Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Dr. Robert Sapolsky: Baboons, Stress Research, Connection and Determinism

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

In today's episode of the podcast, we are joined by neuroscientist and primatologist, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, to discuss his work with baboons, stress, and his own mental health journey. Dr. Sapolsky is professor of biology, neurology, and neuroscience at Stanford University, as well as an author of several books including, A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and Determined. He has spent extensive time studying baboons in Kenya over the course of his career, a passion he attributes to his extensive time spent in the American Natural History Museum in New York. Joining our conversation is Alexander Horwitz, M.D., a 4th-year psychiatry resident who previously enlightened us on serotonin syndrome in an earlier episode.   By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.25 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Robert Sapolsky. He is a world-renowned neuroscientist, primatologist, has written some amazing books, some of which I use in my IOPP partial, including Why Zebras Have Ulcers. He has a new book. It's called Determined. Here we go. And he has a couple other books that will dive into as well. I'm joined with Alex Horwitz. He was on prior episode on serotonin syndrome and thanks guys for coming on sure thank you for having me so i was fascinated to learn that you were writing primatologists when you were at a very young age i think you said around 12 and i'm curious as an adult how you imagine you found this fascination um in the american museum of natural history uh sort of in my experience

field biologists, majority of them grew up somewhere exotic. Their parents were missionaries or researchers or who knows what. And then there are those of us who at some point in our urban setting stumbled into the Natural History Museum and couldn't believe that there's another place out there. And in my case, it was the primate exhibit hall at the museum and something clicked and I decided I wanted to live inside those diaramas. That's amazing. And so I imagine, you know, as you went through and you went through, you know, college and graduate school, and what a huge culture shock that must have been from going from these, like, the most prestigious institutions to, like, Africa being on the field with baboons. Tell me about that.

Well, I think prestige was not so much the issue as when I first started doing field work. a couple of weeks after college out in Kenya. At that point, I had been in the New York to Boston Axis and Philadelphia a couple of times, and that was about it. And I knew nothing about anything in the world out there. And I probably would have felt just as much of an alien trying to understand things if I had been plunked down in the middle of Iowa, but it happened to be the Serengeti instead. and I had no idea what I was doing.

Yeah. One thing that as I read the memoir that you wrote about your baboons is you talked about how all of a sudden you realized you were being conned at times. And I was thinking about what that experience was like and how that changed you. Well, it changed me slowly, which is to say I was incredibly naive and vulnerable. My very first day, I had come from the airport in Nairobi and was waiting to figure out how to get to the YMCA, which is where I stayed initially. And I was on the grounds at the museum, the National Museum in Nairobi. And some guy gave me an incredibly

heartbreaking, convincing pitch about how he was a Ugandan refugee. history, trivia, this was during the period when Idi Amin was dictator of Uganda next door to Kenya. And he was a refugee in fighting for Ugandan freedom from Idi Amin. And could I help him? And I helped him and gave him like half my money and all of that. I proceeded like for years afterward. I would see that guy in the museum grounds being a recently escaped Ugandan refugee. me. So it was sort of downhill from there. I was very, very naive.

Yeah, it's a wake-up call. I imagine it kind of helped you in the U.S. as well, because I think it happens. It's just more subtle, right? Well, I'm still pretty useless on both fronts and detecting things like that. So tell me about your initial thoughts on the dominance hierarchy and then how that changed over time. Well, baboons, these are savanna baboons out in the grasslands, and they live in these big social groups, 50 to 100 animals or so. And all they do is be socially complex with each other. Serengeti is an amazing setting if you're a baboon because you can do your days feeding, foraging in about three hours, which means you've got almost all day devoted to being socially, you know, Machiavellian with other baboons.

And they're miserable, backstabbing, conniving sort of maneuvers, which turned out to be perfect for what I was studying. They're also, at the time, the textbook example of here's a closely related primate species, which in which it is male-dominated, hierarchical, very stratified, high rates of aggression, violence, highest rates among non-human primates. And, well, this is what they're like. And you sure are impressed with number one in the hierarchy and maybe a little bit less so with two and then all the way down there. And hierarchy and all of that was like the center organizing feature of these guys.

lives until it turned until it turned out not to be so much. This was what I had gone out to do is study as like turning into a stress physiologist and was figuring out ways to dart to anesthetize wild baboons, get blood samples, and do dex suppression tests on them ultimately and things like that. And what I was interested in is what does your social rank have to do with how well your body's dealing with stress, your cholesterol levels, your cortisol levels, your immune profiles, all of that. And I went in with an absolutely clear picture as to what I was guessing was going to be the case, which is if you get a choice in the matter, you want to be a high-ranking

baboon because low-ranking ones were like textbook examples of psychological stress, lack of control, lack of predictability, lack of outlets, and they had elevated basal cortisol levels, they had trouble turning off their stress response, they had all sorts of other things that looked bad for them, and ultimately it seemed like this one big blowout of like hooray for social dominance, and I proceeded to waste my first 20 years researching the baboons doing that, deciding I understood what was going on. And what turned out to be far more interesting was patterns of socialization and personality, personality, which is not remotely an anthropomorphic term when you're talking about other primates. And, you know, as a soundbite, it took me decades and

probably no longer being a 20-year-old and a 40-year-old instead to figure out, if you got a choice in the matter and you want to have low blood pressure and you could be a high-ranking male baboon or one who has a lot of grooming relationships go for the ladder every single time that was far more of an important variable in making sense of baboon behavioral psychology yeah so when you're going back and forth between like the savannah and the you know academia are you also noticing a dominance hierarchy in academia? Well, eventually it was mighty interesting going to my

first faculty meeting and sizing up everybody's canines and how long and sharp they were or weren't. Yeah, it gives you certainly insights into human dominance. It certainly emphasizes all the ways in which we are exactly

the same and all the ways in which we are amazingly different and where those continua wind up being got not quite of a continuum and such. Yeah, I kind of look at things differently. At the same time, I, like, sit in a movie theater and somebody comes walking past, and I look at their rear end and try to calculate how much anesthetic I would need in the blowgun to take them down if I had to. So it's infested my daily perception of the world here in lots of interesting ways.

You know, as a therapist, I couldn't help but see this honestly refreshing. moment where you talked about this fantasy of aggression towards a professor who was walking by one day. Is that like a dominance hierarchy thing too? Or what do you think is behind that? No, that was just sheer perversity. This was in grad school. Rockefeller University in Manhattan, there was like a student dorm on campus. I lived on the first floor and like clockwork every day, this guy Fritz Lipman, who Nobel laureate, who was in his 80s then, and discovered like half of modern biochemistry. And he would sort of like shuffle past the way he was lab in his running shoes. And I could not like repress the desire to dart him just because I could. And I was

learned how to do that at the time. But I managed to repress actually doing that. But that was that was sort of an irresistible urge at the time. So you chose to not dart him? I chose not to dart him. And besides, I knew my aim wasn't very good at that point. And I would just get in trouble. I was unstucky enough on my feet with my PhD advisor. So I didn't.

I was watching your interview with Joe Rogan. And I've seen quite a number of his interviews. but the way that he's sitting with you is different than he sits with other interviewees. Really? He was more, yeah, oh yeah, he was more submissive. I don't know if you, you got to look back at this. But I think I observed that because he is such a fan of your work, you know, and he loves apes, right?

And so I could see like a unique shift in the dominance hierarchy that usually manifests. That's remarkable. I could not possibly have been more than I. been more of a hypogonal male around Joe Rogan than anyone on earth. That's remarkable to hear about. Well, testosterone only makes you fight down, right? Not fight up? Is that what you said?

Yes, exactly. It seemed nice enough. I had never heard of the guy at the time, but he's like a good guy to hang out with and talk with for a while. So I guess I'll have to go and look at that again. So it sounded like you made this paradigm shift where you realize the baboons are happier if they have more affiliation, they're grooming more. Did this change the way that you interact as a human to see this? Well, it's one of those.

I mean, that's kind of what I was learning there. And in sort of my lab, nine months of the year, I spent about 30 years going back and forth between the two. I was learning about how bad cortisol was for your brain and, like, nuts and bolts, neuron death and things of that sort. And what came out of it was, you know, some very, very clear lessons about the damaging effects of stress, especially chronic psychosocial stress, the importance of psychosocial buffering and all that sort of thing. And it gave me all sorts of insights, which I've spent decades ignoring entirely. I'm like such a great example of being able to lecture about a topic day after day and pay absolutely no attention to whatever I'm

talking about. You know, why else you're going to spend 40 years studying stress 80 hours a week in your lab and things like that if you're not like miserable at handling it? So I've managed to gain essentially no personal benefit for my science at all over the years. I don't know. It seemed like this epiphany coincided with you getting married, if I like remember in the book correctly. I don't, maybe I'm just pairing this together. No, that was that was not by chance. It has struck more than a few people, including me, as ironic that I had spent about 20 summers living alone in a tent in the Serengeti, finding out how important socialization was for your health. So that bit of incongruity was certainly occurring to me now. And then, yeah, I finally stopped being a sub-adult primate and met someone wonderful beyond words. And best of all, she wound up spending eight seasons out in my tent with me before life got more complicated than that in terms of skipping out and sitting there for a large part of each year.

So yeah, I think that's kind of around the time that I got enough frontal portical function that I could perceive that, you know, just dissing someone in like some dominant hierarchy was not really the way to go anymore. Beautiful, beautiful. Okay, so I had this, like, as you talk about this and the more you talk about it, it's like I start to feel this like strong attachment that you had. with this tribe of baboons and just following them every day and being with them. But there were some moments of just pain that you felt,

especially around the tuberculoid meat given out to, or there were cows that had tuberculosis, but it was the kind that's transferred. You have to eat it. And so they would slay these cows locally and feed the, humans, the meat, but then they would leave some of these scraps and some of the, some of your baboons found this. And I'm wondering, like, I guess I just want to say, it was just absolutely horrific that this happened. I know at one point in the book,

you're like, I shouldn't have felt this way. I shouldn't have felt bad because, you know, like all of the tragedies in the world, right? But it did seem like pretty monumental. It, well, let's frame it that I'm privileged enough in every possible way in my life to have been really, really devastated by this. Like, this is what counts his trauma and loss in a sort of world of my luck and such. Yeah, the baboons got tuberculosis and anyone who has forced themselves to read, you know, Magic Mountain and Thomas. on and it goes on for hundreds and hundreds of pages and it's agonizingly boring and wordy like humans malinger for years and years with tuberculosis. TB works differently in non-human primates. It's wildfire. It kills you in two to three weeks and it spreads to everybody who's within like

sneezing difference and distance of you and this was you know some very developing world corruption. There was a tourist lodge near me and a big staff quarters and the butcher for the staff quarters was being bribed by the locals to approve tubercular cows for sale. And he would like slaughter them and get rid of all the unseemly organs that might tell you that something was a miss by tossing them out to the nearby baboons. We did a lot of scavenging. This wasn't my troop, but it was the troop next door a couple miles away. And before it was over with, half my study subjects had died of TB, and I sure got to learn what tubercular lungs look like.

Yeah. Yeah, I think just the revulsion and disgust that you must have felt the whole thing and just the loss. I think it's, I think, of course, of course you felt loss. I mean, these were like your children, how much time you spent with them, right? Yeah. It left an impact. And I understand, so your troop eventually came over and started eating it, but it was mostly the alpha males that did it. And then so it kind of changed the makeup of the troop for a long time afterwards. Is that correct?

It's one of those, you know, making lemonade out of, like, necrotic lungs just to really get a unpleasant image. But as it happened, the neighboring troop had this tourist lodge, which is like heaven if you're a babooned, because you spend all day long like terrorizing tourists on the veranda there and snatching their food. And these baboons, this neighboring troop was living off of the garbage dump there. A tractor came out and dumped the leftovers from last night's dinner. Baboons lived off of that. And what was fascinating, I did some studies on that troop. They got borderline insulin resistant. They got the starts in metabolic syndrome.

They were eating a westernized diet. On the other hand, infant survival was better. It was like one big blowout adventure in the pluses and minuses of a westernized diet. But in any case, they're there eating the food scraps. And word gets out a couple of miles away to my troop that these guys have like the garbage dump every morning. and it would turn out that half a dozen or so of my guys would pick up in the morning and head over to that dump and punch it out with a dozen or so local males to get some of the meat. So who were these guys doing it by definition if they were going to go off and fight with like outnumbered to get some of the dessert leftovers and such? These were my males who were most aggressive.

not necessarily high ranking, wasn't correlated with that. And very often the most aggressive male baboon out there is some idiot adolescent who's just like taking on guys. He shouldn't go anywhere near. So these were the most aggressive individuals. And mourning is when baboons do most of their like social gossiping and sitting around and grooming and cementing relationships. So these guys were not only aggressive, they were the, the least socially affiliated. They were the ones who were most willing to pick up and skip out

on all of that and go fight for leftovers. So when the TB spread to them, it wasn't just random, which of my guys got killed. If you were aggressive, if you didn't care much about social grooming, you died. And anyone else whose personality was very different from that survived. And in the aftermath, you know, lost half these males. So suddenly there's a two to one female to male ratio, which is not normally the case with baboons. And the males who were left were, well, just to get a little jargony, were like nice guys. They were, they didn't displace aggression on females when they were in a bad mood. They actually groomed somebody, in addition to being expected to being groomed hours each day.

And this totally transformed sort of the social milieu of the tribe, if you will, and among other things, being low ranking in that troop suddenly was no longer associated with elevated cortisol levels. And I even did some work on like endogenous benzodiazepine levels in these guys, and that changed as well. and it showed you a highly aggressive male-dominated hierarchical structure was not inevitable in this species at all. It defaulted into something very different from that. Yeah, it kind of, I don't know, like maybe I'm drawing lines here that aren't here,

but when I think about a lot of your books and writings since, the way that I see it is you're trying to create an argument for a culture in which we're more humane, more giving to, you know, the people who have unfortunate circumstances, reduce any judgment towards people, you know, lower on the totem pole. And I think it's almost like I see you trying to not construct a rigid dominance hierarchy, but more like how do we, how do you, you being more at the top of the dominance hierarchy, whether you like it or not, like how do you talk about the world and talk about, know, aggression in such a way that might lead to a more compassionate reality. Well, it certainly could lead to the hopes for, but in lots of ways, what I took away from

the baboons, and it's very, very significant that you mentioned the word culture, because these baboons developed a unique social culture in this true culture. Oh, my God, anthropomorphic, no, this is a very relevant term for lots of other speech. species, it's non-genetic transmission of a trait transgenerationally or within generation to other individuals, blah, blah. Male baboons, their social system is such that they get bored out of their mind with everyone familiar at puberty. They pick up and they go wander and they find some other troop that they now pursue

their fortunes in. And this culture lasted for more than 15 years or so. such that all of the surviving nice guys from the TB outbreak back when were long gone and forgotten 15 years later as new adolescent males who had grown up in like the big bad like normal baboon world out there joined it took him about six months to assimilate this new social style and it was being transmitted they would show up in this troop and in effect would learn we don't do crap like that here, cut it out. And a lot of my subsequent work was trying to figure out how, in God's name, this culture was transmitted. And looking at the human predicament, the thing that I came away with most was, like, not just metaphorically, baboons were the textbook example of the inevitability of certain aspects of primate aggression and competition. And like, take these guys where, like, you found the first writings about them in the 60s and the ways in which they're undercurrent of aggression,

inevitably, inevitably, innately, genetically forces them into a life filled with competition and violence and all of that. And whoa, in one generation, if it turns out this distant monkey has enough neural plasticity and enough behavioral and social, plasticity to pull off something like this and propagate it, we don't have a like to stand on and saying there's certain inevitabilities about some of our worst human traits. So that's kind of the thing that had its biggest impact on me. It's a hopeful message. If only, if only we kill the 50% of males who are more aggressive, oh, that seems to be a good prescription won't know maybe that might be over generalizing a bit but yeah if they could do it we

can sure do some surprising things with the supposed things that are baked too deeply into us to ever change yeah yeah okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna shift to like this kind of like phase of stress and some of your some of your stuff on stress and kind of integrate it back together maybe as well you know, why zebras don't have ulcers, we give this out to patients, we find that it's helpful to kind of give them some sense of like how stress is affecting them. In the program that I run specifically, I run an IOP partial program. So patients come three to five days a week, three to seven hours a day, and it's group therapy, and they all have a medical problem and a psychiatric problem. So what we have found is that everyone's body breaks down from stress, chronic stress, in a unique way.

So some people come in with chronic headache, some people come in with chronic GI stuff, some people come in fibromyalgia, some people come with psychogenic seizures, where they're having like seizure-like events that aren't real events. And so when I got, when I stumbled upon your lecture, maybe a decade ago, it was just phenomenal, really, really kind of like glued in and solidified some of this stuff for me. So first of all, thank you for that. And I was thinking maybe I could have you kind of jump in. Like one of the things that really was new to me was all stress occurs in the same way.

Bleeding out, injured, starving, too hot, too cold, it elicits a similar response. Can you talk about that a little bit? Well, it's sort of the stereotypical response. Whether you're too hot, too cold, et cetera, et cetera. What you do is you shut down the parasympathetic nervous system. You activate the sympathetic. you activate the adrenocortical axis, you know, gonadal steroids,

you put them off until later if there is a later, growth is suppressed tissue repairing. This whole profile of triaging your priorities. You know, get glucose out of your liver and use it now for powering your muscles, you know, make your antibodies later if there is a later. This whole overall logic about built around, what stress is like for 99% of vertebrates out there, which is an acute physical crisis.

And everything you're doing with your body at the time is essential for life. Just try running away from a lion if you've got Addison's disease that's not treated or shy Drager's syndrome. Whoa, it turns out we've had the elements of this probably for 150 million years because it's essential to mobilize the stress response in the face of, stress as it hasn't meant for like forever for most beasts. And then we socially complex smart primates and get socialization to the point where instead we could spend our time being psychosocially stressed by each other. And then the chickens come home to roost. And while it's great to up your blood pressure for 40 seconds sprinting for your life, doing it chronically is not such a great thing while it's like perfectly logical to like not waste energy on making B cells for the next three

minutes do it chronically and psycho neuroimmunology has its birth and we see you know our primate problem which is we just recently became smart enough and I don't know the last five million years and we're using a very very ancient piece of physiology completely incorrectly and that's why we primates are smart enough to have chronic stress-related illnesses. So, you know, people die now of chronic stress, not infections, right? And so it's like we have this, especially like I'm thinking about type A personalities. You talk about this, how there's this toxic hostility attribution style where they're constantly worried that someone's going to get them 24-7, you know, so they're imagining worlds of persecution, right? And

that imagination leads to that chronic stress. Is that what you're talking about, like that kind of example? Chronically perceiving challenge where there isn't, chronically perceiving threat where there isn't, chronically perceiving yourself as helpless or hopeless, chronically being alone or perceiving yourself as being alone, which eventually becomes one and the same. And just an example of what we're dealing with, eventually I was looking at baboon equivalents of type A personality, what we're doing in terms of the continuum here. You're a baboon, you're sitting there, minding your own business, you're half asleep, you're scratching at your toes, and your worst rival on the whole planet shows up and takes a nap 20 yards away. What do you do with that

point? Do you go back to whatever you were doing, because this was completely neutral, you freak out at that point and stop whatever you were doing and get agitated and break branches and all. Do you perceive hostility in circumstances where it isn't? And after controlling for your dominance rank, if you were one of those baboons who saw your worst rival taking a nap as being grounds for getting all agitated and crazed, your basal cortisol levels averaged about three times as high as the ones who said, this is not a challenge. That was, you know, that is a personality that sees menace where there isn't. And these were guys whose physiology was showing that they were paying a price for it.

And wow, just like us. Like us, right? Yeah. So, okay, and you talk about the story of dwarfism and this boy who had this stress-related dwarfism, who was then hospitalized and finally connected to a nurse. And he had this great connection with this nurse, and he started growing. And then the nurse goes away. Can you tell us this story? Well, it's one of the sort of like epic tales and the annals of, you know, even growth hormone secretion is reflected in how the world seems in

your mind. Yeah. Stress dwarfism, psychics. a social dwarfism, examples of that, and astonishing ones where, you know, a trusted whoever is there for this kid who's gone through some developmental hell and finally gets their first. And nurse goes away for two weeks. And in this classic, like old study, growth hormone levels drop in the kid almost immediately. And nurse comes back from vacation and growth hormone levels start going back to normal. And wow, even the rate at which we're depositing calcium and our long bones are sensitive to how safe and protected we feel in this world. Yeah. Do you think that kind of like evidence added to your overall arcing thought about the importance of connection, the importance

of having at least one person that you feel that level of connection with? Well, Sure. It kind of really hammered that one home. You know, shoulders are very good to cry on, no matter how hairy they are. I don't know, that kind of fails as an extension there, but for both baboons and us and remarkably distant species, social support and social outlets and stuff is mighty protective. So let's say, okay, let's say there is someone who's listening to this professional, chronically stressed because of their own internal imaginations. What advice do you have for them based on this research?

None that's readily useful, just because, you know, baboons afterward, they lie on questionnaires, You can't find out how they're really feeling and stuff. So it's limited in it. You know, what did I come away with? Like you get your mantra of the building blocks of psychosocial stress. And then you've got to spend a lot of time tampering your enthusiasm about it because of the subtleties. Yes, yes, yes. A sense of control is really protective.

And like if you're a monkey or a rat or a college student or any of these classic studies, sense of control is very protected and dependent of whether you have control or not. With a proviso, don't bias someone to believe they had control over something where the outcome is a disaster because you're psychologically prompting them to focus on how much better things could have been. You want to instill a sense of control only for mild to moderate stressors

because the psychological sort of biasing then is, whoa, look how much worse it would have been. Thank God I was at the controls throughout. Information, predictive information is hugely protective from stress and beautiful experimental demonstrations of within a narrow window. If you're getting shocks and you're a rat or human and they're unpredictable and you start secreting gluca corticoids in response to this whole experience. Give someone predictive information, have a little warning light, go on 10 seconds before each shock, and you don't get as much of a stress response. Wow, predictive information. It's so protective, all of that. Give somebody the warning light one second before each shock

doesn't have any effect. You don't have enough time to benefit from sort of the psychological preparation. Give somebody a warning light a minute before each shock. And you know, you don't have enough time to benefit from, you you make things worse because, oh, wow, you got a whole minute to just sit there and marinate in, here it comes, here it comes. There's a narrow window in which information is actually helpful. There's a narrow window in which social support is actually helpful and, like, toxic relationships. And, like, one of the great cliches of how, like, on the average marriage is good for men's

health and on the average marriage is not good for men's health. and on the average marriage is not good for women's health, especially in age of populations. Like, be careful what the social support is you look for. You know, a superficial acquaintanceship turns out not to be what real social support should look like for a primate. And if we invest too much in that and the rug gets pulled out from under our feet, it could seem worse than before you started. So, like, baboons not teaching one too much about how you should have limited expectations if you spend your weekends clubbing or something. Like, that's not necessarily going to be the route to, like, social support that will keep you there to your deathbed. But, you know, we're more complex than being helped just by mantras of get as much of a sense of control.

as much of a sense of predictability, as get as many outlets as possible, you know, it's narrower ranges than that, which is what a lot of the sort of behavioral endocrinology of this stuff shows you. Hmm. Okay. What do you think about like,

there's a lot of data for depression, anxiety, mental illness on like exercise, and the repetitive nature of exercise, getting stronger, decreases depression more and not getting stronger. There seems to be independent. I've done a bunch of episodes on this. Strength training is independent of cardio.

Do you think that these are working out the stress system in a predictable way and I'm choosing to voluntarily do something difficult? Is there part of that that's helping the stress system? Yeah. Some of it is the aerobic stuff and like you're expanding your diaphragm and that's doing great stuff to your vagal nerve like nuts and bolts physiology of the beneficial effects of there, but the word that's at least as important that you bring up is choice that you chose to do that. Again, classic studies,

this is late 1950s. You take two rats and one of them gets to run in a running wheel whenever it feels like it. And the other rat is yoked to the first one. It is kept in a running wheel. It can't get out, and every time the first rat chooses to run, the second running wheel forces the second rat to run. They're getting the same exact aerobic exercise, and they're doing the same great things to their, like, physiology. And the first rat does better, and the second rat does worse than if he hadn't been put in that running wheel in the first place. You know, control is a useful thing. And sort of ironically, like when you look benefits of exercise or mental health and all of that or benefit of all sorts of stress management techniques, don't do one that makes you miserable. And don't do one, no matter how many of your friends say this is the greatest thing on earth.

You know, read the fine print. You know, this may not be for you. If meditation does fabulous things from volumes worth of research. If I were to meditate 20 minutes a day for a week, I would have a stroke by the end of the week. It is so antithetical to what I'm about. But nonetheless, if it works for you kind of thing, but if it doesn't, that's not necessarily the therapeutic way to go. yeah okay so i was pulled into this quote on depression and the vulnerability that you shared and you talked about how you've had episodes of depression moments of these symptoms and um

in the midst of it there's this kind of uh almost like the family can feel like a distraction towards the relentless pursuit of accomplishments um you said quote most of the time the depression is beneath the surface, seeping, swamp, gas, where I suddenly keep it at bay by working incessantly powered by ambition and willingness to view things that really should matter as distractions. And I wonder if, one, like how you've worked through this in your life, for those of us who may have a similar bent. well not very insightfully not very quickly not with a whole lot of natural talent for seeing what

needs to be done as an uphill battle all the way and thank God eventually meeting like the love of my life and who's remarkably patient and and you know slowly beginning to figure out there's more a life than like the length of your CV and realizing running as fast as you can. On an achievement treadmill, you know, you could keep all of that, you know, newer transmitter chaos at bay for only so long, you know, there's more important stuff out there. And that sure would not occurring to me as a 20-year-old nor as a 40-year-old nor as a 50-year-old, nor as a 50-year-old, but it's like slowly seeped in. Yeah.

Okay, I was thinking about, you talk about Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Miller's obedience study, and the majority of the participants conforming to, you know, harmful behaviors potentially unwittingly. You know, you talk about like unconsciously maybe being sort of pulled into these dynamics, right. And you also talk about the importance of teaching stories and maybe teaching about these studies as well, right? Where it's like maybe by teaching stories of heroes, we can then have more power to take a stand and not just repeat history, not just blindly or unconsciously end up doing or becoming part of a problem. Can you speak about that?

Well, ideally, and that said, of course, the Milgram story turns out to be far more nuanced than most of us took away and the Zimbardo story more nuanced and like all those versions. And, you know, there were more people resisting than one might think from like the epic tales. There were more people who thought this is just like some silly psych experiment. So I'm going to be, you know, congenial here. There are more people who found Zimbardo, who's sort of a colleague and friend, to be a very dominating presence, and that had its own effects on how the experiment ran. But nonetheless, like landmarks in showing how readily we conform.

And totally incredible neurobiology studies since then showing on what's, going on in your head when you conform, when you conform just to get along versus when you conform because you really change how you're viewing the world. This is very, very powerful. And then, you know, you got to take some comfort from the fact that admit that, you know, there's neural plasticity and baboons view the world differently when circumstances change and humans do as well. And there's, You know, there's ex-white supremacists out there who've renounced what they've done and worked for peace. And there's, like, there's tourist companies. I was astonished by this that specialize in taking, like, now elderly Vietnam War veterans for trips to Vietnam for reconciliation ceremonies.

And there's, you know, there's room for hope. there's room for change. And if you are completely mechanistic and you're thinking about how we work as like organisms made out of molecules and atoms and things like that, parentheses, one in which free will is a pretty dubious concept, if you think that way and you begin to learn about how our brains change, what you come away with is being vastly impressed with our potential for that and like how we're using some of the exact same like kinases in our brain that a sea slug does when it's learning to you the world differently. Yeah, there's a great deal of potential for change. And I guess folks in your business get up every morning with your motivations predicated by that notion.

And of course, you know, there's double-edged swords and that same sort of neuroplasticity is how we learn how to hate someone who we didn't before or decide a group of thems or threatening you. So, like, yeah, we change. There's cool stuff. Like, we express trophic factors that we weren't doing this morning because of experience. And, you know, that isn't necessarily a panacea. So be careful how one exploits that. But, yeah, very little in us set in stone for better or worse.

So, okay, jumping to these thoughts on determinism specifically, you talk about how you wouldn't believe in free will unless someone were to show you a neuron that is firing by itself with no environmental influences, with nothing preceding it, right? Is that a good summation of how you define what you would need to believe in free will? But then you say, we're not going to look for that. If I'm trying to be a total pain in the ass and, you know, oppositional or whatever, I believe there's no free will whatsoever. I believe when you study enough biology, it's absolutely clear when you study enough

about how biology interacts with environment. It's absolutely clear on a soapbox about how there is no free will, and we have to fundamentally trash most of our assumptions about human behavior and transform society and all of that. And then, like, someone says, okay, so how are you defining free will? And it's usually a compatibilist philosopher who's very much in disagreement with me

about every step of the way. And the impossible, like, high bar that I set is, okay, you just did a behavior, good, bad, ambiguous in between, whatever. And, like, you're wondering, wondering why that behavior occurred and here are the four motor neurons that told your muscles to do that just now. Show me that those neurons would have done the exact same thing no matter what else the

rest of your 800 billion neurons, 80 billion neurons in there were doing. And show me those neurons would have done the exact same thing regardless of whether you were stress or sleep deprived or finding love at that moment. And regardless of what your hormone levels were last night, And regardless of whether you found God in the last three months or develop PTSD, and regardless of what adolescence was like for you with finishing off your frontal cortex and your childhood and your fetal life and your genes and the culture, your ancestors handed to you in the way you were, and changed every single one of those and show me that those neurons would have done the exact same thing then that they did.

And as far as I'm concerned, you've just proven there's free will. and you can't do it because there's nothing. Okay, okay, let's wait for Neurilink to get established, okay? Because then we'll have like electrodes in the brain, we'll have a bunch of electrodes, we can see what's happening, right? And we can all be like Elon. Yeah. Okay, but isn't that like, okay, 86 billion neurons, some with 10,000 connections?

I mean, isn't the sum greater than the parts, right? And so, like, of course, we have this enormous complex. It's like, how do you define, like, I'll give you, I'll give you a molecule of H2O and show me, prove to me that there's wetness from just looking at this one molecule. Yeah, we've just entered this world that is upended, like, dead white male reductive science, and which is, if you want to understand something complex, it isn't necessarily the case to break it down. It's component parts and understand each little itty-bitty building block and then just add them back up together and you'll understand the system. No, you got non-linearities, you got non-additive stuff, you've got chaotic emergent complexity and stuff that is like beyond cool in terms of how it explains how all of our brains are wired up roughly the same, but never identically. and things, it's totally interesting, and I love that stuff, and it forces like a more integrative level of doing your, like, biology than everyone used to think was essential. But that sure as hell ain't where you're going to find free will, because every attempt to somehow wave your hands and get free will out of chaoticism or emergent complexity or quantum indeterminacy or stuff,

every single time when you look closely enough, there's a step in there that requires you to say, and then magic happens, it doesn't really work. Okay. Dr. Sapolsky, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like your opinion has somewhat changed over time. Now you're saying, you know, that basically there's not like, you don't have a shred of free will, but before I think you're willing to say that, you know, or concede that you could choose between two T-shirts. Do you feel like that we have the choice to choose between two T-shirts in the morning or no? No, I was being a polite dinner guest at the time when I was saying stuff like that.

I was about 14 when I decided there's no free will whatsoever and like have been discovering since then how unpalatable it is to like try to accept that for most people. And thus, in effect, what my soundbite is is if you've got to cling to. a belief that like people are their sources of agency and all of that. And you want to do it for explaining T-shirt choices. Go for it. Be happy. You know, that's just fine. But when it comes to important stuff like judging somebody's behavior or deciding whether or not you feel like you are entitled to something or whether you feel justified to hate someone or not, then you should probably do the heavy lifting and figure out how things are actually working then. Okay, let me let me let me let me run a scenario by you. Okay. Okay. So

you're you're in a you're at like a New York subway someone falls in. Okay. And you know that you can jump down and get them and you can save their life and you could probably jump out to because you're athletic let's say. But you also hear the train coming. And so there's a part of your brain that is like self-preservation and it is screaming at you. Don't do anything, freeze, don't move, but there's another quiet area. Maybe it's the clan affiliation, you know, it's a stranger, but it's like it's a softer voice, right? So I almost feel like, don't we have the ability to choose which part we want to amplify and which part we want to quiet? Nah, not for a second. Because you

two people are standing there and one of them may jump and the other not. And you'll say, whoa, what was that about? What was your? And there are different people. And it is a world of biology over which they had no control, interacting with environment over which they had no control, which brought them to that moment. And, you know, it's not by chance that. whatever it is you just did, monumental or trivial, it's not by chance that it happened,

because all you are is the end product of everything that came before. And we all had very different came beforeers than each other. Okay, okay. And that's really the purview of behave, which is like a 700-page treatise on where intent comes from. Exactly. And I'll summarize it. if you want to understand where behavior comes from, you got to think about, you know, ion currents one second before in the person's limbic system and evolution and everything in

between because all of it is where was, was, and what we are now is the end product of that. And you're going to get nowhere if you think you have identified the area of the brain that explains everything or the neurotransmitter or the gene or the developmental experience or whatever. It's, we are the end product of everything that came before and astonishingly, unlikely, subtle, subliminal, distal, unimaginable things turn out to have played very large roles and making us who we are. I guess, I guess it's hard for me to disconnect, like, a sense of agency, free will from, other concepts that we would say like, yeah, the brain is actually part of that process, like self-control, rational choice, planning behavior, active choice, regulatory behavior,

you know, like regulation. And I was thinking about specifically like borderline personality disorder, which I would agree that there's an environmental component and there's a genetic component, right? And the people, like, as you go further back in their history, the effect size decreases. So, for example, if they have attachment disorganization, the effect size is like 0.2. If they have maltreatment, the effect sizes like 0.2, more likely to have borderline per disorder. If they're, if they had maternal hostility at 42 months, the effect sizes like 0.42. If they have emotional dysregulation at 12 years of life, the effect sizes jumps to like 1.4.

And, you know, this is looking at people that are, have borderline personality disorder that are 28 years old. And so, like, I concede with you that there's a genetics, there's environment that lead to this diagnosis, right? But then there's a thing of like, okay, now are they stuck there? You know, can they make a choice to change their environment? But I guess you would just say it as like, okay, I think... No, they can't. They cannot make a choice to change their environment. When our behavior changes, it's because the circumstances,

that have put us into that moment make us more or less amenable to being changed by that moment. And not for a second is that do in the notion that like what you do for a living, which is help people to be healthier mentally, psychiatrically, biologically, that's totally compatible with it. But we're not choosing. We're the end product of circumstances that allowed us to be changed. by whatever the circumstance is or has made us exactly the sort of person who isn't going to be influenced by that circumstance. Let me further specify just because some people may not have

understood that, right? I'm not saying like a kid can change their environment, but now this 28-year-old can change their environment by getting therapy, getting into a partial program. It may take years, right? but there's studies that show that people can then get to a place where they don't suffer from chronic suicidality, emotional dysregulation. And so that's where I was saying, like, I think if presented like, hey, this is actually the path out, a lot of people take that path. Isn't that a choice to take that path, though? No, it's a hell of a lot of luck.

And all you have to do is look at the oceans of people who are treatment resistant with their depressions or look at people where you could do like the best cognitive behavioral therapy at the wazoo and that's someone who it doesn't penetrate on what we see here is i think at the deeper level where we would both agree is the last thing on earth that it means that this is a deterministic universe and we are biological creatures and and all that's it that the The last thing on Earth that means is things cannot change. And it certainly does not mean the next step, which is you should not attempt to try changing things because why bother?

When you study the mechanisms by which we change and things change and neurons change and ions change and ion channels change and societies change, all that does is reinforce that much more that there are mechanistic underpinnings to it. and sometimes the way you access it is by stopping somebody's serotonin re-uptake, and sometimes the way you access it by spending hours and hours listening to someone. And those are equally biological, and those are equally interacting with environment. And all of those are just ways of accessing that like nervous systems change. Change happens, but you don't sit there and decide, that's it. I'm going to change because you can't will yourself to have willpower.

You've got to be lucky enough to have the neurons lined up in a way so that the right circumstances can change you. There was this time post-COVID where I was absolutely exhausted of working out of the garage. I think it was, you know, Florida 110 degrees here, humid. And so I started going to a gym and I got a coach. And it's like it's the change that I needed. Now, I would say, of course, I'm fortunate to be able to afford a coach, fortunate to know which coach to get, fortunate enough to do it. But it's like, I don't know.

I think there's something about like, yeah, when we get stuck as humans, we can uniquely, okay, like, I imagine like there's a deterministic chessboard that we're playing, which is life. And we all have like slightly different rules, but the moves, but there are moves that we can take, right? And if you look out a chessboard into the distant future, there's like not just, there's a, like hundreds of thousands of options, right? It's like the further you get out, it's like infinite options. But you would say that you would restrict the rules down very, very close where it's like, you know, you got one piece you're moving and it only moves one location. Is that correct?

That's correct. but one of the mechanistic pieces to work into that is sometimes a sense of control and agency can be really, really helpful and protective. And it's not by chance that most people like reflexively like the idea of being captains of their ship. That's a good therapeutic tool. Sometimes like hitting somebody over the head can shape their behavior even if there's no ethical rationale for thinking.

that blame and punishment are moral goods, sometimes, yeah, it's a good thing in some circumstances to emphasize to people that things can change, that they can have control over it, not because they really can, but because in the right individuals, that will facilitate the sort of change you're looking for. But don't try that with someone who's homeless. Don't try that with a refugee. Don't try that with someone who's dying of terminal cancer. Don't teach. people that they can control circumstances where in fact there is no malleability that's not therapeutic solace that's the exact opposite yeah i mean absolutely i mean you have to take a different different approach if someone is on their deathbed it's like how do how do you help them

connect with their family maybe find meaning in their in their life or you know it's like very different situation than you know there are some things that they can not control at all death may be inevitable although there's a lot of people that probably try to convince you that oh i have the magic bullet take this diet and this death will not happen right there's a lot of people that pray on the vulnerable your wallets yep yeah i feel like the wealthy you are the more they the more people want to pray too. Well, I live very close to Silicon Valley, which has now become the world's epicenter of now aging.com gazillionaires funding gerontology research and chronobiology and

you know cryogenics and such and you know, it doesn't matter how many like third homes you've gotten up in the mountains or whatever, your telomeres are going to shorten, and your memory is probably going to get crappy, and at some point, you're made it the same stuff as everyone else, and so it's fascinating watching the masters of the universe here in Silicon Valley trying to deal with that one. It's a very good time to be a gerontology researcher, if you happen to be in these parts of the world, because they're pouring money into all sorts of crackpot institutes. But, yes, Yes, reality can be kept at bay for only so long.

Alex, jump in. I know you're dying to ask something. Yeah, so, you know, if we accept your central thesis that if there is determinism, there's basically no room for morality. Do you believe that? I believe that deeply. That is an intellectual foundation of my life. It is a moral imperative for me.

and I can actually function that way about 1% of the time. Yeah, this is hard. This is an uphill battle. Like, people piss you off. And it's very hard to go through, oh, but how do they get that way? And all we are is the end product of all the biological. That person just pissed me off. And Vladimir Putin appears to be a jerk.

And even more corrosively, 99% of the time, if someone says to me, wow, nice job on that. I feel good. What a flaming hypocrite. I had no control. I have earned nothing. I deserve. We feel good about that. We feel angry. We feel judgmental. We blame. We praise. We do all of that. And the vast majority of the time, that is very, very imbued in us. But, you know, we're about three centuries past the point where it felt obvious and intuitively just, self-evident that some people should be slaves, or it's possible for Satan to demonically possess you, and that's why you're having seizures. Whoa, we eventually learned that what was intuitively obvious then isn't really how the world

works, and even though it may seem intuitively obvious now that all sorts of people for whom things have not turned out well in life had control for it to have turned out differently, we're going to figure out at some point that that's not the case either. And if we can only do it 1% of the time, try to do that hardlifting when you're sitting on a jury or yelling at your kid or deciding that you deserve a higher salary or any such thing. And no one says it's easy, but that's where it matters.

And I come back to, like, I think that the humility and the intellectual conclusion that you come to gives a humility that despite your success, you're no better than a janitor, you're no better than anyone. And I go, where you reacted to that? You agree. Yeah, we should all aim for that. And I fail dismally most of the time because, you know, I'm like fragile and a person in my time in place like anyone else. And like no one says it's easy to realize none of us deserve anything more than anyone else does. And hating someone makes us little sense as hating an earthquake. And because we're all, yeah, it's not going to be easy. But like every step along the way in history

where we've been able to subtract out responsibility laden with moral judgment, the world's become a more humane place. So we got to keep trying to do that. Mothers don't really cause schizophrenia because they've got psychodynamic bile running through them. And each one of those, aha, I had no idea of biology, had something to do with that breakthroughs. The world becomes like a better place to live in. Awesome. Dr. Sopulski, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. I hope I hope I'll think about coming back on another time. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. Alex. Thanks for working with me on this.

Thank you both.