone's like, wow, you're a nice person. And I didn't really earn any of that stuff. I'm not entitled to feeling good about myself. That means something critical. If that's how you're feeling at this point, you're one of the lucky ones because you're sitting there with a college degree and you didn't get brain damage from cerebral malaria and you didn't see your family torn apart by warlords in the middle of the Sahel. And you're lucky and you've got a corner office and you have a salary and you're not wondering

how you're going to get food. You're one of the lucky ones because you've spent most of your life being rewarded for things over which it turns out you didn't have control. And you look at the vast majority of people on this planet and they've spent their lives being punished for things they had no control over, being punished because society luck for them they've got an asymmetrical face and they've got sort of a funny thing over their left eyebrow and people haven't wanted to sleep with them as a result you're being

for most people on this planet the experience of having attribution tossed in your lap when it isn't really there has mostly been something to feel bad about it's liberating if you really think about it it's liberating that it turns out there's this hormone and if you have a screwy rare subtype of a version of the gene for it there's not a damn thing you can do about the kale you're going to reach for the m&ms every time and you are going to suffer from obesity and 14 generations your family would because you've got something weird with the receptor for this thing called leptin you don't lack free will it's not that you don't have tenacity you're not self-indulging oh it wasn't my fault it wasn't my fault that people don't like me because I have an off-putting

personality it's you're on the autism spectrum disorder it's not for most people this is incredibly liberating and this is good news and it's a good thing that we stopped burning people at the at the stake if they had epilepsy and figured out they weren't, you know, messing with Satan kind of thing. This is a more human planet every time we do one of those and say, oh, this was outside the realm of that person's control. And it's really not depressing. It's all the ways in which this become a nicer planet to live on over the centuries. Your position has deep philosophical and moral implications. So much so that I think if there was a critical mass that would adopt

your position, we'd have to burn down the justice system. We would have to fundamentally change the way that we think about behavior, what's acceptable, what's not. And it doesn't mean that we wouldn't let people run free, you know, but we'd have to burn the thing down. And so I find that that's like you running around with a match, you know, in a straw hut. Like it's a very dangerous idea in some respects, and it's quite liberating because maybe we can do much better. So how do you think that our understanding of responsibility of behaviors and morality might change if we accept the idea that free will does not exist? Well, it's got to change dramatically. And in terms of the running around with the match there, my guess is the sort of folks who would listen to like an egg heady podcast like this, they're saying, okay, yeah, but what about criminal offenders? And what they really are

going to get upset about is if you take your point and take it one step further and say we're going to have to burn down the admissions office at the harvard business school also because stanford no no because they pay me I can't say that. Because the same intellectual lie and ethical lie that makes the criminal justice system exist makes the meritocracy exist as well. be a whole lot more pertinent to listeners out there who are trying to like deal with the fact that like things have turned out pretty well for them and you got to go in there with a match in that also so okay so how should you think about this if you take this to this completely lunatic extent which i'm capable of thinking like for like a tenth of a second once a couple of years um the only logical extensions of this are that you have earned nothing you are entitled to absolutely nothing more or less than any other person out there your needs your pains your desires deserve no more consideration than any other human on this planet. So, oh, that.

And then as long as we're at it, number two, hating somebody for anything makes as little sense as hating an earthquake. These are the only possible logical outcomes. And like if you could think that way for more than a tenth of a second or so i don't know you're you're levitating from your meditational magic or i sure can't do that and maybe the dalai lama can and it seems like he actually kind of can every now and then um but if you're like a regular meat and potatoes kind of human it's really hard to do and i sure can't do it most of the time but we gotta try but we gotta try when it matters so let's let's take that and kind of port it over to sport for a minute or any any skill that we're trying to get better at and sport is easy because it's so concrete is

that if i want to be able to make more free throws under stress, I can technically practice with, um, with deep focus over and over and over again, and I will get better and, and, or I can change my relationship with stress. And when I do that, it's easier to shoot the free throws when at one time, maybe I felt constricted, but now because of my psychological training and my framing, I've dissolved the pressures that I once felt. So it's, you know, taking action to be more proficient with a skill and or opening up a psychological perspective that allows me to be more free. So those, we can do that. We can get better. You got better at understanding free will

and determinism over the course of where you put your attention. And I still get stuck. You chose, and you got to square me up on this one more time, Doc. You chose to write a book on determinism and free will, and you chose the words that you put on the paper and they're good words and they're deeply thought about. I have a hard time, even though we've had a good, thoughtful, and I'm tracking a good, thoughtful conversation. So this is like you saying, sometimes I get pissed off and I know better because like, you know, like, okay, so I'm there with you right now. You chose the words on the paper. You chose to write a book, right? No, you didn't do it. You were determined, predetermined that at year, I don't know, you look like you're 41.

Thank you. Nicely done. No wonder you got a lot of listeners. I'm actually 42. 42. Yeah. So I was off a little bit. Like, so over, over your years, you know, you were predetermined or determined that this book was going to uniquely come out of you. That smacks. I know you're going to, you're not going to, I know you're going to come right back, but that smacks with the 14 year old dilemma I had. And that 14 year old dilemma, I don't know if it was exactly 14, but we'll play is, um,

wait, what is this thing about God? What is it that, is God active and it's God's plan? What the fuck am I doing then? Why do I care so much? Why do I feel so much? Why do I try so hard? I said, no, no, no, no. It's not God's plan.

And I know I'm getting in trouble with a lot of people just like you are. Okay. So we're in a hot company right now. But I thought that I reorganized it in my mind. My small mind at 14 was that, no, God is not active. And he didn't start a plan and kick it off and say, enjoy the ride. He said, I'm going to give you free will. Okay.

See where we're going sideways here. I'm going to give you free will. Okay. See where we're going sideways here. I'm going to give you free will. And again, I can come back around to the craziness of the statement in just a minute and you've got to choose well. And I know that that doctrine came from my influence from Christianity on an early age. And, but at least I got to the place that I don't think God is active god is passive okay and then through education i was like well what is god okay what what is this a myth is this is this an omniscient being is this is this something to control the masses all our philosophical friends or is this um is this a way a placeholder saying there's something we don't understand?

So I've fallen to that last premise. But I haven't squared free will. Okay. So let's go back to you chose to write this book on determinism and free will. And they're good words that you chose to put on paper. Tell me where I'm missing it because I know I'm using the word choice. Okay. Or you could have even taken, you could leapfrog with God into even a better vote for free will, which is sort of the Quaker version of it. Not only is God on the sidelines watching, but all God has is you to do what he needs to have done to make them

all God has is thee oh my God free will now I got his his like I better like not more March off to war or I better do the right thing because not only is he powerless um but he's counting on you to come through there and help him out which is incredibly super contorted yeah right which is amazing okay so i wrote this book and so i chose to write this book and i sat for five years procrastinating on writing this book and instead thinking about kale and m&ms and but still i eventually wrote it i used this word and instead thinking about kale and M&Ms. But still, I eventually wrote it and I used this word. And okay, tell me how was there no free will in it? So let's flip it to, in my case, the four and a half neurons that wrote the book instead of the four. Let's do a version of

they would have done the same exact thing. I wouldn't have written that book if I had been born in Somalia. I wouldn't have written that book if I had been raised with a culture that has a culture of honor, which teaches you very early on that the thing that you do when someone strikes you is strike them back twice as hard. Because if you don't take revenge, they're going to come and take all your camels. I wouldn't have written that book if my grandfather had done a sloppier job at faking an exit visa and getting out of Tsarist Russia and had been caught. I'd be sitting there right now saying that Putin's kind of a good guy and you've got to understand what he's been doing. I wouldn't have done that if, you know, I'm short. If I had been three inches taller, I would have not spent all these years teetering on the edge of an existential crisis.

I probably would be living in the suburbs and have a much more stable life. And it would never have. I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have. You know, all those random little splits in the road. I wouldn't have if I wasn't a combination of pissed off at my father, begrudgingly respectful, but also afraid of him as hell. And somehow this is a way of saying his value system, I've managed to trump them. I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have, you know, all I am is what came before. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my

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And so is, is, is determinism to you the same as predestined? No, because I can change. And things change. And people who used to be white supremacists no longer are. Or people who were like doing atrocities in Vietnam when they were 20-year-old soldiers now go on these tour company tours where American Vietnam vets go to Vietnam for reconciliation ceremonies. And there's like tour companies that specialize. Yeah, change happens and in amazing ways. But the critical thing is when change happens, we didn't choose to change.

Everything that came from the second before a million years before put us in a situation where the circumstances just now changed us. So your position is much like the prime minister, the first prime minister of India, which is this quote is, life is like a game of cards. The hand you're dealt with is determinism. The way that you play it is free will. No, no, I totally disagree. No. Plus he's like really awful to Muslims on top of everything else.

Is it Modi? Is it the current prime minister? I didn't hear this quote before. Is it this guy or some previous? Well, in any case, no, no, this is the first prime minister. Oh, this is yeah. He was a good guy. He looked good in Nehru jackets. No, no, this is the first prime minister. Oh. This is, yeah, Nero. Nero, okay. Yeah, Nero. He was a good guy. He looked good in Nero jackets.

So that's cool. Nonetheless, he was wrong. He was wrong. And this is like the most seductive, like last stand for holding on to free will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You had no control over this stuff we had no control over there's our natural traits like you're seven foot four and like you had no control over that or you're not seven foot four or you were born what you do with that what you do with it yes what you were

dealt do you bring tenacity and gumption and backbone or are you like self-indulgent and squander your gifts and all that's where you get this totally magical thinking dichotomy yeah our natural attributes are made of biology and maybe even are made of atoms but what you do with it now we've entered the realm of the tooth fairy and calvinistic like virtue and stuff and there's no dichotomy between them because the fact that you can reach for m&ms every time whereas that person doesn't it's because of how their frontal cortex was constructed and functions by one second ago and yet it's's like, whoa, I think Muggsy Bogues is the coolest thing ever. Five foot three and he played in the NBA.

How in hell did he do that? Or how did Edison like fail more than a thousand times in the 15th? And he stuck it out. Wow. That's like, whoa, that's laudable the tenacity is laudable because your basic attributes are made of biology stuff and what you do with it that's made of like your soul it's the same biology and why it is that at some junctures some people never miss an opportunity they miss an opportunity and they do this stupid dumbass thing every time and can never ever resist. They didn't get the frontal cortex that didn't come through for them at that moment by accident. It's because of everything that came before. And the stuff we really admire in our day and age is made of the same biology stuff as everything else.

You are no more deserving of the outcome than if you said that I'm not going to go to that party tonight. I'm going to study hard and ace the exam the next day. That's just as biological as people who, for some reason, have have this freakish ability to remember long digits of numbers. It's biology all the way. Yeah, I get that. And I also, I'm thinking of Viktor Frankl right now, and I don't want to put you up against the great thinker of Viktor Frankl.

I know, but you know what I'm about to say, right? Everything can be taken from man, but one thing, the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. I mean, okay, come on, doc. Don't take that away from me. Come on, doc. He's like the most inspiring guy ever. Yeah, right. The people who, unlike him in the concentration camps, who collapsed into depression and gave up and were dead a week later, it's not that they failed to choose. They had screwed up genes for serotonin transporter reuptake pumps, and thus they were more vulnerable to feeling helpless.

So Viktor Frankl was amazing, but the people who didn't make it out of there did not fail to choose to have the right spirit and find meaning where it was not obvious. He was amazing, but like in the process, what he has just done is dissed the majority of people on this planet who have been punished and felt bad about themselves for the things they haven't had control over, rather than they've gotten a CEO salary because of the things they have felt no control that they didn't have control over or survived the camps over things they had no control over. Yeah. It's

super interesting position that inspiration to see what somebody could be capable of on an individual's basis rather than a broad stroke that that, that ability to see or to think about what could be possible for the person is one of the great insults that you could provide that person. Cause you don't know all of the neurobiological priming that has led to the second before the decisions that person's about to make. I mean, I find that inspiration, your position on inspiration to be deflating in some respect, because like inspiration is like you're doing a disservice to that person. However, I also see that. Wait, let me finish this thought. Like, okay, inspirate.

Yeah. The inspiration piece that you're talking about, Viktor Frankl or the analogy I was just making that that I see you coming from an amoral perspective. Is that right? Absolutely. Because, because a machine, you can't do good things or bad things for a machine, but we're these totally weird machines that nonetheless, when you do good things to us, we think they feel good. We feel that they feel good. And we're set up so that we can't tell the difference between we feel as if they feel good and feeling good or feeling pain or feeling as if we have pain. in there is like you can change because you hear something inspiring you can become cynical because you hear about yet another way in which like you can't fight city home you can i can sit here and be feeling like like i've lost purpose in life and meaningless and all of that because the goddamn people at uber eats i ordered like the potai without the shrimp and they brought it with the shrimp and oh my god what a screwed up

unfair planet this is and then i think of victor frankl and then i find meaning in life and i secrete a little bit less of this neurotransmitter that's tapping into it yeah we could be inspired and when we are inspired something's changed in our brain and it's a good thing that circumstances have put in a position to hear about victor frankl and be able to evaluate and we can be demoralized when yet another like maternity hospital was flattened in ukraine and yeah we change i sure didn't choose to feel inspired by victor frankl when the damn kids screwed up with a with a pod tie but i'm going to give you a moral a bit of a dilemma really quickly and that that dilemma is, I really like this conversation. I appreciate you. You're in a dilemma now. Yeah. You're in a dilemma because you felt that. I know you felt that.

Right. And so. And I think you're a nice guy now who has incredibly good taste and deserves to be treated well in life because of that. Yeah. Now you're all screwed up, doc. So let's wrestle this thing down one more level for very concrete. Again, I really appreciate this, but let's wrestle it down one more level. Let's play out a few scenarios. Your kid comes home and I don't know, he just got in a physical altercation. He beat up another kid at school. And then he got suspended. Okay. How would you handle that?

How does determinism play into how you would handle that? I would handle it with all of this knowledge very, very ineptly. Because I don't know the answer to that. I don't know how to do that right. But I sure know that I have a moral imperative at that point. And as long as we're at it, an intellectual honesty imperative to try to have them understand why that other kid was infuriating or why the world is going to go to hell if everybody did what you just did or why it might

be that they did that because actually this happened to them that time but this really isn't the same circumstance or that like the next time they're ready to do that, they really do have a moral obligation to stop and think for a second, wait, why is this guy so infuriating or why am I perceiving this guy as being threatening or like go and do the work because, you know, maybe we shouldn't bother to think that way. If like you choose,

you know, Rocky road over strawberry and ben and jerry's today but you should do that work before you punch somebody the next time and you should do oh sorry and you should do that work before you sit there and say it's time for me to get a promotion because damn i earned it at either end of those scenarios. Or before you say, lock the guy away with no chance of parole, he can't change. Those are the places where do the work. Go with it if you picked rocky road, but not in these circumstances. Yeah, that's interesting. Do the work because that's essentially what much of my life efforts are about, is to help people live in the present

moment more often, to do that work because it's in the present moment where we have access to full capabilities. And I hear you going, what? No, not what. Oh, you don't. No, you don't. Not well, because it's not by chance that you wound up doing this, valuing doing this, being good at it. This would not happen if you were herding yak in Mongolia right now because of some

other random thing that happened. But nonetheless, you're incredibly privileged that you wound up with this ability and motivation to help people in this way and you could do it only with people who've been lucky enough to have a particular mindset and privileged place in society to benefit from your wisdom and on and on from there but nonetheless most of the time we have to feel that like that's cool that you're doing that good going i like you and it's very hard to get to that amoral stance that nonetheless you're no more praiseworthy or no more condemnable than like the bubonic plague or the fact that some flowers smell great. But we feel as if we feel that way.

And that's our predicament. Yeah. I think you're cult-proof or you're designing a cult. It's one of those two. So, okay. You were probably across the hall from somebody that deeply inspired me, which was Dr. Albert Bandora. And did you guys arm wrestle? Because he was all about agency and you're like, ah, yeah, because he experimentally proved that in certain circumstances, emphasizing that in the right sort of person can bring about incredibly great outcomes. But don't tell somebody about agency if their crack mother has just abandoned them and they're now like living out on the street. Like pick your targets.

And he was not only brilliant, but totally compassionate at picking the right targets for his wisdom. He was also a really nice guy and very funny. He was a good guy. Yeah, he's amazing. Okay, so thought stems. And we're rounding third base, by the way, or rounding home base, I should say. But I wanted to go back to you are no more deserving or you pejoratively are no more deserving.

One of the things that just feels like nails on a chalkboard to me is when someone's born on third base and they think they hit a triple. You know that saying? Yep. It's just like, so I really appreciate your positioning on all this. And so as we're rounding third base here or home base is thought stems. Purpose is. Oh, you're not going to answer that? You're asking me? No, this is a thought stem for you.

Take it wherever you want. Oh, God damn. You are rude. Okay. Purpose is- Oh, I'm on the edge of my seat. Come on, Todd. I'm right there with you. Now you're making me really nervous. What I'm about to tell you is whatever it is I say, I've been spending 50 years trying to say this more coherently, and I'm not there yet, let alone being able to believe whatever nonsense I'm about to say 99% of the time. purpose is that no matter how much we're machines and no matter how little sense it makes to think that a good thing or a bad thing that can happen to a machine um we are machines who can feel as if something good or something bad has just happened and that is so intrinsic to our machineness that after a while feeling as if is no different than

feeling oh that's a cool statement i mean i just the sequential logic in that is very cool yeah and i'm gonna get off and totally violate it because i'm gonna say oh that was cool that was fun that was cool yeah that was a blast right yeah so there is praise right like what are we doing you know so okay that's cool all right um it all comes down to the fact that here it comes again the elephant seal it's the hour of the elephant seal or maybe that's sea lion or something what's really bad is we dropped the clock at this point. So it's been making that sound for the flamingos ever since our kids were little, just really doing in any sort of zoological accuracy. challenge is remembering that what feels intuitively obvious now may not in the future

and what feels appalling and unacceptable and this is a horrid planet seems like yeah duh Yeah, duh, at points in the past. And we are people of our place and time. But at any given point, what is being turned into what will be. And it's not going to be easy. intellectual pull right now and also takes a whole bunch of like empathy seasons on top is going to seem totally obvious at some point in the future because at some point in the past you would have been just as compassionate or whatever and you would have said what can you do the person has a crappy soul what can you do psychodynamically that's how things work what can you do some kids are just not motivated to learn to read and things have changed and they're going to and it didn't just happen randomly so like try to make that happen so much i've just really enjoyed all of

this doc and so thank you you. And where would you like to drive people to buy your book? Oh, I don't know. Anybody. Not that you're going to need help with sales, but it's available everywhere. It's called Determined. And Barnes & Noble, all those good places. Local bookstores are always fun to help out the local tribe there. And I just, again, what a thrill. Thank you. And I'll give you the last close out, if you will. I have this challenge now of getting off after this and not saying,

wow, what a great guy. That was like totally fun. What a stimulating, interesting guy. And like, like the next time we're in a mammoth hunt, I'm like more likely to try to get in between you and the mammoth.

If things go badly. And that doesn't make any sense from all the nonsense I was spouting for 90 minutes. So yeah, we are complicated. Yes, we are. And yeah, contradictory. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks.

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