The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Why do we get stressed? What are the psychological differences between conservatives and liberals? Is free will a myth? Rory and Alastair are joined by scientist Dr Robert Sapolsky to answer all these questions and more in today's episode of Leading. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolics.com. That's the restispolics.com. Welcome to The Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell. And we're very, very lucky to have with us today, Professor Robert Sapolsky, who's the John A and Cynthia Freigun Professor, Stanford University. He's Professor of Biology, Neurology. Neurological science, neurosurgery, and perhaps some other things as well. He is a very distinguished academic. He's a recipient of a MacArthur Award, which many people know as a genius award, which he got when he was very young. He came to my attention because I was listening to him, in fact, on another podcast. And one of the many fascinating things about Professor Sopolsky's life is that he spent 25 years of his life, returning every year to Kenya to study the same troop of baboons. So he was living mostly in tents, watching the same troop of baboons, eight to ten hours a day. And on the basis initially of his

study of primates, he has written and spoken very eloquently and provocatively about stress, about neuronal degeneration, about schizophrenia, about free will, about aggression. I've just been reading his book, Behave. But above all, welcome and thank you, Professor. Thank you for joining us at what is sort of half-past midnight with you in California. Oh, well, delighted to be here, and that's just sort of getting ready for lunch here, so no problem. Robert, can I maybe start, because this is a podcast that mainly talks about politics. We're not going to just talk about politics. But I wanted to ask you about what could a politician learn from doing what you do and going studying the behavior of baboons? I think actually a fair amount, predictably.

Baboons. First is an introduction. This is grasslands, Serengeti, East Africa, big open plains, baboons living in these troops of 50 to 100 animals or so. Hierarchical, highly aggressive, of males, dominating females, all of that, the sort of textbook, alas, sort of nasty primordial primate society. And you look at them and sort of a defining quality of life for any bedroom there is, what's your rank? What's your social rank in the hierarchy? And that has an enormous impact on your quality of life. And I think it doesn't take a whole lot to translate that into sort of political parallels. So at least I sure see them. So how do you define those parallels?

Well, it's taken some, you know, I started with them when I was about 20 and was way too over-impressed with the notion of dominance rank. And it merely took me about a quarter century to realize it was much more interesting to pay attention to sort of social affiliation patterns with these guys and such. But one of the things you see is, okay, Male baboons, just reasons why I've studied males rather than females having to do with monitoring their physiology. Male baboons, their social ranks change over time. You go away for a year and come back next summer and like the squirrely little kid from last year is now beginning to make waves in the hierarchy. And last year's alpha now got his shoulder dislocated in a fight and sort of limping around. It's a very dynamic ranking system.

And what you realize is attaining high rank in male baboon society is all about muscles and aggression and canines and fighting skill and all of that dawn on the savanna type stuff. Once you attain high rank, maintaining it is all about social intelligence and psychological intimidation and manipulation. and which provocations you ignore and which challenges you walk away from. And it's absolutely a realm where if you're an alpha male and you're having fights, you're on your way out. If you're a competent alpha male, it's been a year and a half or all you've had to do is look at somebody the wrong way and they cower in terror. That's all you've needed.

It's pure social bluff by that point. Do you think it is odd or completely undone? understandable that while you were talking, an image of Donald Trump kept coming into my head. Sadly, I think that it is highly appropriate and only somewhat insulting to my study animals. But he, in his head, he is alpha male. He is the top baboon. And he's never going to lose that status. Absolutely. And like a poster child for the pathologies. of when dominance sort of goes wrong. Yeah, he's a disaster and there's much about baboon social behavior that seems way too nuanced and sophisticated to compare to him. How do you go about

integrating with a family of baboons? So when you go back year by year by year, do they know who you are? Do they have a sense of what you're trying to do with them? How do you as a human being integrate with them. They know who I am and there's interesting ways to see what sort of cues they're picking up on. I'm not a fly on the wall. They know I'm there and sort of with behavioral observation days, yeah, you're hanging out with them a 10, 12 hours or so and just sort of picking up the gossip in a hopefully sort of objective scientific way. I'm not a fly the wall, but I'm not a baboon. I'm something kind of familiar, but clearly not quite the same as them, but every now and then there'll be some sort of communication between one of the baboons

and me, which just indicates they know I'm somehow related, but I'm not quite at the top of their list of baboons who come to mind for them. So you're now a very well-known professor at one of the leading universities in the world and a best-selling author. But one of the things I think that really impresses me is the amount of energy and effort you put in over those 25 years to what seems to be quite an uncomfortable life. I mean, can you give us a bit of a sense of what you were doing? Well, not uncomfortable in the slightest.

I actually made it to 32 annual seasons before sort of the game park political roof caved in there. But, you know, I was about eight when I decided I wanted to be a field primatologist. So this is what I was aiming for forever. It was only in college that I got way laid a bit with deciding that the brain was interesting as well and started oscillating between the two. What you do, you live in a tent, you haul water from about. 20 miles away. You run stuff on batteries, the Jeep batteries used to run the centrifuge, things of that sort. So it's pretty low-tech stuff. Robert, I spent a couple of years walking across Asia, and one of the things that I remember, but what I remember, so I walk 20, 25 miles

a day and stayed in, but I stayed generally in village houses, about 550 village houses. But what I remember most is the sense of getting into the rhythm of dawn and dusk much more than you would in normal life. Now, obviously, that's not happening to you at the moment because you're talking to us at almost 1 o'clock in the morning your time. But give us a sense of your exposure to nature during those months when you were there. And your wife came and spent some time with you today. So there was also a family dimension to it? Yes, yes. I spent the first 10 years annual seasons or so alone out there. And then I met my wife and thank God she liked baboons as a well and she was somewhat of an animal behaviorist, a mixture of that and a clinical psychologist.

So she came out for eight seasons and wilds up doing her doctorate on the female baboons. And then as kids were sort of coming along the way, eventually got to a point where we had one season where the whole family went out there about 12 years ago, which was total heaven and absolutely amazing and unfortunately sort of it became untenable soon after that to continue the work. So that was our one and only family season out there. Robert, other moments you can remember where your wife being with you and you talking and observing together allowed you to notice things that you wouldn't have noticed on your own? Yes. In interesting ways, the first was, you know, we could sit there and gossip in the evening about what the baboons were up to and that sort of in my morse.

solitary years was not an option. But one of the things I noted very quickly, part of what I did in addition to watching the animals behaviorally, trying to get a sense of what's the hierarchy this year, who's not getting along with who, who's messing with who in the bushes, that sort of thing, is I would then dart the animals. I would use a blowgun anesthetic system to dart somebody, keep them in camp for a day and run a whole bunch of clinical tests to get a sense of, okay, what's the relationship between your rank, your personality, your social affiliation, and your blood pressure, your stress hormone levels, your cholesterol levels, how well your immune system was working and all of that. And it was a very constrained process of darting one of these guys

in a way where you could actually get usable data and not wreak havoc sort of behaviorally in the rest of the troop. And something that was apparent like almost immediately was my wife could get a lot closer to the baboons for dartings than I could. She was far less unsettling to them, and she was a relative newcomer. And I'd been hanging out there for a decade the way she walked, her pheromones, I don't know what, but she could immediately get much closer to the baboons for darting than I normally could. So that was striking. The other interesting thing was, okay, We lived in a couple of tents on the edge of this park, the Serengeti, and across the river was the start of human settlements, Maasai people there. And, you know, I had sort of been hanging out with the Messiah on and all for years at that point.

And, you know, they're coming through with their cows in the morning and pass them camps. You sort of see what everyone's up to. And it was only once my wife showed up that suddenly the camp was inundated with school kids. and my wife, like her first season, got invited to a clitorectomy ceremony, which I had never been. And unfortunately, we were out of town on that one. And it was so apparent to me that sort of all the years of myself out there, I was just some sort of off-putting weirdo. And something about my wife coming out there, I suddenly made a lot more sense. and like kids were no longer sort of creeped out to hang out about camp.

As far as I could tell, you know, the Maasai, they heard their cows. They live off of cow milk and cow blood, you know, classic nomadic pastoralists. And I think as they sort of figured out, I was taking blood from the baboons. I'd followed the baboons for hours each day. I think they kind of decided that I was such a poor man that I couldn't afford any cows and thus I was herding baboons and living off of their blood and milk. And that seemed to be the view among a lot of them. And that certainly did not make me seem that much more palpable to hang out with. But once my wife showed up, suddenly the camp was like a much more

active social site. So it's clear she made a whole lot more sense to those folks as well as to the baboons than I ever did. But going back to the analogy with the kind of the political jungle, as it were. And you talked earlier about how often you're watching who's fighting with whom. Were they never tempted to fight with you? Were you never a direct threat to them? You know, you kind of learn the rules of stuff. You learn, you don't get in between a mother and her kid. You learn who's in a bad mood today. You know who, when in a bad mood looks for somebody weaker to take it out on. You're super conscious constantly of these are the bushes where the two buffalo hang out, you know, that sort of thing.

In many ways, it becomes like, you know, you could cross a highway if you had to, and someone who was, you know, a hunter-gatherer would get flattened by a truck within minutes, yet, you know, you grow up in an urban western eye setting and you learn this is a dangerous setting, but here's how you go about functioning it. When I first went there, I assumed that when I would dart about Boone, would take about eight or nine minutes until they passed out. And you were watching them closely during that time. I assume the biggest threat at that point would be like, you know, some guy is sitting there

and suddenly he's wobbling around and not making a whole lot of sense. And then he falls over. And then I get out of a vehicle and pick them up and put him in the back. I assume the big problem was going to be that, you know, the rest of the troop would go berserk at that point and water like just, do me in. But it turned out the far bigger problem was, you know, it's number three in the hierarchy who you've just darted. And he's getting all sort of sloppy in his movements and he's hallucinating a bit and making facial expressions at animals who aren't there. And he's number three. And number four is watching this. And he has no idea what the hell is up with number three.

But as he goes down, what a great time to slash his throat. So in fact, my biggest chance, challenge was protecting the males from each other. They had no interest in going after me at that point. If I ever darted a female, and one of the big reasons why 90% of the work that I did was on the males, if I darted a female, when she went down, her mother and her two sisters and her nieces and her kids are like trying to rip apart the Jeep at that point. They functioned in family units. The males have none of that solidarity. So I was perfectly fine. fine darting males. It was protecting the males from each other. That was the problem. Robert, to move on now from baboons to humans, this was one of the things that got you interested

in stress. And obviously, there's almost nothing more interesting to any of us than stress. And I wonder whether you could just begin by laying out a little bit about what stress is in humans, what some of the causes of stress are. Yeah. Me too, to appreciate. that when we're stressed by taxes, by whatever, we secrete stress hormones. The most famous one is from the adrenal gland cortisol, hydrochortizone, or so their name, a class of these stress hormones. And the amazing thing is, a hundred million years ago, some like little twerpy dinosaur was being chased by a predator dinosaur. And without question, that dinosaur's adrenals were secreting the exact same hormone that we do when we think about taxes. It's an incredibly ancient piece of

wiring. It's the same thing in reptiles and fish and birds and it's incredibly conserved. And for 99% of beasts out there, for 99% of history, what it's about is there's a physical crisis. You're running for your life or you're running after a meal and everything you do with stress response, then makes perfect sense. You mobilize energy if you're exercising muscles. You increase blood pressure to deliver it. You turn off all the stuff in your body that you don't need to be wasting energy on at the time. Growth and tissue repair and reproduction and do that stuff tonight. If there is a tonight, everything that goes on there is just triaging to the essentials of surviving the next two minutes. And sort of the secret to why humans are

so prone towards stress-related disease is we get there and we activate the exact same stress refunds hours and hours every day for an entire career being stuck in traffic every day. We see a more expensive car than ours zoom past us and we feel socially subordinated. We are capable of turning on the exact same vertebrate stress responses as dinosaur did, but we turn it on chronically for purely psychological reasons. And the punchline of the entire field is, you know, run for your life and have very elevated blood pressure. This is a good thing.

Sit in traffic every day and have very elevated blood pressure year after year and you're going to get any of the diseases of chronic stress, cardiovascular disease, adult onset diabetes, immune dysfunction, infertility problems, clinical depression, so on and so on. We're this weird species where we activate a system that is designed to save your life for the next two minutes, and we turn it on with like existential malaise. And that's why we get sick with stress-related diseases. I think your first book had a wonderful title, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. So, one, how do you know that zebras don't get ulcers?

And two, assuming that you're right, why don't they get ulcers? Well, first off, from the backward country I come from, we call them zebras. I beg your pardon. We'll talk about schizophrenia later, which we call schizophrenia. Okay, well, this is just a slippery slope here. But thank God I was able to translate what it was you were saying. You know, you look at a zebra and it's out there and, you know, a lion comes out and the zebra manages to spot it and runs like hell and the lion gets a little bit like off kilter of trying

to get somebody else and then try to get somebody else and comes up empty because it's just this dumb adolescent male lion who really doesn't know how to do discipline hunting yet an hour. Zebra guy gets away with it and if it was you or me, we would be hypertensive for three weeks afterward having nightmares or whatever and you look at the zebra and 30 seconds later he's back to his entire universe consists of, am I going to eat this blade of grass or that blade of grass? The speed with which they re-equilibrate, there's no evidence that they have anticipatory stress, like what stress is about for them is an acute crisis, and thus they have chronic psychosocial stress, the type that, among other things, can give you a certain type of ulcer and all sorts

of other stress-related diseases. That's part of why baboons were my personal. perfect study subjects. Because if you're a baboon, the serengeti is like the greatest place to live in. You live in these big troops so the lions don't mess with you very often. There's a lower infant mortality rate among the baboons than among the neighboring Maasai. And most importantly, this is a fabulous ecosystem where you only have to spend about three hours a day foraging to get your calories. And what that means is you've got nine hours of free time every year. You've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to making some other baboon miserable. All they do is sit around and generate social stress for each other.

Overwhelmingly, if you're a baboon in the Serengeti and you're miserable, it's because another baboon has worked really hard to bring that state about. They're perfect models for Westernized stress because they have the luxury of just generating nonsensical psychosocial stress for each other around the clock. Your perfect models. Robert, I mean, this pushes us back into bigger questions around evolution, but we normally imagine that the behaviors of baboons are sort of perfectly designed for ideal survival. But what you've just described sounds as though it's a slightly sort of bizarre,

unnecessary, miserable addition, which doesn't have great evolutionary benefits. Well, it all depends on who you are in the hierarchy as to whether, or not you're causing ulcers or being given ulcers. And you look at baboons, it's just something that just summarized their entire universe, the majority of baboon aggression, and they have the highest rates of aggression of any non-human primate, the leading cause of of death of male baboons is pretty much other male baboons. So they're doing that, and the majority of baboon aggression is displacement aggression. Number two, Lee loses a fight to number one, and as a result, chases number five, who as a result slashes the rear end of number 11, who as a result knocks over a female, who has a result like snarls and snaps at a kid, all in like 10 seconds.

So just maybe there's some bring you to the meaning of this. But I love that now applied to humans, and particularly because we talk a lot about politics, inequality and the way in which human society is, structured. Well, this is exactly a model for it. I mean, as it turns out, you know, we're not getting ulcers because of locust infestations. We're getting because of chronic psychological stress. And what is it that makes psychological stress stressful for the same external unpleasant tree? You are more likely to subjectively feel stressed. You're going to turn on more of a stress response and you're more of risk for a stress-related disease. If you think, you're more likely to feel like you have no control over what's going on, if you've got no predictive information, if you have no outlets for the frustration being caused by the stress, if it means things are

getting worse rather than better, and most of all, if you've got nobody's shoulder to cry on, no social support, these are the building blocks of psychological stress. And this is exactly, you're a low-ranking baboon and somebody else is having a bad day and without any control and any warning, you get your rear end slashed. You spend the morning and you manage to catch something good to eat and anybody can rip you off. You finally get somebody to groom you and a higher ranking guy comes along and boots you out. If you are subordinate baboon, you are a remarkably similar equivalent to a socioeconomically unprivileged human in that your life is filled with lack of control, lack of outlets, lack of predictability and lack of social support. And this is the,

the recipe for the toxicity of social subordination. Robert, when I worked full-time in politics a few years ago, there's one point at which I saw my doctor. And at the time I had depression, asthma, and ulcerative colitis. Cool. And he said, he said, well, it's not surprising because you're operating under levels of stress, which are beyond most people's tolerance or comprehension. And I said, but I don't feel stressed.

I feel depressed, which is different, and I have these other illnesses going on. And he said, the trouble is in your life, you're operating on stress levels that you're now so used to that you can't function unless you're operating at those levels of stress. I now understand what he meant. I didn't at the time. But I just wonder, do you think there's something in the way

that our societies and our economies and our political symptoms function, that in a way we are almost addicted to stress and we feel if we don't feel that stress and pressure, we're not fulfilling ourselves in the way that we think we should. Absolutely. And what this speaks to is, you know, amid a long laundry list of illnesses that are caused by or being made worse by stress, Amid that, we don't hate stress. We just hate the wrong kind of stress. If it's the right kind, we love it. We pay money for it.

We pay money to get on a terrifying roller coaster ride or watch a horror film or some such thing. When it's the right one, we thrive in it. And thus you say, okay, what makes for good stress? And it has certain parameters. One is it's like moderately stressful rather than massively so. The second is it doesn't go on for long. It's very temporary.

It's not by chance that roller coaster rides are not three hours long. And most of all, it's occurring in an overall setting that is benign. Like you get on a roller coaster and you know the worst that could happen is you're going to feel queasy afterward, not that you're going to get decapitated. And what happens is within a setting that you overall feel safe in, what we find great about the right amount of stress there is what we call stimulation. You feel safe enough to say, surprise me. I'm willing to give away some of my control and predictability. Surprise me with an unexpected plot turn. Surprise me with how the roller coaster suddenly dips this way or that. And

that's exactly what stimulation is about. And whether, you know, you do child development or you do gerontology or anything in between, an environment with just. too little stimulation is just as bad for you as one that has way too much, i.e. a stressful one. We want the optimum. But it turns out the problem is not only does the optimum vary a whole lot between one person and another. One person is like really putting it out there with the risk taking is to get up really early for birdwatching and for somebody else. They sign up to be a mercenary in Yemen or something. So there's tremendous individual differences. And the other is society is very good at manipulating us into thinking our optimal set point for stimulation

is a lot different from it actually is. All we hear is seize the day, go out and make every moment count, and that winds up being pretty maladaptive for a lot of folks. Robert, I was a working politician for a decade, and I concluded that a lot of my colleagues were very unhappy. And indeed, there were many serious mental health cases. There were people who tried to take their own lives. It was a very odd environment. And, you know, we hear a lot about the impacts of social media on politics, but there's also the sort of impossible gap of expectations. On the one hand, everybody grows up in school with pictures of Martin Luther King or Mandela or Gandhi. And that's the kind of image maybe you have in your head of what a politician ought to be. And then

you're just a normal person trying to do your job. And you never have enough time to spend with your own voters. You never have enough time to spend in the legislature. You never have to spend enough time to spend your government job. You're aware that your portfolio is far bigger than you can possibly get your head around. I was in charge of environment flooding, all the stuff for the whole of the country and there was no way I could pretend to understand stuff. So I wonder whether you think that there is something interesting about certain kinds of professions actually being made and designed in a way that's actually bad for your mind, your body, and your soul.

Well, absolutely. And I'm glad you survived. Both of you survived your versions of that. There are certain occupations where levels of burnout, levels of job dissatisfaction, levels of mental illness, substance abuse, suicidality, it just goes through the roof, all of that. Where you get some insights is to look at those professions. that seem like they should be stressful like they would rot out anybody's brain. And the classic population that's always gotten studied are air traffic controllers.

Because that's a world in which you make a mistake and 500 people are dead and constant demands. And yes, incredibly stressful. And what you see in terms of careers of air traffic controllers is it tends to get this bimodals through the distribution. Half of them quit after six months or even three quarters of them quit after six months because they simply can't do it and it is too stressful and they're not sleeping. And the remainder have amazing 25-year careers. And what's the difference between them? And there actually have been studies done on this. You get somebody who's the burnout one and four hours before he goes on duty.

He's already hypertensive. His stress hormone levels are through the roof. his stomach is already secreting acids that are wiping out the stomach walls, all of that. He finishes his eight-hour workday, and four hours later, he's still hypertensive and he's still a wreck from what was almost a close call, et cetera. And then you look at the guy who's going to last for 25 years, and up till 30 seconds before he sits down in his chair, he might as well be a Buddhist meditator or something. His body is zero evidence of a stress response, low blood pressure, his autonomic nervous system look great, all of that.

He's doing perfectly fine while he's still in the parking lot, gets into his chair, and 30 seconds later, his system is going at maximum. And 30 seconds after it ends, he's thinking about dinner. What do you see in sort of the optimal profiles, you know, cybernetic people talk about that? This is a system that optimizes signal to noise ratios. You activate the system when it's needed like crazy and not the rest of the time. Robert, you write a lot about the link between inequality and poor health. And I think both of our countries, it strikes me, you've got real issues of inequality. What are the long-term implications for the psyche of our nations that that continues?

They're horrible. I mean, just to show how bad things are, your country sounds like a shining, you know, paradise up on the hill there because you actually institutionally believe that all of your citizens should get health insurance unlike us. So you're a light years ahead of it. I know the national health services kind of having some challenges these days. But nonetheless, you've got a national health service. You believe it's the duty of a government to watch out for the health of its citizens. But nonetheless, you look at every westernized culture out there. And what you see is what they call the socioeconomic health gradient.

For every step down on the socioeconomic ladder that you see, health is worse, the sheer number of diseases, the incidence of them go up, their impact goes up, life expectancy is shorter, the further down you are. and what people have been trying to figure out for decades, really smart public health sort of people, is what's the cause of this? How is it, and this is the jargon in the field, how is it that low socioeconomic status gets under your skin and winds up being terrible for your health? And the easy answer, if you're an American, is, oh, unequal access to health care. You can't see a doctor. You wait four months. You go into a teaching hospital. You get incompetent 23-year-old med students. You take out your kidney, whatever, or you can't at all because you can't afford it. And, oh, it's health care access. But then you look at a country like yours where you do have universal health here. And you look at the Scandinavian utopians. And they've got a socioeconomic health gradient also. It's not as steep. The United States is the worst in the world. And it's been getting worse with every decade. but is not health care access. Okay, so then you say, well, it's obvious if you're poorer,

you can't afford a health club membership. You're going to live next door to a toxic dump. You can't decide you're getting stressed out at work and take a six months sabbatical to learn how to play classical guitar or something. You have fewer protective factors and tons more risk factors. You're more likely to smoke to drink in excess. The food you eat is high fat, high carb because that's cheaper, all of that sort of thing. And you look carefully and about a third of the gradient is explained by that. What's the rest of it about? It's about the psychological stress, the stress of subordination. What's the evidence for that? Wonderful studies where you look at somebody and what's their objective socioeconomic status? And it turns out, you know,

that's a significant predictor of their health. Now look at the... their subjective socioeconomic status. Ask them, it's like the fanciest research equipment in the world. You give them a picture of a ladder with 10 rungs on it and you say, you know, when you compare yourself to other people, where do you put yourself on this ladder? A total measure of somebody's subjective socioeconomic status. And it turns out your subjective one is at least as good of a predictor of your health as your objective.

It's not being poor, it's feeling poor. And then the question becomes, what is it that makes people feel poor being surrounded by plenty? For the exact same income across countries, across states, across provinces,

across city blocks in some cities in the United States, the more inequality you are surrounded by, the worst your health is going to be. But Robert, in that case, why do so many Americans who probably be defined as poor and probably define themselves as poor, why do they look at somebody like Donald Trump, who defines himself as superior to them, wealthier than them, more powerful than them?

So they seem happy to have him saying he's at the top of the ladder and supporting him while they're putting themselves on wrong one and two. What's happening in the psychology of your nation that that's happening? I don't understand it. Or stated in the way that like political scientists pull their hair out over here, why is it that the poor over and over and over vote against their best interests? Yeah. They vote for people who favor the economics of the wealthy and decreased social services

and less of a safety net. And they do it over and over. And it's sort of at the intersection of really interesting science that shows your temperament, your emotional makeup, et cetera, is a much better predictor of your political views than whatever it is you claim you've thought through carefully. People who are made anxious by ambiguity and novelty wind up being political conservatives. If the future is an exciting place, you're going to be a political progressive. If the future is a scary place and the past is when it was great, you're going to be a conservative. If ambiguity makes

you feel like you are overwhelmed and you look for patterns and you look for structure. You are going to love autocrats. You were going to have an orientation towards social dominance. You're going to find things, decide that things like social order is more important than social freedom and things of that sort. And then you see it in the craziest sort of things. You look at, at least in the U.S., political progressives versus conservatives. And conservatives are more freaked out by dirt by getting soiled. They have more cleaning products in their home on the average than do progressives. You show somebody a picture of like some open gaping wound filled with maggots and the more their stomach lurches, the more that's a predictor that they're a social conservative

because they're running their opinions on a litmus test of if it's different, it's kind of disgusting. And if it's disgusting, it's wrong, wrong, wrong, and that's all I need to decide on it. And that's an amazing measure of this sort of thing. Political conservatives get disgusted more readily than do political progressives. Robert, can I also, there's a moment in your book behave where you also talk about some very troubling, disturbing research around race and the way in which if you show someone a very brief image of somebody from a different racial group or assign them to a different racial group, they judge their facial expressions in a different way, they lose the ability to distinguish one face from another. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, it's depressing as hell. It's this whole literature, whether it's looking at juries and not just the race of the defendant has a dramatic impact on jury decisions and judges' rulings. and what bail is required and all of that. But the hue of the person's skin, the more Afro-stereotypically Afro-American, somebody looks here, darkly skin, facial features all of that, the more likely they are to be convicted

than a light-skinned African-American. There's just a massive literature on this. But from my sort of neuroscience world, the most interesting version is you put somebody in a brain scanner and you're flashing up faces and faces of people who look just like you and somewhere in there, you put in a face of someone who looks way different. And if it's a white American subject in there, you show them somebody of a different race. And for about 75% of white American subjects, within a fraction of a second, 70 to 80 milliseconds,

that is faster than conscious awareness, part of the brain called the amygdala activate. What's the amygdala about fear and anxiety and aggression? It's activated before you were even consciously aware of what you're looking at. And meanwhile, there's another part of the brain, a primate specialty called the fusiform cortex that you use for recognizing faces and show the face of somebody from a different race, and it doesn't activate that part of the brain as much as if it was for and us. Their faces don't count as much. You look at their finger being poked with a needle and a part of the brain having to do with empathy doesn't activate as much.

It's depressing as hell. Fortunately, once you look closely, it's a little bit less depressing. Okay. Let's just take a quick break. Robert, you've written a lot about free will. In fact, your last, I think your most recent book, determined a science of life without free will. And if I'm reading it right, you're arguing that we don't have. have free will. Now, does that mean that I kind of don't know where to go with that? Yeah.

Because, I mean, that sort of says to me, well, there's no point trying to do anything. There's no point trying to change the world. Yeah. Because we have no free will. But there is. There's every reason to do it because of people's wrong intuitions about what free will or lack there of is about, you know, A whole scientific song and dance about how we're nothing more than this, some of our biology over at which we had no control, and this interactions with environment over at which we had no control, and all any of us are is the outcome of the luck that made us who we are at this moment. Okay, so suppose you buy into my conclusion, and I'm sort of out on the lunatic fringe in that regard, even among neuroscientists who say there's so much less free will that we have to rethink basic institutions.

I don't think there's any whatsoever. And people immediately panic and start kicking back along a number of lines. One is the fear that we're all just going to run amok, and I can take you through the science that will show how we're not going to all just run amok. The other is, oh, my God, we're just could have murderers running around in the streets, and it could be shown that we have endless societal mechanisms that we've been developing for centuries where we could subtract responsibility out of somebody's damaging actions and protect society from them and still not sermonized to them about their rotten soul. And you can deal with

the existential void. But the one that people then come to is exactly the one you hit on, which is, oh, if the whole world is determined, nothing can ever change. Why bother? And that's completely wrong. All you have to do is look at amazing examples of people whose behaviors have changed. changed, the societies that have changed, people change dramatically. But the key thing is, we do not change. We are changed by circumstance and we respond to that circumstance as a function of the person we got sculpted into being. So we have free will, but it's limited? No, it's none at all. Okay, here's, no, okay, none of this. Don't try to sneak it in the back door there. Okay, here's an example. You get two people, they go to a movie. It's,

some inspiring movie about some everyday Joe who does something heroic from out of nowhere. One person comes out of the movie changed by the experience. The person's behavior changes. They come out and say, wow, that was the most inspiring thing I've ever seen. I'm going to go over. There's a booth right over there for Amnesty International. And I'm going to give them my life savings. The second person comes out of the movie changed by the experience, their behavior changes.

They come out and say, that was the both. manipulative emotionally puerile movie I've ever seen. I can't believe they tried to manipulate us that way. And I hated the cinematography as long as we're at it. And I'm going to go over to the ticket taker right now and punch the person because how offensive it is that they even showed this movie. Whoa. Two people's behaviors changed by this experience two in totally different ways. And you know it's not by chance that each one of them went into that experience. having been sculpted by a lifetime of stuff they had no control over that made them who they were in that moment. They did not choose to change in watching that movie. They were changed by it

as a function of whose circumstances construct them into being. Robert, I mean, one question, I guess, is at the personal level, which is, if we're determined, if there's no free will, how does one as an individual deal with a sense of guilt or obligation? I mean, how do I work out whether what I should be doing is getting up in the morning and thinking, I really hated being a politician, but I've got to go back into public service because this is my duty to do this stuff. Do any of those kind of questions make sense in a world in which I'm determined? Should I be putting myself through miserable things out of a sense of public duty? Robert, Rory is now using you for free therapy, I should warn you.

Well, you've already done the best thing possible, which is you changed your prior egregious profession. And I assume both you and those around you are thankful for that. Yeah, this brings us to, if there's no free will, if you really buy as extreme of the stats as this, blame and punishment make no sense. Praise and reward make no sense. A criminal justice system is not only intellectually but ethically. unacceptable. Likewise, any sort of meritocracy is intellectually, morally unacceptable. And we are nothing more or less than came before. And none of us are entitled to anything more than anyone

else because we didn't earn it. We don't deserve it. Nobody is entitled to having their consideration be less than average because of damaging things they've done, et cetera, et cetera. How are you supposed to function that way? I don't know. I managed to function that way about three minutes. every two months. It's incredibly difficult because we're people of our time and place. And we have been inculcated to see responsibility in all sorts of places where there isn't. And it's an uphill battle for us to work through. This person is not worthy of blame. This person is not worthy of a better salary than 99% of the population. And hating somebody makes his little sense as hating an earthquake. It's hard. Robert, I, I,

I mean, I'm very sympathetic to this. Both Alastair and I have been very involved in prisons and criminal justice. And one of my government jobs was being responsible for our prison criminal justice system. And I tend intuitively to be on your side. I mean, something like 40% of the people in our prisons had been in care, the words, removed from their families. 40% have been removed from school. This is despite, this is compared to 2% of the general population, very high levels of action, et cetera.

So I tend to be very sympathetic towards this, but it does raise enormous political questions. I mean, if we look at what's happening in Gaza at the moment, clearly partly what Israel is doing, it's not just a practical act of dismantling a terror network. It is deterrence, its revenge, it's a desire to demonstrate violence. And how does your insight on free will and determinism help one respond to these kind of big international events? Does it inform the way that you think about something as difficult as Israel-Gaza? It tries to make me dispassionate about it. It is monstrous, the crimes that are being carried out there against civilians.

It is like disastrous what is being done. It is Old Testament, biblical vengeance of the most like savage, animalistic kind. But it's not by chance. that that is a country that turned out that way. And it is not by chance that Hamas turned out to be people who would sexually mutilate victims and things of that sort. Historical exigencies guaranteed that they were plunked down in a position, 1948, as sort of a last grand gesture British colonialism to give away the Palestinians land to somebody else and say, there, two of you go out and spend the next 70 years turning your children into.

bloody savages because you hate each other so much and let's see how it looks. Yeah, they need to be stopped. It is a nightmare there, but they are all victims of the circumstances again, but that never ever means don't bother doing anything. And forgiveness is an irrelevant concept. But at the same time, so let me sort of move that on to another disaster that's happening in the world right now, which is Ukraine. on record is saying that, you know, and as as I've probably said, you know, we've probably got similar views on the weaknesses of the criminal

justice system, but you're sort of of saying something else, you're saying that even the worst criminals, and even right now somebody like Putin, we should be more understanding, more compassionate towards them, because they have been, as it were, made into what they are.

Now, is that not giving Putin and Netanyahu and Hamas and anybody else, is it not giving them a sort of get out of jail free card? It's a get out of moral condemnation card. Like everyone else, they're biological machines, and that's how they turned out, and they happen to turn out to be incredibly damaging ones, and people need to be protected from them. But nonetheless, none of this happens by chance.

And I think something, sort of it's inconceivable to not be horrified by a Putin or to be horrified by anything that's been going on since October 7th or so. And that's intuitively obvious that these are terrible people who are deserving of some form of retribution. And the key thing is if it was 400 years ago, the three of us could have been the same reflective, introspective people that we are now. And it probably would have seemed intuitively obvious to us that some elderly women with no teeth are able to control the weather and thus you need to burn them at the stake when there's a hail storm.

Witchcraft would have made perfect intuitive sense and 400 years later it doesn't anymore. The notion that some people are meant to be slaves because they can't take care of themselves and in fact it's a mercy to enslave them was once intuitively obvious. Four-year-old kids being worked to death in textile factories seemed perfectly fine in the Industrial and all of these things no longer seem intuitively obvious that that's okay. Instead, we have different explanatory systems and one that could subtract blame out of it and still protect society from them. We've learned like if the weather, I don't know, you fly planes that seed clouds if there's a drought rather than deciding that there's witchcraft responsible. We've gotten better.

and like people who have had responsibility attributed to them that is not actually there, have much better lives now, not being burned at the stake. And the challenge is it's as hard for us right now in our place to imagine the people who seem intuitively, obviously agents of their own destructiveness, free agents of it, in fact, are just, you know, accused of witchcraft. Robert, we're coming towards the end, but I wanted to now bring you back to you as a person and your life and reflect a little bit on two things. One is, what on earth motivates you, I guess you're about the same age as to be up at 1.30 in the morning doing a podcast. I mean, what is it that gives you this kind of energy or commitment?

What is it that interests you in it? Why have you not given up, put your feet out and gone to bed four hours ago? Tell us a little bit about what makes you tick and what keeps you going as a professor, a public communicator, or a writer. Well, I would say, you know, just to fall in line with my dogma, just the perfect combination of good and bad luck in my prior 66 years. I mean, my parents traumatized me to the perfect extent so that I didn't wind up as a sociopath, but nonetheless, I wound up with like a very driven sense of.

needing to excel. And I've got the same sort of just the perfect level of insecurities so that I'm not generally like a jerk out in public, but I have had to generate a CV that's long enough that I feel like I can beat people over the head with it who were mean to me when I was 12 years old. You know, it all makes sense to me without going into any gory details. Yeah, nothing is by chance. What is it that makes you want to do a podcast that half-past one in the morning? I mean, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to communicate with British people? I mean, why are you not having a drink with your wife or watching a movie or getting some sleep?

Well, it's operating on two levels. One is highfalutin and laudable, and the other is like totally human. The highfalutin one is, this is a world in which some people are treated way better than average for reasons they had no control over. people are treated way worse and this is crappy and it's a much better world if we like all of that and social justice and you know hooray for that so there's that and at the same time like you know if somebody says to me like oh nice book that you wrote or they say oh nice shirt for at least two and a half seconds i will transiently believe i'm a better human than average as a result before

i hopefully get the yeah you know all these levels going on Robert, let me tell you that on this podcast, I've been told by publishers that whenever Rory or I mention a book that we've read and liked, that there's a little spike on UK Abbasin. So at the very least, you will shift a few books. And I mentioned your book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers at the swimming pool this morning. Oh, perfect. Yeah. And a woman who's a midwife said, that is a great title. I'm going to get that.

So there you go. You've already sold one. Now listen, my final question, if my final question, if I may, and this is quite a personal one, and it may lead us to add all sorts of routes. But I watched, in preparation for this, I watched a couple of your lectures at Stanford. So I mentioned to you that I get depression. And I also had a brother who died age 62,

who had schizophrenia or schizophrenia, as you call it. I know this is, we've only just met, but why did I get hit with depression and why did he get hit with schizophrenia? Because that is a question that troubles me a lot. Because the two of you had different versions of shitty luck. Most straightforwardly, there are genetic modifiers for risk of schizophrenia. There are genetic modifiers for risk of depression.

In both those realms, these are not determinate versions of genes where you are guaranteed to get it. They are more or less consequential in different sorts of environments. and the sources of environmental influences that change the way biology plays out are incredibly subtle. You look at identical twins, and at birth, they already have significant differences in their gene expression profiles in their brains. Already, they've had nine months of different luck and different experiences because this blood vessel that went to this one carried more nutrients than the blood. blood vessel that went to that at birth. Already these vagaries of environment interacting with biology is already, you know, sending people

hurling into who they are. The best evidence at this point is you're more likely to have had certain sort of social stressors growing up than your brother. Your brother is more likely to have had some perinatal stressors around the time of his birth that's set up for a vulnerability to schizophrenia. frenia, there's all these hints there, but, you know, two different versions of thoroughly crappy luck, but of different sorts that just sent you down different paths. It's kind of what he used to say.

He just said, I had, I got a shittiest thing that you did, is what he said. Well, it would be probably not very productive to arm wrestle as to who got better bragging right over that, but yeah, pretty crappy in either case. Yeah, well, we should put your, you did a very long lecture on schizophrenia at Stanford, which we should put in our newsletter for listeners as well. But listen, it's been great to talk to you. I hope that the American people wake up to the fact that they really don't want the biggest baboon in the jungle running their country again.

And I hope you carry on doing what you do, at whatever time of day it is. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me on, and I sure help my country heeds your advice, because fascism is really going to suck here in the United States. Yeah. Robert, and thank you for me, too. This was a great, great privilege. Really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your evening. Thank you again. Lots of fun. Have a good day. Take care, guys. Thank you. Bye-bye. Alistair, so tell me, what did you think? Well, what I thought before the interview was why I was going around the place saying, of Robert Sapolsky, people say, no.

And then as always this really interesting guy that Rory thinks we should talk to on the podcast. And then I found it more interesting when I started to watch some of his lectures, but I found it fascinating talking to him. I really did. And I like the fact that we didn't have to push him too hard for him to be perfectly clear that he can't stand Donald Trump,

which is obviously a good in anybody's book. But I thought that he's obviously a very interesting character. But he kind of, he has a way of saying things which, so like he was talking about baboons and I was thinking about American politics. I don't know what you were thinking about. But he has a way of sort of making it what he does relevant without him saying, by the way, this is why it's relevant. So I enjoyed that. Yes, it's extraordinary. He's very good at kind of bringing up, as it were, the metaphor of the parallel.

I also think, I mean, he got this incredible thing called a MacArthur Genius Award where you get, I think, half a million dollars just for being super smart at the end. age of 30. And I think like a lot of truly brilliant people, he is a great communicator. I'm always a bit suspicious of people who you're told are very clever and they're completely incomprehensible. He's somebody who you can really imagine if you were a student at Stanford you'd really want to have as your professor because he's prepared to turn his brain anywhere. The lecture that I watched when he was talking about schizophrenia or schizophrenia, it was like an hour, one hour, 40 minutes. And so far as I could tell, he wasn't using notes at all. He just had. He had a whiteboard.

He had a pen. He was walking about. Now, he may have had notes. He doesn't look to me the sort of guy who has notes on a sort of massive auto queue at the back of the room. So I think it was just a guy sort of imparting his knowledge. And there is something, as you touched on this, this idea of not just going to sort of look at a family of baboons once or twice, but doing it every year for over 30 years is pretty

impressive. And, you know, and no qualms about what he does and how he does it. you know, the darting and liking the fact that his wife could get closer to, to dart the baboons, and then this whole thing about hierarchy. I mean, he must make a lot of assumptions, though. When he talked about, he goes there and he picks up the gossip from the baboons. What is that actually? I wanted to sort of go down a bit on that. But no, he's obviously a very interesting guy, and I think a lot of our listeners probably will start out as I did thinking, why we're talking to some Euro-scientists. but actually I came away with quite a lot of interesting thoughts about our careers and politics.

Now, I'm not sure I was not understanding what he was saying about free will. I think I was getting a bit lost there. Well, his book Behave is the answer for people who want to follow up on that. But, well, I also think it's just so wonderful for those of us who don't spend our time reading science properly, to be reminded of the incredible progress that we've made on understanding human brains. particularly. And this whole point about the fact that whole areas of our brains are hundreds of millions of years old. You know, his point about the fact that kind of 150 million years ago, some dinosaur has the same stress responses going on. And I think geckos and things today still have

a lot in common with our brains. The other thing I think that listeners may not pick up unless you're watching this on YouTube is that Professor Sapolsky also looks a little bit, this is very unfair, but a little bit like a baboon. I mean, he's got the most, and I think he's got enough for of humor for me to say that. Got the most enormous beard, the most incredible hair. And ponytail, massive ponytail. And there's a New York Times profile on him, which describes his house, which apparently is completely chaotic and sort of consists of baboon skulls. And he called his son, Ben, after his favorite baboon. So there's a sort of element of amazing kind of childlike enthusiasm. And he says he wanted to be a primatologist from the age of eight, because he started writing letters to

distinguish primatologist when he was 12. And clearly has, in, some sense, it's sort of, he talks about his anxieties and his luck, but in some ways, you can feel a kind of envy for somebody who's found a life that he's clearly found so richly interesting. Yeah, and he made it on free will, Rory. He got there on free will. He had the free will to make all these amazing choices. Anyway, no, I thoroughly enjoyed that.

Very good start to the day. Very good end to his day. And I'll see you soon. Thank you. Thank you, Alistin. Bye-bye. Hi, it's Dominic here from The Rest is History. is that clip that I mentioned earlier.

The other thing is something else you get some Grantham, and that's the Methodism. And actually this to me, I think this is one of the absolute defining things of Thatcherism. It's the tone, the moralistic, evangelical tone. Yeah, and the low church tone rather than the high church tone. Completely. Margaret, as a girl, had to say grace before every meal. She had to go to chapel three or four times on Sundays. Her father, as a lay preacher, went on and on and on about hard work, individualism,

thrift, clean living, all of this. And this is what I think makes her politics different. There is a moralism to it, a low church moralism that is totally unlike anything that any other Tory leader says before. So in 1984, an interview with the Times, I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end, good will triumph. I mean, Ted Heath could have lived to the age of 10,000 and he would never have said anything like that. It's unthinkable. Also, I mean, what's interesting is that it's giving to the left what the left often give to the right. It's casting the left as evil and the right as virtuous. And usually it's the other way around. Completely it is. I mean, you see this reflected in her archives,

which are online at the Thatcher Foundation website, which is brilliant, by the way, this amazing digital archive. You can see all the notes that she would handwrite for her conference speeches and they'd be full of all the stuff about, you know, the evils of socialism, good versus evil, what the great religions of the past teach us, what life, you know, life is struggle. Her speechwriters would cut all this. They'd say, God, this is bonkers. But it would find its way in one way or another.

And I think you're absolutely right. She thinks socialism is not just wrong. She thinks it's morally, it's evil. It's corrupting. and people in 70s Britain, you know, they're used to thinking, socialists are well-meaning and idealistic, maybe they're a bit deluded, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, she doesn't think that.

She doesn't think they are well-meaning and idealistic. She thinks that they're doing the devil's work. Yeah. And that's what makes for her admirers, it's so invigorating and for her critics. I mean, if you're on the left, right, and you're used to thinking yourself of yourself as the goodies, to be told, actually, you're not, you're the bad people. It's insulting. And it's why I think one reason why people take it so personally when she sort of wades into battle.

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