Modern Wisdom - #693 - Dr Robert Sapolsky - The Shocking New Science Of How To Manage Your Stress

Episode Date: October 14, 2023

Dr Robert Sapolsky is a Professor at Stanford University, a world-leading researcher, and an author. Stress is an inevitable part of human life. But what is stress actually doing to the human body when it happens for such a prolonged period of time? And what does science say are the best interventions to defeat it? Expect to learn the crucial difference between short term and long term stress, how stress actually impacts the human system, the neurodevelopmental consequences of stress and poverty, how to detrain your dopamine sensitivity, what everyone doesn't understand about how hormones work, whether believing in free will is a useful world view, why there is a relationship between belief in free will and obesity and much more... Sponsors: Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150)  Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code: MW10) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Robert Sapolsky. He's a professor at Stanford University, a world-leading researcher, and an author. Stress is an inevitable part of human life, but what is stress actually doing to the human body when it happens for such a prolonged period of time? And what does the science say are the best interventions to defeat it? Expect to learn the crucial difference between short term and long term stress. How stress actually impacts the human system, the neurodevelopmental consequences of stress and poverty, how to detrain your dopamine sensitivity,

what everyone doesn't understand about how hormones work, whether believing in free will is a useful worldview, why there is a relationship between belief in free will and obesity, and much more. If you don't know Dr. Sapolsky, he is a complete legend in the field of evolutionary biology and research in general.

And this conversation goes absolutely everywhere. So yeah, so much to take away from this. And he's really fun. I love his sort of light, playful, sort of, joky approach to pretty serious academic topics. And he's really fun. I love his light, playful, joky approach to pretty serious academic topics. He's great. One of my favourite purchases of the last two years has been my cold plunge from the team over at plunge.com. They are the gold standard when it comes to cold therapy. You may have

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dr. Robert Sapolsky What do you wish more people knew about how stress impacts the human body. That while it's worth paying attention to the fact that it does crummy things to your heart and blood pressure and bladder and everything else, for me, most meaningful thing is it does crummy things to your brain. The worst is that it makes you less empathic, it makes you less tolerant, it makes you less willing to take somebody else's perspective. It narrows your tunnel of concerns and I think what we see is in a world full of stress. People are crumly to each other on the average. Why does stress cause that reduction in empathy? All sorts of interesting stuff, various places in the brain, but in one region, we think we,

colleagues, and I, and lots of other people in the field, I think we've gotten a sense of the brain region that's relevant, something called the anterior singulet cortex. And if you want to summarize it, this is the part of the brain where you feel someone else's pain. Sit someone down, stick them in a brain scanner, poke their finger with a pin, and like all sorts of out parts of the brain activate. And as part of that, this part of the brain, anterior singyulid also activates and it's got a lot to do with interpreting what the pain means. That sort of thing. Like you poke somebody with the pin

after you've told them, they've just had this very powerful anesthetic cream smeared over their finger. When in actuality, it's like cream cheese or something. And they don't feel the pain. The parts of their brain that are saying, ouch, that was in my finger are still going on. But anterior singular is gone silent because you have fallen for a placebo effect. It's about the interpretation of the pain rather than the nuts and bolts features of it. So now stick the person in the brain scanner and Don't poke their finger with a pin make them watch their loved one have their finger poked and the Pain no meter brain regions have nothing to say because like nobody's doing anything to your fingertip

but the anterior Singular activates and but the anterior singular activates and Neurons there on this very like simplistic level can't tell the difference between your pain and someone else's pain Big amazing sort of footnote in there Typically people suffering from major depression this part of the brain is overactive is just pain 24-7 wherever you look, and that kind of thing. Okay, so it turns out that when people are stressed, they become less generous. They're more likely to cheat in an economic game.

Their moral compass goes out the window. Their range of concern narrows down to people who look just like me and pray like me and eat like me and all that sort of stuff that we're way familiar with. And it turns out what stress hormones are also doing is disrupting the functioning of this part of the brain. And there's like a drought you can give to rats or give to college freshman volunteers, which will block the effects of the stress hormone. And when you throw that in there, they maintain

their empathy, despite being stressed, they maintain all sorts of physiological markers of it. We're feeling less capacity to look at somebody else's pain and somebody else's perspective on the world when we're stressed because what matters has turned into a very self-interested focus for most people. So like amid stress doing terrible things to your memory and your executive function and judgment and all sorts of stuff, this increasingly strikes me as this is the outpost that's really interesting. One of the things that continues to come up in your work on stress is this, it's almost

like an agentic view of what's happening to you. It's how much agency do you have? Is this kind of being imposed on me or have I selected that this is going to happen? What is the role of agency and a volition when it comes to stress and how we interpret it? Well, it falls under the rubric of how I think everything in the universe works, which is like, there's no agency at all. There's no free will. In recent years, I've stopped spending most of my time fuxing around with wonder on at a time and so keep them stress hormones and getting much more interested in larger issues of biology of who we are and how we got here and our best moments and our worst moments and everything ambiguously in between.

And when you spend enough time like obsessing over biology and how it interacts with environment and all the things that came before us that we had no control over, both biologically and environmentally, you reach this conclusion somewhere in there that there's no damn free will whatsoever. It is entirely a myth. So this is my current song and dance, trying to convince the world that

this is how things work. Well, if we want to increase the stress in everybody at least for a short term, perhaps that's a nice little teaser for what we're going to get onto. Talk to me, because obviously short term stress is useful, long term stress, not useful, is there a line? Am I not supposed to be stressed after eight hours and 35 minutes, when does short-term stress start to become bad? Well, it depends on who you are in your place in society and what culture and as long as we're at it, what species you are. And sort of the central concept of stress is like, you get stuck in a traffic jam, you're stressed, you do this with this hormone,

you turn off this other one, your blood pressure does whatever. And the amazing thing is if you went back a hundred million years and some like twerpy little dinosaur, it was being chased by someone terrifying, that dinosaur would have been secreting the precise same molecules that you do when you're stuck in traffic or thinking about global warming or who it's an incredibly ancient piece of art like wiring.

It's the same thing in us and other primates and mammals and fish and birds and reptiles and it's incredibly conserved stuff. And what it's been doing for like 150 million years or so, is saving your life when you were facing a short-term physical crisis. Somebody's very intent on eating you. You're very intent on eating somebody else because you're starving. And everything that it does is get your body

for dealing with the next three minutes of crisis. You're mobilizing energy from storage sites to deliver to the muscles of it saving your neck, you're increasing the heart rate, blood pressure, you're turning off everything on a central in your body, in the hopes that there is a later, you'll take care of it later. Growth, tissue, repair, immune surveillance, reproduction, all of that, all built around like triage, everything that's not essential to the next three minutes. And then you get us smart primates, us humans who could anticipate our deaths or some like low ranking baboon who spends his entire life not being chased by liars but being hassled by higher ranking guys. And what you've

invented is this like totally corrosive disasterously, chronic psychosocial stress. And you see this very simple outcome. You go sprinting for your life and your blood pressure is way, way elevated. This is a good thing. It's saving your life. You day after day deal with an abusive boss or you have an anxiety disorder or whatever, and you're doing the same thing with your cardiovascular system, and you're going to blow it apart because the system didn't evolve, being turned on chronically. And for most beasts, it's either over with after three minutes or you're over with, and we're capable of doing this like for months, years on end. And that's not what the system evolved for.

And that's why us, and if you were the prime aides, are smart enough to get sick from psychological stress. Yeah, the idea, the concept of being smart enough to get sick from psychological stress is an odd sort of twisting of the words, but I suppose it's very true, right? Because if we didn't have this unbelievable abstraction ability to be able to contemplate, am I really speaking my truth forward? Is this my highest actualization? Maybe that cookie that I ate yesterday really does say everything about me that I've always

thought that it was. Ruminating about that weird thing you said to a teacher 15 years ago, whatever it might be that you're vacillating about, we are able to abstract our stresses and ruminate about them and continue to cause them to persist in our mind even when they're not there. So even if we're not being chased by said dinosaur or tiger or baboon, we can imagine all of the previous baboons and tigers and dinosaurs that we thought about getting chased from and still get the same physiological effect. Yes, as well as remember our most incompetent embarrassing social moments of our lives, as well as imagine that you're destined to do something like that over and

over again in the future as well as worry about, worry about a movie character. You watch somebody on a screen or you read a novel and you activate a stress response because oh no watch out the bad guys are coming up behind you or your heart broken you know at the end of a novel by some beloved character getting done in or Worse and most meaningfully you sit there and you read about what's happening in Ukraine or Bangladesh or and you do the exact same thing or Bangladesh and you do the exact same thing. We're taking this 150 million-year-old circuitry and we can abstract it over space and time like nothing less overwalked this planet before. Right. With this perspective, the kind of trite cliche of people saying humans are not meant to consume the entire world's catastrophes 24 hours a day in real time. This is presumably having a real genuine impact on our stress response and therefore health outcomes, physiology,

hormones, all of that stuff. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, to show how similar things are and then how different you take a female baboon, this was some great research done some years ago by some colleagues and she has an infant and the infant dies. There's a high infant mortality rate and they could show up to a month later, not only is this female more socially withdrawn, doing less grimm all, she has elevated stress hormone level. She

is mourning for a month afterward. And that sure looks familiar and often she will carry the body around for days afterwards. Wow, that looks just like us. And then we do the same thing when we see that Bambi's mother was killed in the in the cartoon. And we're haunted by that for you. Whoa, we can take this very primate thing, my child has died. And we're feeling upset about an animated cartoon character. We're thought, you know, we could just extend it in ways that's unrecognizable to other species. I learned from you that a third trimester fetus's brain

development is impacted by the mother's socioeconomic status. How screwed is that? How like absolutely insane. You're born and you are already screwed by having picked the wrong wound. Take that from the top wrong world. Take that from the top for me. Take that from the absolute top. Okay. Well, you know, people used to realize poverty, social instability, being a peripheralized outgroup, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong race, the wrong, all of those things, what your body pays

a big price. The United States, for example, if you are African-American, on the average, your chromosomes are aging at an accelerated rate compared to everybody else, because stress hormones mess up the enzymes that keep your chromosomes young and like, whoa, like the chromosomes in your cells are falling apart faster. So, whoa, no surprise, no surprise. And when you look at like health, socioeconomic status, it's a gigantic predictor. Am I assuming correctly you're in the UK? Austin, Texas, but I was in the United States for a very long time. I'm an adoptee over here. Okay.

Well, no wonder you've got the Texan accent. The classic whitehall studies of civil servants and Britain and stuff here. Socioeconomic rank has an enormous impact on your body and has got nothing to do with getting healthcare access. It's got very little to do with the fact that like you can't afford your health club memberships, it's stress, it's the psychosocial effects of like chronically having no control, no predictability, all of that. And then they figured out that like the social economic status you hear family, when you were a kid is predictive of all sorts of unhealthy stuff when you're 60 years old.

And then, among other things, people got brain imaging techniques cool enough that they could now brain image of fetus and see how it's doing, and back came the finding that already as a fetus, your mother's socioeconomic status, has an impact on your brain growth. How does that happen?

Very simple. If you're poor and if you're chronically psychosocially stressed for any of the gazillion or the reasons, you've got elevated levels of these stress hormones in your bloodstream. And they get through the placenta and they get to your fetus and have all sorts of effects while the fetus's body is learning what kind of world it is out there. Whoa, it's a scary one, it's an unpredictable one. These stress hormones having all sorts of effects and how you're constructing every outpost including your brain. And it turns out some of the fanciest parts of your brain, your frontal cortex, etc.,

are very sensitive to these stress hormones and their maturation is impaired by them. Yeah, what are the outcomes? What are the sort of outcomes that you see from a mother that is low socioeconomic status, perhaps highly chronically stressed? What is the sort of brain or the sort of person that will be born out of that more than likely? Well, this one isn't well understood yet because these are the first studies coming out. This is officially cutting edge neuroimaging techniques, but we already know a ton just a few years later.

Get a kid by the time they're five years old going into kindergarten and on the average their family socioeconomic status is already a predictor of this kid's resting stress hormone levels. How screwed is that? And on the average it's already predictive of the maturation of the frontal cortex in this kid. How thick this cortical region is, what it's metabolic rate is like, and one wonders. So what does this part of the brain do that I keep mentioning?

It's the brain region that lets you be self-disciplined and long-term planning and impulse control and emotional regulation. I don't know. A lot of people will be familiar with like the famed marshmallow test with like five-year-old kids. And oh my god, that's amazing. You're going to five-year-old and can't hold out for the second marshmallow. And they're on it within seconds and all of that. And this is predictive decades, decades later of this kid's cumulative earnings over their lifetime, their adult socioeconomic status, their patterns of metabolic diseases, cardiovascular woe, or ready at age 5, the die is not cast unchangeably, but it's already leaning in a

fairly significant direction by age 5 that's already a predictor of what things you're going to look like as an adult and lots of these important realms. And by age five, if you once again pick the wrong family to be born into and you're already marinating in chronic psychosocial stress because you know, your family's poverty, by age five, you already have that profile that's predictive of, you know, that outcome that is on the less desirable side long afterward. Absolutely insane. It's, I had a Robert Pullman on the show.

I've spent a good bit of time learning about behavioral genetics over the last couple of years. And what I'm really fascinated about is this odd intersection between nature and nurture. The fact that your parents are predisposed to behave in a way which creates the nurture. Their predisposition has to be inherited by you, at least in part, because that is the nature element of what's going on. So when you have this very odd blending,

let's say that you have a mother who is predisposed to be a little bit more anxious. Okay, so perhaps you have got a predisposition to be a little bit more anxious, but then what's the environment in that you grow up in, right? You already have this sort of precursor downstream from that mother's that say, overbearingly, you can't go out without your coat on

and make sure that you're ring me before this. What's the subtext that you're being taught there that the world is a scary place, that you need to be very concerned, that you must always be vigilant, and you've already got this predisposition. It's this fascinating intersection and the interplay between the two that I think is really interesting in behavioral genetics.

And incredibly important one. And behavioral genetics has kind of, I don't mean this too pejoratively, but grown up to the extent of realizing when it comes to behavior, genes are very, very, very, rarely determinant. They're about vulnerabilities. They're about potential. They're about skating on the edge of something, and it depends on what environment you wind up in, whether you're pushed over the edge.

It depends if you have the right and nurtured things that you've got the genetic potential all set to take advantage of. It after a while is irrelevant to ask what does this gene do, but only to ask what is gene does in this particular type of environment. Great example of this in terms of stress and genetic vulnerability. Classic study, it's been mered and some controversy for years, but I think it's the most important study done in biological psychiatry in the quarter century.

There's this gene, it's got something to do with serotonin, this neurotransmitter in the brain. Everybody knows serotonin has something to do with depression, SSRIs like Prozac work on it. So it's this gene that comes in a few different flavors. And all sorts of animal studies suggested you wind up with this flavor and you're at more risk for depression. And that made perfect sense. And whoa, that, you know, suggests all sorts of genetic impact on depression and such. Let's go look at some humans and this amazing study following like thousands of people from

childhood up into like early adulthood where you've got their genomes and you're saying, well, just having like the scary, vulnerable version of this gene increase your risk for having the history of depression by the time you're 25 years old. And the answer was absolutely clear. Yes, yes, it increases the risk. If and only if you had a lot of stressors during childhood, in the absence of a stressful childhood, having that risk variant had virtually no impact whatsoever, no impact whatsoever. It's not the genetics of becoming depressed. It's the genetics of being more vulnerable to depression when it's coupled with huge amounts of stress early in life. And this turns out to be the theme with like everything implicated with gene-s and behavior.

It depends on the environment that you're in. And what do you know? It turns out all sorts of these genetic risk profiles when it's coupled with a stressful environment, an abusive one, an neglectful one, or would that the circumstances in which they suddenly are adverse? Yeah, it's interesting to think about, let's say you had some child that was 99th percentile conscientiousness, you know, full standard deviation higher in IQ, all of

it like some stuff, big predisposition, but they were born into an environment or a culture that wasn't really pushing them to use that discipline and that motivation and that sort of drive, perhaps they're born into somewhere that doesn't even have a formal education system. And you think, okay, well, what ability do they have to be able to capitalize on this? And again, another fascinating thing is we moved recently only in the last sort of hundred and fifty years from a brown base to a brain-based economy, which has meant that people who had a competitive advantage only two centuries ago, if that same disposition was born now, they're totally different. What are you going to do with your ability to dig eight hours a day without getting back pain?

I get back pain, right? I'm not going to be good. I'm not going to be good on the digs. What do people get wrong? So what you've said there sounds tenuously close to what people who don't understand epigenetics on the internet say is epigenetics. That sounds to me like the sort of epigenetics of the gaps that they would say you see, the jeans aren't turned on and then the environment turns them on. Is that epigenetics and if not, what is epigenetics related to it? Well, actually, that's like epigenetics. I can't give a bunch. We're accurate description of it than that. You got your genes, DNA sequence, long strings of them, specifying proteins that

you make. And it turns out, like, 95% of your DNA doesn't specify genes. It's the instruction manual. It's the on and off switches for when you activate or deactivate the genes. In particular, circumstances in this part of your body, but not in that part and so on. And it turns out very little of environment changes your actual DNA sequences and the stuff that does is like bad stuff, like radiation, things like not stuff. For example, all those three-headed dogs running around there with the Russian troops. But what environment, what experience does is messes with the on-off switches.

And epigenetics is the fancy term for the fact that experience doesn't change your genes, but it changes the regulation of them. Often, really for a long time, often lifelong, often through some incredibly cool mechanisms, multi-generationally, this is how, like, you're a fetus, and you're being soaked in a lot of stress hormones. And what are they doing? They're causing epigenetic effects on on-off switches in the brain that, unless you intervene pretty, like, majorly, later on, you're going to be lifelong.

This is exactly, mech epigenetics is just the fancy term for, wait a second, stuff that happens to you is going to make a difference 50 years later. It's going to make a difference in your disease risks. Your diet early in life has epigenetic effects on how good your pancreas is at reacting to glucose in your bloodstream when you're 80. So epigenetics is just the trendy term for saying. The interesting

stuff about genes is much less the genes themselves than their regulation and what environment does is change the regulation to your genes. That's fascinating. Maybe the people on Twitter were right all along. So it sounds to me like you're saying bad stuff, not only leaves scar tissue for you and not just for you now, but you in the future. And then also potentially your kids as well, presumably. Yeah, through mechanisms, well, you've already mentioned one mechanism, which is like Yeah, through mechanisms, well, you've already mentioned one mechanism, which is like the regulation that happened to your genes and the brain you got right now as an adult is going to influence how you raise your child. And you know, what what parents spend an awful lot of time doing is trying to figure out

ways to make their kid just like them when they grow up. To have the same cultural values, to have the same neuroses because those of them seem like neuroses, they seem like the only sensible way to go about handling the world, all of that. So there's multi-generational transmission through parenting style, through culture, all of that. But multi-generational epigenetic stuff also arises from unbelievably cool mechanisms. Okay, for example, so you were that fetus and mom is stressed as hell because she has an anxiety disorder, for example. And thus you're being soaked in a lot of the physiological consequences

of her anxiety disorder, and that influences your brain, and among other things, it causes epigenetic changes in one part of your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is about fear, anxiety, all of that, and what does a lot of stress early in life, including during fetal life, thanks to this hormones too, it makes your amygdala grow bigger than normal. You wind up having, as an adult, on the average, an amygdala that's enlarged, that's hyperactive, that's hysterical, that sees menace that other people don't, things of that sort.

Okay, so you got this, and like with the right therapy at the right points in life, you can actually reverse epigenetic stuff. Wow, get the right talk therapy and like your genes are regulated differently in your brain. Yeah, it's got to. That's like when therapy works. But if you haven't had that good fortune, now you're an adult with your enlarged amygdala and you get pregnant. And because of big amygdala, and you get pregnant. And because a big amygdala, you secrete elevated levels of stress hormones, because that's and thus your fetus is amygdala will be bigger than expected. And thus when they are an adult and you have these multi-generational ripples, and this

is not passing on genes. This is passing on the adverse regulatory consequences for your genes, and this stuff is multi-generational. It's not inevitable. You are not damning 100 generations of descendants, and like you could intervene in very little in us a certain stone, but all things being equal, this is even a way to pass this stuff onto the generations beyond you. Wow. You mentioned interventions there. We are bathed in stresses. I don't know how full Andrew Huberman mode you have gone in your work to look at emeliorating or mitigating this. Has there been anything that... What is the 30,000-foot view of how to think about strategies that are good at

reducing stress? What is the way to conceptualize it? Well, what I can say confidently is you're asking the entirely wrong question to this person because I'm terrible at handling stress. Like, why else do you spend decades living in a laboratory thinking about this? Research is me search. Yes, indeed, sublimated all into those test tubes, those statistical tests. So I happen to be lousy at it. So anything I have to say here, take with a grain of salt, but what the real experts show is, you know, what, what is stress about not when you're being chased by a dinosaur, but when you're being psychologically stressed.

What is it that makes psychological stress stressful? It's for the same external reality, for the same external unpleasant tree. If you feel like you have no control, if you feel like you're getting no predictive information about when is it going to come and how long is it going to last and how bad is it going to be? When you have no outlets for The frustration caused by this stress when you interpret things as meaning things are getting worse rather than better And when you got no social support incredibly like elegant powerful studies

Showing stuff like with a lab rat or with a college student You give them shocks every now and then they get a college student, you give them shocks every now and then, they get a stress response, and you give them a little warning like 10 seconds before each shock, they don't get as much of a stress response. You've given them predictive information. Let them press a lever repeatedly where they think that by pressing the lever decreases the likelihood of a shock, The lever is doing nothing. It's a placebo, it's disconnected.

Yet merely by feeling like you have some sense of control, just imagine how worse it would have been if I were not the captain of my ship, you buffer against so hugely important psychological variables in there. But what you see is like it's narrow ranges where this is predictive information. Give that little warning light one second before the shock doesn't do you any

good. It's not enough time to get the right psychological perspective. Give the warning light a minute before each shock and you make things worse. Because rather than sitting there saying, Oh, what a magnificent life I have, where I know when my stressors are coming and now I can prepare for my coping stress, you sit in there for a whole minute. Whoa. So it's not just have more predictive information, have more of a sense of control. You don't want to give somebody a sense of control when the outcome was a disaster because

all you're doing is biasing them towards thinking how much better things could have been. And too bad I was at the control at that time. And some of the most humane stuff we do is try to minimize somebody's sense of control in the face of nobody could have stopped the car the way that child darted out. It wouldn't have made a difference if you had gotten them to the doctor earlier. There's nothing that you couldn't have done anything. The sense of control only works for mile to moderate stressors. For big disastrous ones, help that person to see themselves like crazy because that's

where the... So it's not just, you know, get as much control and as much predictability and as much social support as possible because, like often, we often we mistake like superficial acquaintances for actual social support and like it sucks when the carpet gets pulled out from under your feet that it turns out that clubbing is not the way in which you meet people who will keep you through the moments of crisis in your life. You know, now arrange for all the stuff works. Sound bites, and once again the terrain where do as I say, not as I live, but you know, all

the stress management stuff collectively can work quite well. It's not stuff you save for the weekend. It's not stuff you save until like you're on hold on the phone kind of thing. It's something you got to set time out for every day and usually a block of time. And what's interesting is whether that's like exercise or meditation or playing your oboe or whatever it is that's doing it for you. Actually doing that activity is stress-reproducing, but the mere fact that amid your life of saying, I can't say no to this, I got to get this done, I got to get that done, all these pressures. If you were willing to say no to that stuff enough, if you were willing to consider your well-being to be important enough that you stop everything for 20 minutes of day of like you know messing with Rubik's cubes. It hardly matters what

you're doing. You're 90% of the way they're already because you have said this is serious enough and my well-being is serious enough that I'm going to say no to all these things. I can't say no to so like that works great. Next thing is make sure it's a stress management technique that like you actually enjoy doing like because if it is and you don't you should be getting stressed by doing your stress management technique. Exactly. Like you know meditation, there's a gazillion study showing it as also to benefit, beneficial effects. Because of my makeup, if I spent 20 minutes a day meditating, I would have a stroke by this weekend. It's so like antithetical to what my makeup is.

But like, that's great that all your friends say it's wonderful. You know, see if it works for you, read the fine print. And if it doesn't, like, that's not stress reduction, that's exactly opposite. I would say the last caveat that comes with that is if you've run to somebody who says it has been scientifically proven that their special brand of stress matter works better than the other ones, you got to do it almost every day and it's got to be something that actually works for you rather than working for whichever celebrity. Didn't there like exercise routine is talking about online and

don't trust someone who says there is a special because they all are roughly doing the same thing. Talking about on the other side of this, moving out of stress and into good stuff, have you ever thought about how people can help themselves habituate to the good things and the good changes that happen in life more slowly? Yeah. Something I've been rummaging on a lot as of late because you know, it's another one of those where we're a weird species and it allows us to do some cool stuff. But whoa, does it have some like bills that come afterward in terms of no free lunch? Okay, so you're a bad boon. Like what's the source of

fun in your life? You're hungry and you get to eat something great or like you're in a bad mood and you get to beat up on somebody's smaller so you feel terrific or somebody mates with you or any of these things. And like it's a fairly limited repertoire of what counts as rewarding. And then you get to us and like all of those things

are nice, but in addition, like we solve a math problem that we've been working on for 20 years, and like the world is a wondrous place, or like a piece of music, or like quadruple orgasms, or like you smell a flower that smells great, or like we've got this range of potential pleasures. That's amazing compared to every other beast out there. And once again, this theme of we're just like every other primate out there until you look close and we're totally different. We've got the same brain circuitry that handles reward and anticipation and motivation as every other like primate out there. And a lot of it revolves around the

Senderer transmitter dopamine and dopamine is totally cool and it's a reward, but it's actually more about anticipation than reward. And if you're about boom, dopamine is all about wow, this like gazelle I just killed is going to be fantastic. This is going to taste great. And then we do stuff like we release the same door transmitter thinking about, wow, this is going to be such a great plan for my grandchildren or wow, this is, you know, we've got this range of potential pleasures and potential motivations like nobody else out there. And the range varies like this is a system that has to accommodate smelling a nice flower and winning the lottery. And it's using the same circuits

and it's using the same newer transmitters to do this. What that means is this is a system that has to reset really quickly because it's got to know, okay, okay, we just stopped doing winning the lottery. Now we're doing the smell of flowers. So like going from zero to 10, okay, we've read just to this is what zero to 10 now means. This is like the first nice smell of the season rather than, oh, you've just cured world hunger or whatever. It's got to reset quickly. And there's some cool hits coming up by now as to what's unique about the human, like reward anticipation system where it's got fancy or regulation, so you could send more

negative feedback signals saying, okay, we're switching from flowers to organisms now or whatever, it's got very fancy. So that's totally great that allows us to do stuff. And there's like the bill that comes, which accounts for an incredibly, incredibly, incredible percentage of like human dis-ease and despair and dissatisfaction, which is if this system resets so quickly by definition whatever was like a fantastic surprise and wonderful yesterday is going to be what you feel entitled to today and

is going to be what you feel entitled to today and is going to feel insufficient tomorrow. And we get hungry again and we just get hungry and hungry and hungry and whatever was great is never going to be enough very quickly. And like, okay, that's why we go to the moon and that's why we do incredible, motivated things and we innovate and we always want the next new thing and novelty and all that. But it's also why with like damn, few tragically few exceptions, we habituate to great stuff and it never tastes as good again and and never feels as good again, or feels as satisfying, or, and, like, this is this crappy, miserable thing we're stuck in as a species.

You know, if we're going to like send in tens of thousands of patents for new things every year, the downside is what was wonderful, stop seeming wonderful pretty quickly. We habituate like mad and like that, that's our, that's our like basic predicament. It stops feeling as good and we get hungry again. Okay, so when it comes to extending how long that happens, is there anything that we can do?

Can we slow this inevitable onslaught of hedonic adaptation? Oh sure, you have to be a hell of a lot more mature than I am for example and you know far more You know all this stuff like go through these like cognitive exercises of think about go through these cognitive exercises of think about somebody else who's less lucky than you were, try to really file away that feeling of glorious surprise and like this is great. And this is like a wonderful, loving, caring world and I'm okay. And it's going to be okay. And the next day when you're feeling like, well, yeah, but what about, okay, really pay attention to the viscera of that moment

to have a prayer of recalling some of it. Think about other people, think about like, how great it would be to evoke the same feelings and somebody else, wow, you know, vicariously doing that is a great way of resetting pleasures that we've habituated to. And you know, every parent has this at various points where they say, wow, my kid just

got to experience this for the first time. It was amazing when I did that. It's, you know, there's all sorts of means of doing it. And of course, you got to have your, your act together to a greater extent than most of us readily do. But like these are, these are all the ways in which you try to keep the colors from fading too quickly. You hit on one of the hot topics of the internet,

dopamine, obviously dopamine nation, the fact that people are in sun, You hit on one of the hot topics of the internet, dopamine. Obviously dopamine nation, the fact that people are in sun, they're being driven by it, they're compulsively chasing it through a screen, through a vape in their hand, through whatever next collective effervescence experience they're having with their friends. How much bullshit is there in your opinion? In the training, detraining, retraining,

sensitivity detoxing of dopamine? Oh, I don't know. I'm trying to be polite and I call it bullshit, but thanks for calling it bullshit. It's because people get pulled in one particular direction with it, which superficially is correct, but is not really the case in the reality. It's like so much more interesting. I'm in this dopamine nation and stuff. That's a great phrase. The equivalent phrase I'd have is, we're the species that wants and wants and wants and

wants and wants. It's for much the same reason. Okay. and wants and wants and wants and it's for much the same reason. Okay, what everybody thinks they know about dopamine and what all the savants thought they had shown for a long time is dopamine is about reward. Take a person, take a monkey, take a rat, give it a reward from out of nowhere and it releases dopamine from the dopaminergic reward circuits in the brain there. And yeah, it's about reward. Cocaine releases tons of dopamine, like nothing the natural world could ever do.

So that by the way, afterward, you've depleted your own dopamine stores. So if you want to have a big rush, the only possible choice you have is to do it again. And then do it again, because each time you come back to a baseline that's even more depleted than you were before, you know, the ratcheting downward of addiction, but I digress in a preachy manner. Okay, so dopamine is about reward. That's totally straightforward. All these euphoria and release dopamine case closed. all these euphoria and release dopamine case closed. But now you do the experiment a little bit differently. You take that human rat monkey, whatever,

and you put him in a room, and here's the deal. When a little light comes on, it means if they go and press this lever 10 times, then they're gonna get a reward. Great. You learn it very quickly. Light work reward, light work reward, and you got it under your belt, and that's terrific. And so the question now becomes when that sequence occurs, when does dopamine go up? Does it go up when you get the

reward? No. Not once you learn this contingency, dopamine goes up with the light turns on. Because you're sitting there saying, yeah, I'm on top of this. I know all about this lever pressing stuff. Peace at cake. This is going to be fabulous. Dopamine's about the anticipation. It's not about the reward. It's about this is going to be fantastic. And even more interestingly,

if you mess in there and you block the dopamine levels from rising, you don't get the lever pressing. It's about the motivation driven by the anticipation. And this is like incredible. This is totally amazing. And all sorts of ways. First off, it begins to hint after a while that it's not the pursuit of happiness, but it's the happiness of the pursuit. Yes, that sound bite. I've never patented that, but that should be on little doilies and everyone's kitchens and stuff. That's what I mean think about how often the anticipation of something turns out to be much better than it turns out to actually be bummer because what you now have afterward is even that much more of a hunger, but it's about anticipation. So that's the first interesting implication, the anticipation and the striving is what's really the thing that motivates us.

Second cool thing. Okay, so now do the experiment a little bit different. What I just described was you press the lever and you get the right one. Press the lever, you get the reward, 100% predictability, it's completely clear. Now shift things to you press the lever and you only get the reward about half the time. What happens to dopamine at that point? It goes through the roof, the second the little light goes on. Because what you've just introduced into your brain chemistry is the word maybe.

And whoa, maybe drives the system like nothing on earth. Okay, I'm detecting that my dog is frantically bereaved because his ball has rolled under something. Let me go help him out in his patheticness. I'll be right back. Okay, okay. Now, uh,

oh, yes. look at you. Yes, now, okay, Safi, come, so let me see. Oh, and now the other dog is here also. Let me see if I can keep them satisfied by wrapping them on the nose here and pretending to be trying to pull the ball away. Okay, so you introduce them uncertainty in it and there's even more dopamine because maybe, like you're now sitting there saying, yeah, I'm a total screw up, but today I'm feeling lucky, but I'm sure I'm going to mess up, but no, I'm on top and you're just teetering there. And that's

motivating, like nothing under add in some uncertainty and if you get the right social engineering going on like people do in Las Vegas they will take a one in a thousand chance and convince you you actually have a 50-50 chance or something wonderfully and you just press that lever over and over again. I'd say the third thing that's coolest about it is you do all this with a monkey or a rat and this is about like you press the lever and then after a 10 second to lay you got the reward. And then we do the exact same thing and we press a very human specific lever and what we believe is somewhere down the line we're going to get a reward. We're going to go to heaven after we die.

If like you pray, whoa, we can lever press like an entire lifetime. We can lever press for, we're able to maintain that anticipatory dopamine like nobody else out there. We can lever press an anticipation that our grandkids will inherit money from us. Like, what is that? We take the same system and we could run it like a million times longer than your average

monkey can. And that explains an awful lot as well. Yeah, I find it so interesting that it seems like the kind of the bullseye of happiness is things are about to get slightly better than I thought they were going to be. Like, that's pretty much it, right? It's just, it's that moment, just there. It's before it happens, right? It's not when the foods come out, it's when you see the waiter coming over with the food. And it's about to put it down. And okay, here's one of the most cynical things I ever heard someone say,

this was a guy down the hall in the dorm in college. He said, a relationship is the price you pay for the anticipation of it. Wow. Yeah. Yes, yes, he had one disastrous relationship after another after another. I imagine, yeah. The word almost. Whoa. That's that's really powerful. And like that's how we, you know, construct cities and like sequence the human genome and build pyramids and all that like just keep pressing the lever because that's going to be amazing when they stick your mummified corpse inside that

big pyramidal thing. So what is all going to be worth it? What about dopamine sensitivity and driving that either down so that we become more sensitive. So we have detrained ourselves from dopamine so much. There is advice online. Don't have any stimulus for 30 days. It resets things in the brain. How long does it take? Is it locked in for life? I win the lottery once and now every paycheck to me

is it forever going to seem poultry? I've hit the lever and got a million bits of food and now no amount of food is ever going to feel satisfying to me. Well, I feel fairly confident that if you didn't eat for 30 days, food would be amazing. Afterburned, it would have reset in a traumatic way. Here's just one piece of that story and again, kind of the world I come from. If you're a fetus and you're exposed to a lot of stress hormones among all the other things going on and there, you make fewer dopamine neurons in that part of the brain. You're going to have fewer of them as an adult. You're going to have less capacity

for feeling pleasure and anticipation. You're going to need less capacity for feeling pleasure and anticipation. You are going to need stronger stimuli to get the system kicking into gear. What have you early life stress and vulnerability to substance abuse? That's exactly a mechanism for it. So yeah, how many of those neurons do you have? How good are they at making dopamine? How quickly do they run out of it? If they've run out of it, how fast can they rebuild it? If the system's habituated, how fast is it reset?

And every single one of those things has a nuts and bolts explanation in each of us. Every one of those differs in each of us from somebody else. And every one of those settings is a mixture of genes and what happened to you when and all of that. And that's why you get people who like go listen to a Wagner opera for four hours and find it to be wonderful and other people who like if they don't like, you know, shoot up right now, they're not going to last another minute or so. Everything, you know, individual variation. You know shoot up right now. They're not gonna last another minute or so everything

You know individual variation All right, everybody's system works differently We're talking about stress. We're talking about neurotransmitters and hormones and some of that stuff's contentious Right, but largely people are interested in how to reduce stress and how it works and how the oxytocin and the serotonin and stuff all come together. Why did you decide to descend into the hellscape that is the free will discussion? Like why is it so important to discuss this that you would put your own mental health on the line? Well, when I was a fetus,

there's this thing that happened. Well, when I was almost back to a fetus, I was 14 when I decided there's no free will whatsoever. As long as I was at it, it was one very tumultuous night. I also decided there's no God and there's no purpose to anything. And it's a huge empty evening for a 14 year old. Yeah, yeah, and I've been paying for those insights ever since. I even, this was literally a two the morning I woke up during a rather like distressed week with all sorts of like, angsty things going on. And I woke up and like I remember very clearly saying oh I Get it

there's no God And there's no free will and there's and I even quickly wrote down notes Which of course we're incoherent because I was half asleep and I couldn't read morning But you know I've been thinking this way forever and sleep and I couldn't read in the morning, but you know, I've been thinking this way forever. And, you know, that's great. That's kind of what I've gotten to. And about five years ago, I wrote this book called, Behave, the Biology of Humans, that are best and worst. And it's basically, why do we do what we do? And the answer is, because of what happened one second ago, and one minute ago and an hour

ago and back to childhood and fetal life and genes and what culture your ancestors invented because that's how your mother treated you and evolution and all that. And you got to take all of that into account. And literally 790 pages agonizingly later, you know, this is what we're about. And the aftermath, I did a lot of lecturing, and like you'd go through a 50 minute version of all of this, and Q&A afterward, and inevitably, there'd be someone who would say, wow, you know, if all, if this is how stuff works, we may have less free will than we normally think. That's what I was saying.

You think, you think, and I realized like for a surprising number of people who would do something as ridiculous as go to a lecture on a weeknight or something, this was revelatory and saying, okay, I thought this would be obvious after like almost 800 pages of this download, time to write something that says, yeah, not only is there much less than we think, there's no free will whatsoever, and we gotta start functioning a little bit more as if that's the case.

And thus I've sat, you know, collecting cobwebs for the last five years, writing a sort of the sequel to that book. It's coming out October, it's called determined a science of life without free will and I take what is far and away a lunatic fringe stance Which isn't saying that we have no free will whatsoever all we are is isn't saying that we have no free will whatsoever. All we are is the sum of our biology and its interactions with environment and neither of which we had any fundamental control over and that's who we are. So I kind of figured I would like go try to convince some people of that and fully expect that's going to be wildly unsuccessful,

but at least I don't have to try to frame my arguments and go here in paragraph anymore. Why do you think the conversation about free will is so animated? Because at first glance, and for the first 150 or so glances, it really sucks if we have no free will. If we are just biological machines, all of that, it really is terrible and demoralizing and frightening and all of that. And it's not by chance that what the poll show is like 95% of philosophers who think about this are what you call compatible lists, which is they're willing to admit we're not made out of magic, like the world was made out of molecules and stuff like that.

But somehow, somehow, somehow this is where we still manage to have free will. And when you read between the lines, it's because half of them are saying, because damn, that would be depressing, because we get such, we are me, um, me. And where did me come from? And part of being me is that like, I've got some control over what I do. And this is incredibly central to our sense of well-being and mental health and lots of cases and all of that. But like bummer, it doesn't work that way. And you know, I go through like this agonizingly long book. The first half is like, why we have no free will, and here's the brains and the genes and all of that. And the second half of the book, which took me much longer to write

because I still don't really have any good answers to this, is, oh my God, what if people actually started believing this? How are we supposed to function if we recognize that there's no free will will that agency is a myth? Oh my god, like what's the world supposed to look like and the second half of the book is very feeble attempts at trying to get at that and hopefully in the process like D

constructing people's resistance to the notion that we have no free will. The first thing everybody immediately freaks out over, everybody's going to just run a muck because there's no responsibility if you feel like there is none. And what a lot of science has shown is we're not going to run a muck. We may run a muck for the first afternoon. We're convinced going to run a buck. We may run a buck for the first afternoon. We're convinced of that and like

Interesting research has shown if you like unconsciously prime people to believe less and free will They're more likely to cheat at a game 20 minutes later stuff like that But when you get people who have for a long time believe there's no free will Just as when you get people who for a long time have believed there is no God, they're exactly as ethical as people who believe there's abundant free will and it makes sense to hold us responsible for our actions. And just as ethical as people who believe there is a God who is watching and judging all of that. And so the key commonality is, if you've spent a lot of time thinking about this,

what's the source of meaning, what's the source of human goodness or any stuff like that. If you spent a lot of time thinking about it and lots of ways it doesn't matter if you're a conclusion as we have free will or we don't, there is a God or there isn't, there is a God who cares. Or if you've done the hard work of thinking about it, you're

going to wind up being much more ethical than average. That's the we're not going to run a mock. But then people freak out saying that still still there's going to be some people that run a mock and what you're going to do. Nothing about them, you're just going to let murderers run around on the street because they they're not responsible for their actions. And, you know, that's an ass-n-eye worry because we've got some great parallels.

If you got a car and the brakes don't work, it's not safe, it's dangerous. You keep it off the streets because it's gonna hurt people. And what you do is if you can't fix it, you stick it in a garage and the car can't be driven anymore. But that doesn't mean it deserves to be locked up. That doesn't mean it's got a crappy soul or something like that. It's a broken machine. And yeah, this is the solidarity from it. Yeah, I guess this sort of criminal side of this is

a really interesting implication, right? Like if there's, it does, does no free will mean that there's no such thing as blame and that punishment and retribution and, and vengeance and stuff are always indefensible, right? I think a lot of the time what we see when we see bad, bad people, people that have done bad things, when we see them go to jail, there's something kind of righteous that we feel. We feel like they're given their just desserts in some regard. And you need to use it as a tool of discouragement for other people to do it in future.

It needs to be a societal signal. But we also know that it's only like a bit okay at that. There's many people who don't care about whether or not they get caught. Many, many people who almost prefer to be in jail than prefer to be outside, people who've become so habituated to their existence. And so yeah, what does this do to a law system

that needs to be able to protect us from people that are going to do bad things, if we are not the conscious agents that have caused the actions that we're now being prosecuted for. Well, sort of the new, honest response I have to that is the entire damn system is irrational and medieval and has to be completely abolished because it's premised on the notion that it and B.D.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E One of the most reliable releases of dopamine in our brains is get to be righteously punishing of someone. Yeah, that's good to be an uphill battle because that feels good when we think like we're doing it for the right reasons. But the

criminal justice system makes no sense at all. Even the reformist versions of like, you know, reconciliation ceremonies and, you know, compensatory actions on the part of people who have done harm to better understand their victims and their victims to better understand them. All of those are premised on like bleeding heart liberal versions of, you know, the system could be a lot less brutal, and could work better. The system makes no sense at all because it is predicated on the starting notion of it's a just world in which people are punished for things they had no control over. And that's the only possible logical outcome. So this is where people freak out and, oh no, murderers running around on the streets.

And all you have to apply is the same public health quarantine model that you do with a car who's breaks, don't work. You keep it in there, but that doesn't mean like you dent the hood viciously every single day to make it a better car or afterward. It doesn't mean that what does this look like practically? Like what does it look like practically like what what does it look like it's not a car. Okay, we do one version of this like all the time with a type of human who's dangerous. They're dangerous and if you don't keep them like confined in a way that they

can't get access to other people. People are going to be harmed by them. And what is this? This is when your five year old has a cold and you keep them hold from kindergarten because they're going to get the other kids sick from sneezing. And we've all learned that as a quarantine containment strategy and we're only able to protect kindergarteners from sneaky kids with runny noses and there's no judgment, there's no responsibility. You don't keep your kid home because they deserve not to be able to see their friends that day. You don't say you can't play with your toys because, you know, the way you're sneezing

don't you care about how you're going to harm other people? Whoa, we've managed to do that, and we keep kindergarteners safe from nose colds and society hasn't fallen apart. We've subtracted out a notion of responsibility and society not only functions, if functions better because kindergarteners not only don't get sick, but you don't tell five-year-olds they've got like the evil demon in there that's making them sneeze or something. What about people that would say, Robert, that sounds an awful lot like jail to me?

That's what we do. We take the people that have done bad things and we put them in a quarantined building along with other people who also have the same bad things for a period of time and then we let them out. No, because it's a world of difference from quarantine. For one thing what you do with quarantine, what your moral imperative is, is to figure out exactly what you need to do to keep people safe from this individual and not a smidge and more, not an inch more than that. Because there's no reason to take away your child's toys just because they have a nose cold. You do the absolute minimum that is needed. In addition, you don't moralize about it. This is simply a containment strategy. And finally, what you do, and you get all of society to look at it that way, I mean, we've gotten to the point

where, you know, a kid who's sneezing, we don't view them as a moral blight, but yeah, don't bring them to kindergarten tomorrow. They're gonna get my kids sick and that's gonna be a disaster. We've subtracted that out of it. We've subtracted that out of it in some even more meaningful realms schizophrenia. Like, one of the all-time horrible diseases usually gets you in late adolescence early adulthood and for decades and decades and decades, like somebody's child falls into schizophrenia and you take them to the doctor and it's the most tragic moment of your life as a parent because the doctor says, yes, it is that disease. And we don't really know how to handle it. And you know, this is an enormous tragedy. And then as the parent, you say,

how did this happen? What caused this disease? And for about the middle half of the 20th century, the best, most compassionate psychiatrist under it had an answer for you, which is you caused it. You caused it by your crappy parenting. And of course, it was always directed at the mother at your quote, schizophrenic, genetic mothering, which amid sort of the Freudian builds that fueled it. On some unconscious level, you hate your child, you hated your child, and it's your fault, your fault. And I have talked to like support groups of like family members of people with schizophrenia,

and the first generation of people where they figured out, oh no, actually, it's a neurogenetic disorder, brain developmental abnormalities. It had nothing to do with your mothering. And these are all women in their 90s now. And it is amazing to talk to them about the moment when they truly grasped, this isn't my fault. I didn't do this. So as a society, we're able to like take care of kids sneezing and we're able to subtract out fault of mothers

when it comes to schizophrenia, things like that. And we're able to do it in a way where we're not moralizing anymore. So you contain the person, you quarantine, then the absolute minimum needed, not an inch more, and you do that morality. And you do the thing that like every good public health person knows that their job doesn't end at that point.

Their job is to then figure out, how did this happen in the first place? Why do certain sort of inner city neighborhoods produce criminals? Why is it that people who live in poverty die of like diseases of aging when they're 50 years old? Well, go do something about root causes. And it's the same exact like moral and perilive imperative public health people. Like dig well so people can get clean water.

Do things so that people don't grow up thinking that it's an infinitely scary world. And you have to watch your back all the time. And in fact, here's a good weapon to use when you want to accomplish that. Like put those pieces together. And yeah, it's obviously an utterly transformed world. But that's exactly what we're doing with kids who sneeze. Okay, let's make sure the next time I take my five-year-old to soccer practice that they like put their like warm jacket on afterward. So they don't get sick. And if they do, it's not their fault, they're not evil.

And make sure they don't get anybody else sick at preschool, but like don't punish them beyond that. And whoa, we could run the world that way. And we could run the world that way. This gets a frenion now. And we need to move to the point where we're running it that way with a whole bunch of other stuff because it's the exact same profile and the exact same ways in which we make all sorts of people's lives miserable for no reason. And like we've done it before. So yeah, let's go do it again.

So yeah, let's go do it again. Okay, so after we've shit on the righteous retribution that people want for criminals and people that have done bad things from a great height, another pillar that people are very, very attached to. Me included is meritocracy. Yeah. People being able to be the architects of their own successes. And I had some Harris on the show about three months ago,

and this was one of the things that we didn't get to talk about, but I kind of wish that I'd brought it up to him. And he talked about the myth of the self-made man. And he said, the myth of the self-made man does so much heavy lifting right of center. It allows people to feel like they are the architects of their own successes and a lander boton from the School of Life gave me this beautiful framing years ago, on this great video he did, where he said, in ancient Greece, the beggars on the streets,

the word that was used to describe them was unfortunate, that Lady Fortuna, the goddess that has the scales, that she hadn't blessed them. And that's changed now into the modern world, the nomenclature that we use is a loser, right? A loser is the person that hasn't been able to get themselves up and sort their life out. It's been taken from something that was almost bestowed on you by an outside ethereal force, to now something that was completely within your volition and totally under your control as a sovereign

agent in the world. And the implication is, if the losers are the architect of their losses, then the winners are the architects of their successes. And this myth of the self-made man, all of the rest of it, I've made a lot of changes to the way that I exist and the things that I do and the texture of my mind. And I've made lots of changes over the last six years. And it does sound to me quite disempowering

and quite disquieting to hear, I didn't choose to do any of that. All of the effort that I thought that I deployed wasn't mine to choose. My capacity to have that effort wasn't choose to do any of that. All of the effort that I thought that I deployed wasn't mine to choose. My capacity to have that effort wasn't mine to choose. My desire and choice to put my foot on the pedal of whatever that effort is wasn't mine to choose and the executive function to piece it all together

into a structured, ordered, organizational framework to do it also wasn't mine to choose or to deploy. It makes for quite a sad world as someone that wants to try and become something. It sure does, which is why this is totally depressing. And yes, this is actually a good thing. I mean, for starters, everything I just said about the criminal justice system, just like, say opposite words in the same sentences and it applies exactly the same to meritocracy. It is just as irrational and just as indeed of being like chunked altogether because like

the other side of this being like a horrible unjust world is that we reward people for things they had no control over. And they come out feeling entitled and feeling like they've earned it. And so that's got to go also. Okay, so what's the equivalent panic to, oh great. So you're just going to have murder is running around on the streets saying, oh great, you're just going to have a random, at least selected person taking out your brain tumor. No. random, least selected person taking out your brain tumor. No, like you gotta have like skill people being there are surgeons and some people can gain those skills and other people

not. And like you need to have competent people doing stuff. And just as like you keep dangerous people from hurting people, you keep incompetent people from hurting people as well. And like your neurosurgeons will still have to go through a lot of training and all of that. But that means the incentives need to be there, right? You have to have the incentives in order to be able to justify them going through all of the training and doing the hard things. Yeah, and what we went through was like the usual incentives for punishment have to be subtracted out because incentives are built around your rotten person and you could be cured, go talk to the chaplain or whatever. And the same thing in the case of the brain surgeon

flipped the other way. Like the only logical conclusion is thank God they're capable of doing this, but they're not a better human because they can do this. They're not entitled to have their needs and life considered more than anyone else's. So where do incentives come from?

needs and life considered more than anyone else's. So where do incentives come from? Major like, oh my god, almost Buddhist crap this guy is going on about right now. We are motivated by the desire to attain prestige and power and respect and entitlement and all of that. And in the case of how they were talking about those poor unfortunate, not blessed by a lady luck back there, what we have to take pleasure from is we were one of the lucky ones to feel gratitude for that. That has to be a source of like, okay, cool. Turns out it looks like I'm one of those people who has the potential to like be able to go save a source of like, okay, cool. Turns out it looks like I'm one of those people who has the potential to like be able to go save a lot of lives.

To interject there, why should you feel gratitude for something that you had no choice in it happening? Because you lucked out. You, you, you're not living on the streets. You lucked out. I've, I've got the balance sheet in my mind of the degree of pleasure that people have from feeling like they authored their own successes compared with the degree of pleasure that they have from feeling like they just rolled a double six. Yeah, this is aesonine, this is like utopian beyond words, but like somewhere in there, we recognize that like there's a certain amount of irrational attribution of acclaiming someone when they turn out to be 7 foot 4 inches tall and they're amazing in the NBA.

Okay, that kind of, you know, that may begin to explain why they're in the NBA, and I'm not kind of thing. Oh, yeah, that one we've gotten to the point in society that that one has something to do with versions of like your growth hormone receptors, and that was not a moral like triumph to grow tall enough to play in the NBA. We can kind of deal with that. And society hasn't fallen apart. We can subtract out praise for somebody

growing to be that height. And the world doesn't collapse. And it's a much more accurate assessment. But what we're getting at here is like this enormous false dichotomy we do in our heads, which is like most people don't believe in infinite free will. And they say, yeah, there's stuff we have no control over. Like not everyone gets to be seven foot four. Not everybody gets to have perfect pitch. Not everybody gets to have the right glutamate receptor makeup so

that they've got an amazing memory. And, you know, there's luck. There's the biological attributes that we get gifted with or cursed with. And there's that stuff. Yeah, we had no control over. But oh, what we do with those attributes. Do we strive? Do we show tenacity and gumption? Do we, like, when they're going, get tough? Do we get going? Or do we squander our gifts? Do we indulge ourselves in this opportunity?

That's the measure of who we are. That's this, like, totally false dichotomy that our attributes are made of biologyol and G and like what we do It is made of fairy dust whether like that tests our souls and like that's Like the most seductive thing like how could you not be like? I don't know these these seven-footers playing the NBA and like a wild pack, there was this guy Mugsy Boag who was five-foot-three inches tall and he played in the NBA because he was like amazing and how could you not be inspired by that? And the one out of gazillion kids born into poverty who somehow are now the CEO of something

and like, they're so damn inspiring and looking at the squandering is like so pleasurably appalling to watch. I saw Forbes magazine last year, 70% of wealthy families have lost their fortunes by the second generation because they just squander and oh my god, who could resist that? Yeah, that's the arena in which we are convinced that like God and Satan or arm wrestling what you do with what you're handed at you and like if you show self-discipline or not, if you have admirable impulse control at a highly stressful moment or if you fail at a highly stressful moment, or if you fail dismoly, if you any of those things, it's made at the exact same stuff as your memory span, and whether you're a good sprinter or not, because of the muscle makeup of your thighs, and whether it's the same biology.

It's, in my opinion, a much more interesting biology, and it's got lost to do with that part of the brain, the frontal cortex, but it's the same stuff. And not only if you are like horribly abused and grow up under like nightmare, a adversity, not only is your brain could have developed in a way that you probably are not going to have a great digit span among the other consequences, you're going to have terrible self control on the average because your frontal cortex didn't develop properly and everyone looking at you will have this great Calvinist sort of notion to apply to you has no self-discipline. Can never make themselves do the, at every juncture they do the wrong thing, they do the

self-indulgent thing. And it's made of the same stuff. But yeah, again, there is kind of this problem that like I see this all the time, you talk to a bunch of people who have come out to hear a lecture about the brain and that sort of thing. And yeah, yeah, they all gulp if you've convinced them. And the slightest that free will is a pretty suspect concept. They all go up and say, okay, well, we're going to have a whole different view about punishment. Oh, I mean, containing dangerous people and Christ before it's over with, we're going to have to be like the Scandinavians.

And whoa, this is going to be hard. And I got a lot of this real stuff. I'm going to have to overcome there. But if you want to really know what I'm going to have a hard time with, it's, oh, did I not deserve my good salary? Did I not earn my college degree because I was one of the ones who always skipped the parties and went and studied it? That's where people really begin to panic because that's going to be the much harder one. This philosopher, Daniel Dennett, who's like a leading compatibleist and he's very influential and he's like a charming

speaker and writer, and he's he's medieval in how he thinks about free will and entitlement and all of that. And like this quote of his that winds up in all of his YouTube talks and interviews and stuff, where he's going on about how like, you know, we need to hold on to the concept of free will, regardless of whether it's true or not, I happen to think it's true, he says, and hear my completely unsupportable scientific opinions about it, but nonetheless, because we don't want murderers and rapists running around all over the place, and what's going to happen if we don't feel a sense of accomplishment in our prizes?

Whoa, that's what he's actually worried about, you know, fuck it with the murderers running around. What's gonna happen if I can't feel is if I earn my pro... This is a verbatim quote if we can't feel a sense of accomplishment for the prizes we've earned. Yeah, oh! can't feel a sense of accomplishments for the prizes we've earned. Yeah. Ooh. Now we know what the problem really is for all those people with 10 year chairs and philosophy or whatever. Like that's where the panic comes in.

And what I spent like the five years writing this book, thinking I was going to wind up with is like the most unpalatable punchline on earth, which is like tough. This is how the world works. You really didn't earn those things. It's all chant, it's biological, it's environmental luck, so like, you know, suck it up and be an adult with this. Wow, that's going to be really a fun message to go out and try to sell people. But then you realize this is actually fabulous news. The lack of free will is incredibly liberating because when it comes to this being a world where we reward and punish people for things that they were not responsible for,

most of the time we're punishing people. Most of the time we're telling people who had the crappy luck in life to be born in a village in the hell where there's no clean water or had the crappy luck to be born into the wrong poor family or had the crappy luck to not be beautiful and thus for their whole life they have less of a chance to be loved or the crappy luck to have genes that make them destined for obesity or any for most people on this planet. The news that you were not responsible for how it turned out is the most humane damn thing you can tell anyone. And there's this gigantic self-selection problem, which is the people who are gonna come

and listen to some like nutty lecture, which is the people who are gonna come and listen to some like nutty lecture, are exactly the people who are gonna be saying, oh my God, maybe I didn't earn my college degree. The people for whom this is like the liberating message, they're sitting there wondering how they're gonna pay the rent at the end of the week. But for folks. They have no idea who Robert Sapolsky

or Determinism is. And like the frontal cortex, because they're working three jobs, and for most people on this planet, the news that all we are are end products of all the things we had no control over beforehand, is the most humane possible news you can get and a world that adjusts to thinking that way. You know, it's a very good thing that we decided not to take old women with no teeth who live off by themselves on the edge of the hamlet and decided it's their fault that there was an earthquake and burn them at the stake.

It's a more humane planet that we learned something about witches and the biological reality. Every one of these things is going to make for a more humane planet. And as soon as we figured those things out, the world got better for the majority of people. So this is actually a good thing. Like bummer, if you were left with this existential void, and on top of that, like your business school degree is a little bit less source of a sense of entitlement in you. But for most people on this planet, like a justice system that is the backbone of everything that we do, which says that reward and punishment is just because it's being meted out to people who we incorrectly believe earned it.

All I could do is make the world better. So this is a good thing. I sure can't really think that way most of the time because most of the time I'm saying, oh my God, but what about the fact that I have a job they pay me I've got like a good salary all of the whoa. I sure worked hard to you know nobody is saying this is going to be easy but all that happens at every step when we subtract responsibility out of our perception of where human behavior comes from it becomes a nicer planet. Yeah, it seems to me that taking the free will red pill is something that hurts people who have much to be proud of, but benefits people who currently have much to be kind of despondent about. It's like a flattening way to the ultimate egalitarian philosophy, right? It's as flat as flat gets. Yeah, because if you do the impossible and

really, really think this way all the time, and I sure as hell can't, but the only logic, conclusion from this is none of us are entitled to anything more than any other human on earth. There's no person out there whose needs are entitled to less consideration than yours. So I understand that, but from a practical consideration, you know, if we're talking about the importance of incentives in order to be able to get people who have the predisposition or the capacity to be able to deploy that in the right way, presumably we can't just red pill free will into all of the potential budding brain surgeons out there so that they know even though I only get paid the same as the guy who has

bottom of the barrel conscientiousness and just smokes weed and does Xbox all day, because he didn't choose that and I didn't choose this, it should be my duty to ignore the lack of incentive in this new world of UBI or something like free will based universal basic income. I'm guessing that that's not your proposal for a society structure. Well, good luck with that. Yeah, that's not going to be easy. On the other hand, we've got a world

where from very early on in life, we're training kids with cultural myths that are exactly the opposite. I don't know if we put a lot of work into teaching people to just recognize it is sheer utter chance that they wound up being who they are. And if you had the good luck, some gratitude would be a good thing. Okay, okay, my Christ, I'm going to start, I'm going to bring Joan Baez in here in a moment on like her walker or something to talk about the utopian, like, yeah, but we do it in little bits and pieces. You know, like there's, there's like hallmark cards you can get and give to somebody that says,

what's it? Thank you for being you. Oh, come on. Thank you for you having been the lucky one to have turned out the way you are and happening to, like, keep me my spouse. Or, yeah, it's going to be really hard. And I can function this way less than 1% of the time and I constantly show that like, I'm believing this stuff. I'm a total hypocrite because I can't really act on it emotionally, the vast majority. But every now and then, when it really, really, really matters, like, think about it when you're trying to make sense of why it seems okay that this person gets less concern than

people like you do or Try to think that way every now and then when you're about to be like pissed off at somebody or Self-righteous or whatever or really really think like You should be able to be in the front of the line because after all, I don't know, it's interesting, you know, being a professor at Stanford where the students are great, they're all smart and they're great kids and they're like, they like uniformly worry about the world and they're wonderful and a huge disproportionate percentage of them came from ridiculous material and or intellectual privilege. And most of them spent a lot of time

trying to wrestle with this because they realized, you know, it's not by chance they wound up there. And it was just, and that's, you know, when you dig beneath the surface of those kids who were like, calling off to help run a free clinic in Nepal or whatever, it's not just to get into med school. It's on some level, they realize where they're at. And like, go look at a bunch of people and the prison a mile away from Palo Alto and the fact that they are weighed disproportionately like to not have parents who read books to them or like lived in a neighborhood

where you could walk home at the end of the day and feel safe and you know that whole song and dance. And yeah, it's not gonna be easy, but like at least do it. It's some juncture where you're feeling like you should be able to get to the front of the line. And remember, you didn't during it. I sent a 40 minute clip, the original 40 minute clip of Sam telling Joe Rogan this on his podcast.

I think it was maybe eight years ago when it came out and I think about five years ago I sent it. I used to work in night clubs. It was funny that you mentioned earlier on about clubbing. I gave it to, I listened to it and explained it on the night at one of our events. I explained it to the manager of one of the venues and he was like interested in philosophy and stuff. Luke Irish dude, fascinating guy. And he was like, I'd love to learn a little bit more about that.

So I sent him it. And he was spiraled into a deep depression for two weeks because I'd sent him this 40 minute video. And he came back two weeks later and he had to take me to one side. And he said, I need to have a word with you. And I was thinking, oh God, what have I done now? Have I let somebody in that's not got the right ID

or is one of our boys done something? And he was like, that's Sam Harris video that you sent me. So yeah, I didn't get out of bed for like two hours because of that. I've used a board with my sick days and then it's like it work and all this shit. So can you provide people with some glimmer of a white pill

that makes them feel a little bit less despondent about the fact that why shouldn't I just not do anything, all of the things? Because I do think, even if on mass and over a long enough time span people end up just going back to their sort of habituated routine with a slightly ambient Sapolsky in the back of their mind, reminding them that it's not the, they're not the architect of their own successes. It's uncomfortable, right? To genuinely try and grapple with this, it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable in the

same way as realizing that eating factory-farmed animal products is basically like paying sentient creatures to be tortured for your pleasure. And people need a little bit of help to get them across the line. Do you have any Viagra to help them get through this slightly difficult situation? Viagra to help them get through this slightly difficult situation. Well, this once again is going to be a pretty lame answer. It amid the absoluteism of there's no free will whatsoever. All of that, like go do something incremental. Once a week, when you realize you're about to judge somebody and harshly, like,

don't or once a week when you're like making, you know, pounding on the desk, if some poor bastard where you're insisting that you had an appointment and you're important and they're delaying you're, or whatever, like, do one of those things once a week. Like, some point, like look at somebody very different from you and really try and exercise and they had absolutely nothing to do with how they wound up. We're, you know, a little, little,

instead of small random acts of kindness, small random acts of rejecting free will and like, okay, I can't do much better than that, but like go do that, go do that every now and then. I think again, I feel like Sam Harris has been here in the conversation with us. When I had him on the show, I asked him kind of something similar to do with mindfulness, because I've done a lot of meditation, especially over the last five years. And I mentioned that it felt like kind of pressing down on the accelerator of a car that it can achieve even good momentum, but as soon as you put your take your foot off it,

the momentum starts to slow and sometimes way quicker than you would like. And I was asking, I wanted to know whether ultimately I'm going to reach some enlightened, blissed-out, state man, where I just lie under trees man in your life. And I think it's important that what you've sort of come to is if somebody wants to take this particular free will, Red Pill, and even if the ethical, philosophical implications are super universal and kind of everything gets upended and the entire world would be totally different, the sort of day-to-day practical instantiation of what you're saying is, just think about this a little bit, just string these together, string these kind of insight moments together every so often, or as often as you can, or as often as is useful.

And Sam had something similar to do with mindfulness. You know, he mentioned, he was late for the show, he was late getting out of the door and he was rushing and he was rushing in him and his wife were getting ready at the same time and they were going past each other and whatever, and then he said, before he got out of the door, he caught himself and realized that, you know, he's in this marriage with this woman that he loves. And he just took 10 seconds to scoop her up and give her a kiss. And then he left.

And he was like, ultimately mindfulness comes down to stringing together as many of those individual instances as you can. And I love that. I love that as an idea, because it seems so much more graspable to me. It seems so much more graspable to me. It seems so much more achievable for me to try and do 10 times a day. My mind just be where my feet are.

Fucking for once, right? And then maybe I can do it 20 times a day. Maybe I can do it 30 times a day. Maybe some weeks I don't do it at all. And then I come back and I try and 10 times a day, 20 times a day, 30 times a day. And maybe with the free will thing, maybe that's the same too. Maybe it helps us to be less judgmental. Maybe it helps us to feel less fucking superior and vengeful. And yeah, maybe it is, maybe this, maybe you need to speak to someone and get this as a part of a meditation course so that they can let go of their resentment.

God, no, not that. Anything but that. Yeah, I wish I had Sam's growing capacity for spiritual solace and stuff. More drugs. Heavy more drugs. You need to take more heavy psychedelics and see if your capacity for free will is maintained through that, through no free will of your own, obviously. Yes, well, my problem is I never did none of that stuff. But yeah, which there's something oxymoronic in that, which is saying, oh, like this reform undercuts revolution reform. Oh, let's try to remember this person circumstance before we lock them away for 50 years instead of 60 years. Oh, reform, little incremental stuff. There's no free well. We need a total revolution and suggesting here that

implementing this revolution in this little baby step incremental reformist kind of way, but like, yeah, why not? I mean, on a daily basis, like if any of this stuff is true, it makes as little sense to hate somebody as to hate a volcano. So every day, I try to find the means to not hate Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or that bastard kid who was incredibly mean to my son once, 23 years ago. And like, okay, let's let's work at this. You know, a little bit at a time. I really appreciate your work. I really appreciate the way that you put this stuff together I've had an awful lot of fun together. There's been a long time coming to get you on the show

I'm really glad that I finally did well. Thanks. This was a blast. This was really fun Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the things that you're doing? Oh Well this book coming out next month, October. Okay, once again, call, determine the size of life with, oh shit, what's it called? Determine the size of life without free will. You'd think I have that one sorted out, I know. Oh, five years writing it and you can't remember

the fucking time of the book. I know, my poor public years writing it and you can't remember the. I know my poor publicist just had like apoplexy if listening to this. Okay, determine, decisive life without free will. Penguin, random house in your neighborhood grocers, soon all of that. You know, everything I've ever said or thought in the last five years, I've written down in there. So like, I've written down in there. So like, I got nothing else useful to say than that. And even that may not be.

But okay, that's where you could find it. Go, go help Jeff Bezos get richer. It's available there too. Fantastic. Robert, thank you for today. Sure. Thank you.