Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Robert Sapolsky: Free Will Doesn’t Exist! Leading Neuroscientist Claims ALL Behavior Is Biologically Determined | Human Behavior E262

Starting point is 00:00:00 I think there's no free will whatsoever. When you're choosing Coke over Pepsi, you feel like such an agent of choice. You feel like you were independent of everything that came before, which we never are for a second. Why do you feel like your view of free will is controversial? People initially freak out over the, oh my God, people will just run amok of people stop believing in free will and we'll have murderers everywhere and we won't hold anyone responsible for anything. The system makes no sense at all. If there's no free will, meritocracies don't either.

Starting point is 00:00:36 What people believed forever was that you think your way to a moral decision. And what all the science now shows is you feel your way to a moral decision. And then your conscious cognitive self suddenly leaps up and scrambles to try to come up with a rationale for why it makes perfect sense that you did that. We don't have free will, but what about free won't? do we at least have the ability to veto stuff and dancers? Welcome back to the show, young improfitors, and today we're talking about free will.

Starting point is 00:01:24 Free will is something that we often don't speak about. We kind of just take it for granted, like it's this definite thing that we all have. We all have agency. We all have choice. Well, the guest I have today is going to turn that thought on its head. Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. He's an expert in several fields, ranging from strength.

Starting point is 00:01:44 to baboon behavior to human evolution. His work has received many awards, including the esteemed MacArthur Fellowship. Robert is also the author of several best-selling books, including Behave, and his newest book, perhaps his most ambitious yet, is called Determined, a science of life without free will. Robert, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Well, thanks for having me on. I am really excited for this conversation. We have not spoken about free will on the podcast yet, and I think all your material is is really interesting. So I just want to cut straight to the chase in a nutshell.

Starting point is 00:02:18 Tell us, what is your outlook on free will, and how does that outlook differ from the traditional outlook on free will? Well, just to start off in a very subtle, nuanced way, I think there's no free will whatsoever. And that puts me, well, basically from the overall population, that puts me in the lunatic fringe, among neuroscientists,

Starting point is 00:02:42 puts me a little bit more extreme than the average, but it certainly puts me way outside the pale for 95% of philosophers these days who believe there is free will. So I'm staking out a fairly extreme stance here. And I'm going to dig into this a lot, but why do you feel like your view of free will is controversial? Like, what does it turn on its head? Well, my best evidence that is controversial is the hate emails that I'm getting, is showing some really dramatic misinterpretations of, well, actually, I have no evidence that any of these people have actually read any of this. But what it seems to panic people most about, once they get past the, is there no me inside there, am I not a special separate entity, separate from all my neurons and such?

Starting point is 00:03:38 people initially freak out over the, oh my God, people will just run amok of people stop believing in free will and we'll have murderers everywhere and we won't hold anyone responsible for anything. So that's usually the first sort of thing that people bring up. But with an audience like yours, my guess is the real thing that comes through always takes about an extra 10 minutes or so, which is, wait, are you also telling me I've got, no grounds for being proud of my really prestigious MBA or my salary or my corner office or even my ability to work really hard. In some ways, the notion that if there's no free will, criminal justice system makes no sense at all. If there's no free will, meritocracies don't either.

Starting point is 00:04:29 It's so interesting. And I've never even thought of the fact that free will could not be real, right? We're just always taught when we're younger that we have a choice. We can change our lives. We have free will to do whatever we want. But you're basically saying that's not true that everything is sort of predetermined and based on your biology and your environment. Yeah, exactly. And it feels like we have free will because when right in the moment you're choosing

Starting point is 00:05:04 Coke over Pepsi or something. It's so in the momentness. You're so there. It's so tangible. You feel like such an agent of choice and all of that. That is hard for you to imagine the billions of like little threads that have brought you to that moment and made you who you are. And you feel like you were independent of everything that came before, which we never are for a second. So I was born Muslim and I know that in Islam, that's what it says, that everything is written, like your life is already predetermined. So your thoughts actually are more aligned with like major religions out there in terms of what these religious books say. Would you say that's accurate? Yeah, with the key distinction in that sort of your version is another version of like the pilgrims running around with buckles on their shirt. and being Calvinist predeterminists, that everything has already said. A scientific determinism absolutely deals with the notion that things can change.

Starting point is 00:06:15 And you could change dramatically. Societies can change dramatically, all that sort of thing, rather than they don't bother. Because that's bringing us to sort of the next thing that people freak out over, oh my God, everyone will run amok, oh, my God, when somebody compliments me on having done a good job, I really can't take credit for it. The next one is, well, if there's no free will, nothing can change. Why bother? Which is as far from the case as possible. We change really dramatically at times, but what we think of is that we formed the conscious intent to change. I decided it was time to change how I feel about something totally fundamental. No.

Starting point is 00:07:00 That's never the case. Circumstances that have made you, you are such that you will respond to this event in a particular way, which you will say, I changed afterward, where in reality, you were changed afterward. Well, those are some really fascinating and unique thoughts. Can you tell me about when you first started realizing that you think that there's no such thing as free will? Well, I was not quite a scientist yet, but I think in retrospect, I was thinking scientifically. I was 14, and I was going through some sort of adolescent tumult that was very intertwined with all sorts of ways I was being raised and it was terribly conflicting.

Starting point is 00:07:49 And then one night at two in the morning, I woke up spontaneously. And like this epiphany of, oh, I get it. There's no God and there's no free will and there's no purpose. And that's exactly how I've been thinking ever since. Everything evaporated in one evening, one night. And then you went on to become a scientist and you further established the fact that there's no free will. And then now you've come out with this new book called Determined. So what was your intent with writing Determined if we could call it intent?

Starting point is 00:08:29 Well, I'm glad we could view that as a temporary term. I published this book about five years ago called Behave, the biology of humans at their best and worst. And it's like 800 pages along and it's agonizing and nobody in their right mind reads the whole thing. But basically it's going through you do a behavior and where did that behavior come from? What was the science of what was happening one second ago, one minute ago, one hour ago, eventually one millennium ago, how do we make sense of us in the context of neuroscience and hormones and early development and genes and culture and ecological stuff? And like this huge tour of that where it seemed self-evident to me that after you go through all of that evidence, there's like no space for free will in there. And I'd hear from

Starting point is 00:09:25 people afterwards saying, wow, just read the book, whatever. It seems to me like this may like lessen the realms of free will that we could. Lesson. Are you kidding? I think this is like emphatically showing that there is no free will whatsoever and saying, okay, well, amazingly enough, 800 pages was too subtle. I now need to write a book just explicitly saying when you look at the science of how we become who we are, it's not just that there's less free will than we conventionally think. There's none. All we are is the outcome of biology we had no control over and it's interactions with the environment that we had no control over. Before we get into the actual science on why you believe there's no such thing as free will, talk to us about your

Starting point is 00:10:15 background, your experiences as a scientist, even your own genetics that make you the perfect author of this book? One thing that has helped, and a point I try to emphasize, ooh, if you study tons and tons about neurobiology, you could see there's a lot less free will than people think, but it's not a slam dunk. And ooh, if you studied genetics, you reach the same conclusion. Oh, if you study cultural anthropology, whatever. And it happens, I'm somewhat of a sort of generalist. I've spent my sort of career oscillating between being a laboratory neurobiologist and studying wild baboons in a national park in East Africa. I've spent 30 years going there annually. So like the lab stuff gets me talking to molecular people. The field stuff gets me talking bizarrely to like sociologists.

Starting point is 00:11:07 So I think collectively I've got this kind of broad interdisciplinary view, which is to say I'm skating on very thin ice and a lot of different disciplines at once. But when you have that perspective, you eventually see they're not different disciplines. They all connect. Like, for example, if you're talking about the effects of genes on behavior, by definition, you're talking about the evolution of those genes. And by definition, you're talking about your childhood, which determined how readily turned on or off those genes are. And by definition, you're talking, you're talking about the last hour when those genes were specifying what proteins are being made in your brain. It's not just, ooh, all these different disciplines collectively, they all

Starting point is 00:11:56 turn into one discipline after a while, which is this like seamless arc of stuff we have no control over. And when you look at it closely, there isn't a crack anywhere in there to shoot horn in a notion of free will. This is so interesting because I've never, heard anything like this before. Like I've never heard anybody say that there's, I have self-improvement people and entrepreneurs all day coming on this podcast talking to us about grit and determination and purpose and all these things that according to you, we don't have much control over. So your book is really two parts or has two main points, the science of why we don't have free will. And then what do we do with that information? How do we live our best life knowing that there's no free will? I want to dig into

Starting point is 00:12:44 the science, but I think let's get some terminology and some foundation on the table. So, first of all, can you define free will and can you define determinism for us? Okay, free will. Probably the best place to start is what I don't think defines free will and 99% of people do because it just feels so right, which is the in the momentnessness. You have an intent to do something you were consciously aware you have the intent, you understand if you do that, what are the consequences likely to be? You understand you have alternatives. You don't have to do that. And for most people, if the answer is yes to all of those, yeah, you understand this is, you got free will. And that's how our criminal justice system works on. Once they establish, if the guy actually did it, did he intend to?

Starting point is 00:13:37 Did he know there were alternatives? Did you know what the consequence? And if the answer is, yes, that's it. Culpable, responsible act that as a free agent. And this gives me apoplexy because this is ignoring virtually everything that's happening. This is like the metaphor I keep thinking is it's like trying to review a movie based on only seeing the last three minutes of it. Because what you're not doing is saying, okay, but where did that intent come from in the first place? And it's when you look at where intent came from, or let's translate that a bit, how you turned out to be the sort of person you are, that's where you see you had no control at all. And in a sense, in my mind, the definition of free will then is your brain makes you do something. And if you can show that

Starting point is 00:14:32 it did that something, and it doesn't matter if you had completely different genes, were raised in a different home, were raised in a different neighborhood, had glands that secreted dramatically different levels of hormones, and like your eye color were different. And if all of those things were different, if your brain would have done the same exact thing, it's acting freely. And no brains do that because they can't do anything other than the ways in which they're embedded in what just came before this and what just came before that and before that and all the way back. So what you're really saying is that we may have choice in the moment, but that choice in the

Starting point is 00:15:17 moment is based on our biology and environment, which we have no control over. Yes. And even more striking our circumstances where we're making a choice in the moment, where we even think and makes sense to us why we formed that intent. Like, okay, okay, well, this is the person I turned out to be, but this person who I am is now very consciously making that choice. And then all you have to do is look at circumstances where just subtle manipulations of people, and they make different choices, and they have no idea that you have manipulated them, and they feel as if they are agentive out the wazoo, and this was entirely, and even being conscious of what you're intending to do is not getting you some free will, because, you know, independent of how you got that conscious

Starting point is 00:16:10 intent, a lot of the time we're doing stuff where we're not even conscious of it. I mean, one of the, there's just been this massive shift in sort of people who think about moral decision making. And what people believed forever was that you think your way to a moral decision. And what all the science now shows is a whole lot of the time, most of the time, some of the time from the most important things. You feel your way to a moral decision. And then your conscious cognitive self suddenly leaps up and scrambles to try to come up with a rationale for why it makes perfect sense that you did that. Guy at NYU named Jonathan Haidt has done this fantastic neuroimaging stuff showing somebody's making a moral decision, here's the scenarios, this is the right thing to do, is it wrong, whatever,

Starting point is 00:17:03 and the more emotional parts of the brain activate and commit to an answer before the more cognitive parts do. And we all know this. We know this when somebody sits there and says, you know, I can't quite tell you why, I can't put my finger on it, but when those people do that sort of thing, it's just wrong. It's wrong, wrong, wrong. You've caught them at that point. Their cortex has not come up with a rationale yet for the gut intuitions they're running on. And then when two seconds later, they say, oh yeah, that's why, that's why, because those people tend to be this way, or because those people did this to my ancestors back in 1823. And what we're seeing as much of the time, some of the most fundamental things we're deciding, like what counts

Starting point is 00:17:55 as okay behavior, what counts as grounds for condemning someone, et cetera, we haven't a clue where our decisions are coming from. I'm 100% Palestinian. So later in this conversation, I definitely want to ask you about your thoughts on the conflict and like how people are thinking and stuff. But first, let's get through some of this material. So your book is called Determined. Why did you title the book that? And can you explain a little bit about what determinism is? Well, the Determined was meant to be sort of a play on words.

Starting point is 00:18:32 The full thing is determined, a science of life without free will, determined in the sense of biological determined, but then going after exactly what you brought up before and what's probably terribly relevant to your listeners, which is that whole issue of, hey, show some determination, social grits, show some backbone. And that's speaking to like this incredibly tempting false dichotomy, which is most people are willing to say, okay, there's stuff we have no control over. There's biological attributes that we have. I'm not seven foot four, so I'm never playing in the NBA. I've got perfect pitch. I didn't have to learn to do that. I just, it turns out to be

Starting point is 00:19:20 genetic. I am really good memory for this, but lousy memory for that. Yeah, we can accept that there are all sorts of traits that we were handed, but where people then go berserkis saying, ah, but the true measure of a person is what they then do with those traits. Do they show tenacity? Do they show gumption? or if they've been given all sorts of gifts, do they squander it? Do they throw it away at a self-indulgence? Ooh, in that totally incorrect view of the world, stuff like your memory span, that's made a biology. But your grit, your tenacity, that stuff's made out of like fairy dust or something. That's different. And a key critical thing is when, just as an example, You have someone who is prone towards alcoholism and they're feeling an urge to drink something.

Starting point is 00:20:20 That's a biological phenomenon. And when they then either give into it or say, no, actually, I'll have ginger ale instead, that's just as biological. The part of your brain that makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do, something called the frontal cortex, is as sculpted by everything that came before you. you, and we think of like attributes as being the hardware in your brain, but what you do with it and do you stick to the tough sort of thing, that that's the you sitting inside there that's somehow separate of all that biology yuck, and it's made of the exact same biology, so that

Starting point is 00:21:05 if someone has no control over they were handed the biology of a tendency towards alcohol craving. They also have no control over the biology of whether or not they're good at resisting it. It's just a very different sort of biology, but it's one that you had no more role in choosing than choosing your eye color. So do you believe that, let's say somebody else was born and looked exactly like me, had the same biology as me, had the same environment as me, but they're not me, that they would be the host of Young and Profiting Podcast eventually. And like, same things that I did, they would have done? Well, if they had the same genes were raised by the same parents in the same way

Starting point is 00:21:54 and the same environment, all those other things, including prenatal environment, which is a major factor in what kind of adults we turn out to be, if it was exactly the same, everything else would be the same, assuming the rest of the world was the same as well, because it's the rest of the world that would have been shaping you. But showing random stuff, Brownian motion, like all of us had to learn what Brownian motion was for about three and a half hours in chemistry, somewhere in like ninth grade or something. And Brownian motion makes molecules float around in random indeterministic ways. And a consequence of that is you and your identical twin are both in the same exact womb and seemingly having the same exact environment for

Starting point is 00:22:45 nine months, but you aren't because somewhat random brownian sort of stuff is going to determine that your sibling has two and a half percent more capillaries going to them than you have. Or because of blood flow, you're getting 4% more of this stress hormone from mom circulating in your brain than your sister is, and you go through all of that and you look at identical twins at the time of birth, and their gene regulation is already different. Already, not only have you been sculpted by your prenatal environment, but which corner of the womb and things like that. So you can't really do that thought experiment of having everything being exactly the same, but in principle, yeah, you'd still be here saying the same exact thing.

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Starting point is 00:28:03 And as a result, behavior has happened and it's consequential. So, like, you could say, well, okay, which parts of the brain just activated to do that? Which parts went silent? Good. That's why you did that behavior. But then you've got to also incorporate, well, what was going on around you in the seconds to minutes before? Are you tired?

Starting point is 00:28:25 Are you stressed? Is somebody threatening you? Are you overheated? Are you feeling perfectly comfortable? All that stuff makes a difference. A bizarre, totally amazing literature showing that if people sit in a room that smells a freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, they become more generous and economic games that they then play. Whoa, that makes a difference in the minutes before. But then, what were your hormone levels this morning? Because they're going to have been marinating your brain and making it more or less sensitive to this or that sort of stimulus. You take somebody of either sex and you raise their testosterone levels and later in the day,

Starting point is 00:29:09 they look at a face whose facial expression, everyone would say, looks neutral, doesn't look friendly, doesn't look angry, and elevated testosterone will make you view neutral faces as threatening and angry because of your hormone levels this morning. And what was it going on in previous months? Did you have trauma? Are you in the middle of PTSD? Have you had a major depression? Have you found God? Have you fallen in love? All those things change the structure of your brain. And then before you know it, you're back to adolescence and childhood and fetal life and your genes, which don't determine anything, but which completely determined what will happen in a particular environment. And then the most bizarre thing of all is you've got to start thinking about culture, like what sort of

Starting point is 00:29:57 culture did your ancestors come up with 500 years ago, parentheses, what sort of ecosystems make certain cultures more likely? And you look at that and say, what does that have to do? Because within minutes of birth, your mother was mothering you differently depending on which culture she was raised in. And she was raised in the one that came before and came before and went all the way back. Like here's one example that just in terms of like how you view the world, I love this one in terms of our shared nomadic pastoralist roots that people, desert cultures tend to come up with monotheistic religions. Rainforest cultures come up with polytheistic ones. And you further see that rainforest cultures tend to come from hunter-gatherers with polytheism.

Starting point is 00:30:50 Monotheistic cultures come from the desert or the open grasslands and people who are pastoralists with their cows and sheeps and camels and goats and stuff. And that's where the Judeo-Christian Islamic world came from. That's why that's dominating this planet rather than people from Kwokyudal cultures or Trojan Islanders or something like that. That has something to do it. Yeah. And you can see centuries later those patterns of who your ancestors were. For example, explains patterns of violence of the United States, depending on who settled what parts of the country back. Okay, so you even have to go back to culture. So, geez, everything from what you were smelling a second ago to whether mom was stressed when you were a fetus, to what your ancestors

Starting point is 00:31:41 were doing, all of those collectively merge into one set of influences, and then you throw an environment on top of it. And that's how you became who you are. And that's why you did. And that's why you did the thing you just did. I'm trying my best to, like, grapple my head around this because it's like, like I was saying in the beginning, it's something I've never heard before. It seems really outlandish compared to other things that I've heard before. So help me understand. Like, let's look at like Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Was Jeff Bezos born to make Amazon what it is today? Was that always going to happen? Or was that just what happened? I guess I'm just confused about it all.

Starting point is 00:32:23 Well, he certainly wasn't born to make it. By the time he did start Amazon, it's not by chance that he did and somebody else did not. By the time he had to go, how many years was it before Amazon started making money and somehow they kept still going? It is not by chance that he turned out to be that sort of person who could hold on and hold his breath for that long. And not only do that, but convince other people to hold their breaths also. And it's one of those where, okay, you get three people, each of whom starts the same sort of business and they're side by side and it's not making money for years. And one of them like gives up and like steals the investors money and buys a yacht. The other one like collapses into despair and like goes back to working in a kinkos. And the third one is Jeff Bezos and just keeps pushing at it. It is not by chance that each one of those wound up being the sort of person that they are that would respond to it that way. In the same way, like, you go to some inspirational heartwarming movie, and one person comes out saying, that's it, I'm going to go do a

Starting point is 00:33:35 random act of kindness tomorrow. And the next person comes out and say, oh, my God, that was such amazing cinematography. And the third person comes out and says, that was the most manipulative, boring plot I've ever seen. How do they wind up? You just exposed them to the same stimulus, but a world of influences from one second before to a million years before blah, blah, blah, turn them into people who were going to be changed by seeing that movie or changed by the news that they still had not made a profit that quarter, but they were going to be changed in different ways because of who they were sculpted into being outside their control. Can you talk to us about Laplace's demon and why it can help us think about what

Starting point is 00:34:23 determinism is and isn't? Well, it's sort of that's 18th century version, but a sort of a logical precursor, ancestry to all of this. This was his notion that if you could arrange every particle in the universe as it was at the time that God created the world, this was pre-Big Bang, but if you could set every single condition exactly the same as it was back when, you'd have the exact same world right now. It was just spooling out a tape of pre-recorded contingencies that we're going to produce this outcome. And what we've learned since then is there's randomness thrown in, there's quantum indeterminacy that has virtually nothing to do with free will, but still mucks around with things. There's systems, chaotic systems that are by definition unpredictable,

Starting point is 00:35:20 even though they're determinists. Okay, so we got a 21st century view, but he's basically still like the poster child for the notion of saying, all we are now is the end product of what came before. And like anyone writing about free will, somewhere by the second paragraph, they have to mention him,

Starting point is 00:35:40 and his demon was this supposedly infinitely insightful being, who, if they knew where every single, particle in the universe was right now could tell you like that you're going to sneeze three centuries and 23 minutes from now. So that's sort of the grandfather of the notion that whatever came before came before that and before that and before that and before that. And all of that collectively is what made you into the person who's like standing here right now. Yeah. And so just to further clarify what you're saying, you give a really good example about a garbage collector and a college graduate and you kind of compare their lives to each other and how

Starting point is 00:36:25 they could basically be swapped had you just swapped the conditions. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, this was actually at my son's graduation sitting there and it's totally heartwarming and it's like great and the parents and everyone's tearful and it's totally wonderful and I'm a sucker for stuff like that and all of this is going on and sort of at the corner out of the corner of my eye, I saw this guy back there who was the grounds crew guy who was bagging the garbage from all the nice like box lunches, all the parents had just tossed or consumed and thinking, wow, so we're sitting here and there's the graduate and there's this guy collecting the garbage. And you know damn well that if they switched jeans and switched

Starting point is 00:37:16 childhoods and switched which one of them got ice skating lessons from their parents and which one of them had to move every six months because like visa issues or undocumented, which one of them grew up in a dangerous neighborhood, which one went to a fancy-ass prep school, etc., switch all of those, and the guy with the garbage would be the one up on stage now getting the diploma. And that's what a deterministic world looks like, the fact that we know if all of those advantages and disadvantages were traded, they would be trading their positions in life at this point. But at some point in our lives, we're making decisions, right?

Starting point is 00:37:59 We are making decisions, at least in the moment. So can you talk to us about where deciding and where intent comes from? Okay, so tell me about a time of very explicit decision that you made. chose this instead of that, where you initially thought, eh, I'm probably going to do this, and you wound up changing your mind and doing that instead? Well, six years ago, I was working in corporate and I quit my corporate job to start my business and take my podcast full time. So my whole life, I thought I was just going to be in corporate, or for a long time, I thought I was just going to be in corporate. And then within a month's time, I just decided I wanted to start my business and I

Starting point is 00:38:42 quit my job. Okay. So that's great. And we know for certain all sorts of people in the exact same position would now be like heading towards their 45th anniversary of working for the same company, that sort of thing. Why do you turn out to be the sort of person who would be bored by being in the same environment? Why do you turn out to be the sort of person who had enough self-confidence to walk away from that? Why do you have the certain degree of risk taking that you do? We know all about half a dozen different genes that have an influence on how risk-taking someone is, how sensation-seeking they are, and it influences who you marry and your voting patterns and your economic stability. So how do you wind up being that sort of person? How do you wind

Starting point is 00:39:30 up being somebody who, I assume, was extroverted in the right ways to get people to back you? if your parents thought this was the most like disastrous decision on earth, where do you turn out to have the ability to respect them, but only so much? Or if they thought this was wonderful and they had been prompting you to do that, how do you turn out to be the sort of person who thought that your parents actually had sensible things to say to you, et cetera, et cetera? I was once lecturing a bunch of judges. I do some of these read judges continuing ed things and telling them

Starting point is 00:40:07 how they're in this ridiculous occupation because it makes no sense and they have no free law and all of that. This judge said, well, that's nonsense. The other day, like the day ended in court where I figured, okay, I'm going to throw the book at this guy. And I thought about it that night and realized, you know, actually this and this. And I decided, no, I'm going to go easier on the guy the next morning. And he said, you're telling me I didn't decide that. And I said, who told you to turn out to be the sort of person who respects reflecting on your thoughts? Who taught you to value thinking objectively? Who taught you to be the sort of person who wouldn't be so threatened by the notion that you're changing your mind? What do you mean? Omnipotent? Had you turned out to be somebody who

Starting point is 00:40:54 could deal with the fact that your first thoughts were wrong? And none of this comes from nowhere. And you know, I am sure, cadres of people who would have been too freaked out to make the leap that you did. And that didn't come from nowhere. And the fact that they're changing, the fact that they're still at the same job didn't come from nowhere. And the fact that they're still there and are bored out of their minds or that they're still there and this is totally great. neither of those responses came from nowhere. That's how we become who we are. That's why Jeff Bezos stuck it out for all those years

Starting point is 00:41:36 and lots of other people would have given up. So I have two follow-up questions to this. Do you feel like there's no such thing as being spontaneous? And then how about the choice of not doing something? Do you think we have the freedom of won't? Yeah. Being spontaneous, no. we're never spontaneous. What we think of as spontaneous is when you have absolutely no insights

Starting point is 00:42:02 as to what was going on implicitly underneath the surface. Like every now and then we're capable of saying, oh, that's why I'm being all irritable. I haven't eaten yet and I should. There we have some insight into the implicit stuff boiling beneath the surface. But what we call spontaneous is like we're just not aware of what the pieces were. And we're not aware of most of the pieces. In terms of, okay, okay, we don't have free will, but what about free won't? Do we at least have the ability to veto stuff? And the answer is no, because when you look at the nuts and bolts of how your brain goes about deciding to do something, and you conclude, actually, there's no free will going into that, all you need to do to figure out is,

Starting point is 00:42:51 the nuts and balls of when you've decided to do something and then your brain says, nah, don't do it. All you've done is just added a little minus switch to your circuit instead of a plus there sort of thing. But it's the same exact stuff that it's built on. And if you find people who at every single juncture in their life, when they have an opportunity to finally get their act together, and they can't do the free won't, they can't say no, they do the wrong thing each time, that's the same exact biology playing out there as if they instead had said time to like reform myself and I'm never going to do X again and now I'm Mother Teresa or some such thing. All it does is it just has a little like additional glitch in the system there

Starting point is 00:43:41 and you get the opposite unspontaneous decision. That makes me sad kind of because it makes me feel like if somebody is born in a bad environment and has poor genes or trauma in their genes, that they're never going to have a good life or be able to change their life to have a better outcome? Well, absolutely they can change, but we know it's an uphill battle. We know despite whatever myths we have in this country, if you're born into poverty, I don't know what the number is, but there's like an 85% chance, you're still going to to be in poverty as an adult. And if you're born into a family with three vacation homes and,

Starting point is 00:44:26 you know, an IPO coming up next season sort of thing, you know you are going to get a large inheritance somewhere to add. You are going to have freedoms in your life that 99% of people on this planet don't have. You know, every now and then somebody does completely counter all the expectations, but we're running a planet, or at least a country on the notion that it's okay to treat some people much better than average because of stuff they had no control over, and to treat other people much worse than average. And not only do we think that's okay, but we invent all these myths to explain how the person actually had a role in bringing about those things. I mean, Here's like a great example in terms of like ongoing biology.

Starting point is 00:45:17 You know, you look at all sorts of implicit bias studies and people are getting less biased against people from this background and this other background and all of that so that there might actually be some good news occurring there. But one area where there's not been a decrease in implicit bias, and in fact there's been an increase is against people who are obese. that calls for very negative judgments, both visceral and reasoned, pseudo-reason, that this is someone who has no self-control. So how are they going to do self-control in this job they're applying for, et cetera, et cetera. It's one of the groups where stigma is increasing against them. And then along comes somebody who everyone in their family is morbidly obese and they were by the time they were 11. And this is how they've been incorporating their view into their whole life. yeah, I keep trying. I can.

Starting point is 00:46:10 What can I say? I have no self-discipline, blah, blah. And then somebody discovered this hormone called leptin. And leptin sends a signal to your brain telling you to feel less hungry than you were. And it turns out this person has a mutation in the receptor for leptin so that they don't get a satiation signal. It's a goddamn mutation that their family has all had. And that's what?

Starting point is 00:46:38 No, they're not lacking self-control. No, they don't hate themselves, rather, or any of the... This is what it is. And we run a world where, because of this one stupid feature about their endocrinology, they're less likely to get jobs than other people. They're more likely to be convicted by a jury. They're more likely to spend their life alone and lonely. I'm like, how screwed is this?

Starting point is 00:47:04 And it's this way in all those domains. And yeah, it's kind of like horrifying if somebody just because they were born with a silver spoon, they're going to have a life of privilege and comfort. But, you know, it's a hundredfold more horrifying. When you look at all people who spend their lives with less and their needs less considered and marginalized or mistreated or disenfranchised or whatever, just because of their just crappy luck, there's something. very wrong here. As you're explaining this, it gets me thinking that a lot of your work can actually

Starting point is 00:47:42 make the world a better place because we'll have more empathy for people who are overweight or people who have drug addictions and things like this because we'll realize that in a lot of part or in your opinion, and 100% it's not their fault. They don't have free will. And likewise, if we see somebody who's like a master of the universe and has just had like their six successful startups in a row or whatever, and they kind of have decided they're pretty damn special and they're entitled to better treatment and they're more deserving of this and their needs have earned more consideration, they haven't for a second. If all of this has to change your worldview into not blaming for people for the ways of

Starting point is 00:48:31 in which things didn't turn out well for them, absolutely the same. Nobody, including you and me, are entitled to anything that makes them better than anyone else. Because the cool, laudable, you know, impressive things we may or may not have pulled off had nothing to do with who we are because we just had good luck with it.

Starting point is 00:48:55 And like meritocracy goes down the tubes just as surely as blaming people, born into poverty for still being poor 20 years later. Happy New Year, Yap, gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged.

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Starting point is 00:53:34 Yeah. So let's talk about some of the ways that we create these decisions and some of the causes of these decisions. You give a lot of examples in the book. One of them is between odor and disgust. Can you talk to us about how odor and disgust can actually change our decision making in the moment? Yep.

Starting point is 00:53:54 I love this in terms of, whoa, that's got something to do with it in the 30 seconds before you make a decision. This is not a big effect, but it's been replicated. It came from some very good psychologists at Yale and sort of a broader, the sort of version of that has been out there. And it's the flip side of what I mentioned before. Take somebody, sit them down, have them fill out a questionnaire about their political views, social politics, economics, geopolitics, whatever. And then bring them back a month later and put them in the room saying, here's another questionnaire we want you to fill out about your political views. And it happens, they're sitting at a room that smells of totally rancid garbage. And you can actually go buy a vial of rancid garbage like odorant and you like take the lid off it just as you could buy freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, smell vials and open them up. But you're sitting in that room. And if somebody is sitting in a room that smells bad, they become more socially conservative.

Starting point is 00:54:57 doesn't change their economic views, doesn't change their political, their geopolitical views, but what's happening, a part of the brain called the insula cortex, which for the last 150 million years in every vertebrate on Earth tells you if you've just taken some rancid food into your mouth and it tastes disgusting and all sorts of like toxin receptors in your tongue, wake up this part of the brain and it causes you to gag and throw up and spit it out, all of that. Somewhere in the last 40,000 years, we've evolved the ability. Not only do those neurons do disgusting taste and smells, they do moral disgust also. How did this happen? Like 40,000 years ago, that's like a blink of an, that's not enough time to get a new part of the brain. They had like

Starting point is 00:55:49 some big committee meeting and they said, well, insular cortex, it does disgusting tastes. Okay, it'll do disgusting actions from now on. Like, give me some duct tape. Let's like push that in there and expand its portfolio. And you've got neurons in there, which literally cannot distinguish between a disgusting taste and disgusting moral act, which is why when we hear about them, we feel queasy. It leaves a bad taste in our mouth. We almost want to throw. It makes us nauseous, that sort of thing. And once you've got that, you've got people who are then running their moral decision-making on stuff that just kind of feels disgusting is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Starting point is 00:56:33 And that's letting you then have a 150 million-year-old part of your brain make your decisions as to whether those people are okay just because they, despite looking different from you or sounding or praying or eating or loving or whatever it is, because you're running your brain on one of the most savagely, like, ancient parts of it, and it's powerful. And you take that person at that point to say, whoa, that's really interesting. Because, you know, four weeks ago, you said, that should actually be legal if people want to do that. And just now you said it shouldn't be legal.

Starting point is 00:57:11 Why do you change? They're not going to say because the room smells disgusting. And my insular cortex can tell the difference between metaphor and reality. they're going to say, oh, I thought about it and I saw this thing in the news and then I reflected. And they're just making it up because they were running on just an intuitive sense that disgusting sensations make you think of disgusting actions and ideologies and theologies and things like that. And like, whoa, where'd that come from? That's fascinating in and of itself. and what's even more fascinating is when you this ask the person who made that different judgment

Starting point is 00:57:52 and they're going to confabulate something from like freshman year philosophy or something to explain. And nah, there's other stuff going on underneath the surface. And it's mostly other stuff going on underneath the surface. So are you saying that we can't have rational, logical thinking, and we are really just pretending to have logical thinking, masking our reptilian brain or something? Well, that's very apt that you brought in that part of the brain because that's exactly sort of where that comes into. We and dinosaurs, we're doing some very similarly impulsive things with some very similar parts of the brain. But do we ever actually think and reason and come to a rational? Yeah, we do.

Starting point is 00:58:43 but under some circumstances more readily than others. If you're tired, you're going to run on instincts and intuition. If you're in pain, if you're scared, if you're stressed, if your heart is pounding because of desire and arouse on all of that, you're going to make completely different sorts of stupid decisions. Or if you're sitting there and you're deciding, how are you going to assess this person? if they count in your brain as a them instead of as an us,

Starting point is 00:59:15 you don't have a chance to get your more emotive reflexive parts of the brain to step down and let's think about this carefully. Wonderful example of this research by this guy at Harvard named Josh Green, who has shown if you're having to make a decision about acting morally or not, am I going to act in a generous sharing way right now? if it's concerning a bunch of your friends, people who are uses, if you have to make a very fast decision about that, you're going to be generous.

Starting point is 00:59:47 And if you have mortal time to think about it, that's when you come up with, well, you know, it's really their fault that they did that and somebody else is going to take care of it. It's really not my problem. And you wanted to do something selfish. When you're considering a them, someone who looks totally different from you,

Starting point is 01:00:04 all of that has all those alarms going, off unconsciously, if you've got to make that decision instantly, you're going to act aggressively and selfishly and preemptively sort of looking out for your side. It's only when you have more time to think that you may come to, you know, maybe they're not so different and maybe, you know, they wound up this way because, you know, their circumstances were real different from mine. when you're around us's, your reflexes are towards pro-social nice behavior. When you're around them's, your reflexes are towards just the opposite. And it's in both cases that when you can sit and think about it, that's where you come up with a

Starting point is 01:00:47 completely different answer. So in a world in which somebody has to decide in the next three seconds, should this person get a green card, should this person get this job, should this person be arrested, you in those cases, that's exactly where you should be on guard, that you're going to be making your most stupid emotion-driven decisions. Stop and think about it and thinking about again and again and again. And all of this gets encapsulated in this quote that I think is like incredibly informative, which is you cannot reason somebody out of an opinion that they weren't reasoned into in the first place. If they got to that out of emotion and fear and hatred and stress and

Starting point is 01:01:35 love or whatever, and they just made up a rationalization afterward, no amount of reason is going to change that. And we've seen that, you know, our national political landscape over the last eight years, showing counter to what every sort of rational social psychologist would have taught you. There's a whole realm of having extremist views where the more convincing the evidence is that you give them that their views are wrong, the more they're going to believe in it. Because, oh, my God, they must really be having to come up with a big lie if they're pulling out the big guns like that. Like, we know the whole world I'm talking about here. Yeah, reason is not going to reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into in the first place.

Starting point is 01:02:20 And circumstances where we can actually, like, come to, that's not what I normally would have thought, but I thought about it and I thought about it again. And I put myself in that person's perspective because theirs is a whole lot different from mine. And I showed that I'm capable of understanding somebody else can feel pain about something I have no understanding of. And when you work your way towards that, that's where we come up with interesting different outcomes. And that's where it's not by chance that some people do that and some people don't. One more example that I think really helps illustrate this. You talk about judges who are hungry,

Starting point is 01:03:05 who end up giving different sentences based on their level of hunger. Tell us about that. Yeah. This is another one of those. I love this study, and it was done by some really good scientists in a very prestigious journal, and it's been attacked by all sorts of people since then. But this was looking at more than a thousand judicial decisions in this parole board system over the course of the year, looking at when did the judge's parole the person, when did they send them back to jail and looking at every variable they could think of. And the strongest predictor was how many hours had it been since the judge had eaten a meal. Appear before the judge right after they had lunch, you had a 60% chance of being paroled by four hours later a one to two percent chance.

Starting point is 01:03:51 Oh my God, what is this about? What it's about is doing the harder thing, looking at the world from somebody else's perspective, instead of jumping to immediate gut decision, thinking about again, all that takes work in a very literal way that's more energetically demanding for your brain. And if you have low blood glucose levels, because you haven't eaten in four hours, you get the easier answer every single time. And what's amazing about that is you ask the judge why they made this decision, and they're going to tell you about, I don't know, Spinoza or Aristotle or something, and they're not going to tell you because my blood glucose level was below this. Now, that study has been attacked by all sorts of cranks complaining about how the statistics were done.

Starting point is 01:04:39 The authors have come back and completely put that confound to rest some other things that people have complained about, which when you look at it closely, makes the case even stronger for that, and it's been replicated in other realms. Don't go apply for a home loan if the loan officer has gone a lot of hours since eating a meal. You're less likely to get a loan. If you're an out-group member and somebody's looking at your job application, the more hours it's been since they've eaten, the faster they're going to toss your application in the garbage. Whoa, all of those. But then, then on top of that, where I was talking before about culture even matters, there's one circumstance where as judges become more hungry, they become more merciful. What's that about? That's in Islamic courts

Starting point is 01:05:34 during Ramadan, because you're hungry and you're reflecting on the nature of justice and goodness and all of that, if you're in a Sharia court and you're a judge, hunger makes you more merciful if it's in a religious context. If you're hungry because you didn't have time to get lunch, you're more likely to throw the book at the guy, just like a judge sitting here in the Bronx or something. Whoa. So there's a cultural aspect to it as well. Totally cool that it works that way. So with all this information, knowing that your environment and your circumstances really shape your decision-making in the moment, if you're hungry, if you're stressed, if you have hormones, if you're PMSing, if you're a girl, like, there's probably all these different things that we need

Starting point is 01:06:20 to worry about. So how do we take this information and then apply it to the real world, knowing all these things? How do you suggest that we improve our lives in the real world? Well, I recognize once again out of the lunatic fringe that if this is really taken to its logical extreme, criminal justice has to be totally completely trashed and replaced with a quarantine model. You protect people from dangerous people. You can strain them, but you don't do it one smidgen more than the minimum needed, and you don't lecture them afterward about how they have a bad soul, and you put a lot of effort into understanding how they turned out that way. And also from the lunatic fringe, meritocracy makes no sense whatsoever. That doesn't mean you pick a random person to take out your brain tumor tomorrow morning. You want the person to be skilled. You want to protect people from incompetent people in difficult jobs. But sure, don't make sure you teach that person that they feel more deserving that you,

Starting point is 01:07:23 that they're a better person because they've got a good memory and they've got good spatial, you know, physical, digital control or whatever, taking out your tumor, that stuff needs to go down the tube. None of us can feel entitled to anything whatsoever, and thus there's nobody on Earth who is less entitled to things than you are. And finally, like hating somebody makes his little sense as hating a virus or hating an earthquake or something. And all that said, that's unbelievably difficult to do. And I've been thinking this way since I'm 14, and I can pull this off about once every three weeks for a minute, because most of the time I'm falling back into the time and place I was trained in. And if it's really, really hard to do this, which it sure is, what you're left with is,

Starting point is 01:08:15 save the energy to do that for when it really matters, for when you're just about to judge somebody for when you're just about to jump to the front of a literal or metaphorical line, because you feel as if somehow you've earned better consideration than anybody. Save it for when it really matters. If you want to believe it was free will, whether you floss the top of your teeth before the bottom this morning or the other way around, you know, go for it. Don't work hard at that point to figure out how you turned out to be an upper-tooth flosser instead of a lower one, but save it for when it matters. And like all we've learned is for centuries

Starting point is 01:08:57 every time we figure out a new domain where, aha, there actually wasn't responsibility. That person had no control over what happened. The world becomes better. It's a really good thing that society figured out that disastrous thunderstorms are not caused by old women with old teeth. Witches can't cause thunderstorms, and the appropriate societal response isn't to burn them at the stake. And like kids you aren't learning to read very well, they aren't lazy and motivated. They've got something screwy with like layer six of this part of their cortex. So they reverse looped letters and they have dyslexia. It's not their fault. And not only does it become a better world because you figure out how to teach kids with dyslexia to read and it becomes, you know,

Starting point is 01:09:50 more interventively effective. But it's a much more humane world because you're not burning old women at the stakes and you're not telling kids who can't keep letters from flipping that they're lazy and unmotivated and that's who they should grow up thinking of themselves as. And at every one of these steps, if you save the effort to do this hard work where it really matters, the roof isn't going to cave in. this is going to happen. Is this going to become like a nicer world to be in? So I mentioned this earlier. I'm 100% Palestinian and I said I would bring up the Palestine-Israeli conflict and I feel like this is an appropriate time. So right now, Israel, in my opinion, is committing an ethnic cleansing and genocide against the people in Gaza. And I can't help but always whenever I do these interviews,

Starting point is 01:10:38 it's November 7th, the day that we're recording today. So this has been going on for about a month. and I think everybody in the world by now knows about the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the fact that now Israel has been retaliating carpet bombing Gaza for about 30 days straight now. So let's talk about this because it seems pretty relevant to what you're talking about in terms of like the Hamas attack. They even have control over what they were going to do. There's so many circumstances that obviously led up to that. And then now with what Israel is doing now, in terms of, of the bombing, and then even before that, with the apartheid and the entitlement of, you know,

Starting point is 01:11:18 having a state only for, you know, Jewish supremacy. Well, I am going to, I would guess, get literal death threats rather than just metaphorical ones in saying what I think here, I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, a very observant one, until I became an atheist that night at age 14, and I am a vehement strident anti-Zionist. I think the founding of Israel was one of the last great crimes of European colonialism. Like Europe finally figured out, after shitting on the Jews for 2,000 years, Hitler finally pushed it over the top and made that seem a little bit embarrassing. So for the first time, European Christianity decided it's time to be nice to the Jews

Starting point is 01:12:05 and try to make up for the death camps. And what does Britain do in its last gas of empire? It decides to make up for those 2,000 years of European brutality by giving away the Palestinians' homeland. What a cool idea. How just is that? I know. Ridiculous. And what that did, amid that creating the Palestinian catastrophe of that, what that did is make both sides victims. of this because the Palestinians have been robbed of their homeland and their rights and their safety and their security and their dignity and all of that for 75 years now, whatever it is. And all of these bedraggled survivors of the concentration camps were dumped into the middle of a place where everyone surrounding them hated their guts because it was much easier to hate them than to hate

Starting point is 01:13:00 the British Colonials who engineered it behind the scenes. And all we've done is spent 75 years guaranteeing that these people were going to spend this time tearing in each other's throats like savages. And they're both victims. And they both got screwed in this deal. And Israel, it's there now. I would not have voted for its founding. But it's, if you do that, take it apart. Now, there's a lot of other places you're going to have to take apart. It's there now. But they're sure as hell has to be a viable, supported Palestinian state, and they're sure as hell has to be equal rights for Arab Israelis in Israel, and they're sure as hell has to be all those things, and those settlers sure as hell should be labeled as terrorists and pulled out of there,

Starting point is 01:13:48 and, you know, all that stuff. So, you know, those are the obvious solutions, but all of it is within this mindset that I think is totally an outcome of how I think, which is they're both victims of circumstance. And somehow, 2,000 years of bedraggled Jews have become ethno-nationalists. And somehow the Palestinians who have been, like, beaten on for 75 years, have become angry enough to do things like what Hamas did. And everybody is a victim in this. So that's my two cents. Yeah, it was a good one. Thank you for sharing. I had no idea where you were going to go with it. but I do think it's relevant to everything that you're saying that this is the main thing that I wanted to get out of what you just said. None of this actually happened on October 7th. This is years,

Starting point is 01:14:40 thousands of years in the making. It's not October. It didn't all, everybody was looking at it in a bubble. And really, there's so much context behind it. Environmental-wise and even biology-wise, like all the trauma from everyone's ancestors even is at play here. I know that we are running out of time here. So I end all my interviews with two last questions. Thank you so much for your time. Everything was really, really insightful. The first question is, what is one actionable thing that our young improfitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Starting point is 01:15:14 Since I am so ignorant about the world you're coming from, I can't even begin. I don't know, anything that I can say is to be sound fatuous, stupid. Like, you're really not such a big deal. you're really not the Christ child coming again just because you pulled off a successful startup. You really didn't do it on your own. You didn't do any of this on your own. So keep that in mind. That's one of my biggest takeaways from this is that now I feel like I'm going to look at other people

Starting point is 01:15:49 who might not be as successful as me with a lot more empathy, honestly, and less judgment. So that was my big takeaway from this conversation. and what would you say your secret to profiting in life is? And this can go beyond financial, so profiting in your relationships and everything. Oh, once again, like useless, like window dressing. Oh, I don't know, just remember you didn't get here by chance. And if the outcome of that is you shouldn't beat on yourself as much or hate yourself as much, that's a good thing. And if the outcome of that is remembering you've got no damn grounds to congratulate yourself,

Starting point is 01:16:35 you know, those have to be good outcomes. That's got to make things a little bit better. Awesome. Well, Robert, thank you so much for joining us on Young Improfiting Podcast. I love the conversation. Great. Likewise. Thanks for having me on.

Starting point is 01:16:52 Yeah, fam, this was one of those interviews that truly blows your mind. And I know I personally will be thinking about this for weeks. Robert Sopolsky's view that we lack free will entirely is a radical one, and he admits that, but he certainly made his case in a compelling way. We all like to think that we're agents of choice and the architects of our own fates, and that we're all leading our lives by making conscious moment-to-moment decisions. But so many recent findings in neuroscience and psychology suggest that this is far from the truth. Like Professor Sopolsky put it, there are a billion threads leading to each moment and believing that

Starting point is 01:17:29 is just your conscious intent in any given moment that determines your actions, is a lot like trying to review a movie based on only seeing the last three minutes of it. Viewed like this, something like grit, which many of us entrepreneurs take great pride in, loses a bit of its luster. Your tenacity, like everything else, stems from some combination of your genes, hormones, environment, ancestral heritage, and more. The implications of having no free will are even bigger than that. The moral principles that underlie our criminal justice system, our meritocracy, our ideas of blame and praise start to crumble without the presence of free will. But that can be a good thing too, says Sapolsky. It can actually

Starting point is 01:18:11 lead us to having more empathy for others who are struggling with things like their weight, drug addiction, or something else that may not be their fault at all. So whatever your own view on free will, there's so much to take away from thinking about these issues. And next time you're thinking about beating yourself up or somebody else for that matter for a mistake, shortcoming or bad outcome, perhaps try zooming back and taking in the really big picture. Thanks for listening. And if some combination of your genes environment and chance brought you to this fascinating discussion with Robert Sapolsky on Young and Profiting Podcast, then why don't you exercise

Starting point is 01:18:47 whatever counts as your own free will to share this episode with your friends and family? And maybe it was predetermined that you would also drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Perhaps your whole life has been building up to this moment. We here at Young Improviting would certainly appreciate if you did. You can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or on LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. But keep in mind, I am the LinkedIn queen and my DMs get nuts. So if you want to reach out to me and you want to make sure I see it, try me on Instagram.

Starting point is 01:19:18 Before we wrap up, I do have to shout out my amazing production team at YAP Media. Thank you for all that you do. This is your host, Hala Taha. aka the podcast princess, signing off.

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Robert Sapolsky: Free Will Doesn’t Exist! Leading Neuroscientist Claims ALL Behavior Is Biologically Determined | Human Behavior E262

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