What Chronic Stress Does To Your Body - Dr Robert Sapolsky

what do you wish more people knew about how stress impacts the human body um that while it's worth paying attention to the fact that it does crummy things to your heart and blood pressure and bladder and everything else uh for me most meaningful thing is it does crummy things to your brain the worst is that it makes you less empathic it makes you less tolerant it makes you less willing to take somebody else's perspective it Narrows your tunnel of concerns and I think what we see is in a world full of stress uh people are crummier to each other on the average why does stress cause that reduction in empathy all sorts of interesting stuff various places in the brain but in one region uh we think we colleagues and I and lots of other people in the field um think we've gotten a sense of the brain region that's relevant something called the anterior singulate cortex and if you want to summarize it uh this is the part of the brain where you feel someone else's pain sit someone down stick them in a brain scanner poke their finger with a pin and like all sorts of ouch parts of the brain activate and as part of that this part of the brain anterior single it also activates and it's got a lot to do with interpreting what the pain means that sort of thing like you poke somebody with a pin uh after you've told them they've just had this very powerful anesthetic cream smeared over their finger when in actuality it's like cream cheese or something and they don't feel the pain the parts of their brain that are saying ouch that was in my finger are still going on but anterior singula has gone silent because you have fallen for a placebo effect it's it's about the interpretation of the pain rather than the nuts and bolts features of it so now stick the person in the brain scander and don't poke their finger with a pin make them watch their loved one have their finger poked and the panometer Brain regions have nothing to say because like nobody's doing anything to your finger tip but the anterior singulate activates and neurons there on this very like simplistic level can't tell the difference between your pain and someone else's pain um big amazing sort of footnote in there uh typically people suffering from major depression this part of the brain is overactive it's just pain 247 wherever you look and that kind of thing okay so it turns out that when people are stressed they become less generous they're more likely to cheat in a economic game their moral compass goes out the window their their range of concern Narrows down to people who look just like me and pray like me and eat like me and all that sort of stuff that we're way familiar with um and it turns out what stress hormones are also doing is disrupting the functioning of this part of the brain and there's like a drug you can give to rats or give to college freshman volunteers which will block the effects of a stress hormone and when you throw that in there uh they maintain their empathy despite being stressed they maintain all sorts of physiological markers of it we're feeling less capacity to look at somebody else's pain and somebody else's perspective on the world when we're stressed because what matters has turned into a very self-interested Focus for most people so like amid stress doing terrible things to your memory and your executive function and judgment and all sorts of stuff this increasingly strikes me as this this is The Outpost that's really interesting one of the things that continues to come up in your work on stress is this uh it's almost like an agentic view of what's happening to you it's it's how much agency do you have is this kind of being imposed on me or have I selected that this is going to happen what is the role of agency and of valtion when it comes to stress and how we interpret it well it falls under the rubric of how I think everything in the universe works which is like there's no agency at all there's no free will um in recent years I've stopped spending most most of my time fussing around with one neuron at a time and soaking in stress hormones and getting much more interested in larger issues of biology of who we are and how we got here and our best moments and our worst moments and everything Ambiguously in between and when you spend enough time like obsessing over biology and how it interacts with environment and all the things that came for us that we had no control over both biologically environmentally you reach this conclusion somewhere in there that there's no damn Free Will whatsoever it is entirely a myth so this is this is my current song and dance trying to convince the word world that uh this is uh how things work well if we want to increase the stress in everybody at least for a short term perhaps that that's a nice little teaser for what we're going to get on to talk to me because obviously short-term stress is useful long-term stress not useful is there a line is am I not supposed to be stressed after 8 hours and 35 minutes when when does short-term stress start to become bad well it depends on who you are and your place in society and what culture and as long as we're at it what species you are and sort of the the the central Concept in stress is like you get stuck in a traffic jam you're stressed you do this with this hormone you turn off this other one your your blood pressure does whatever and the amazing thing is if you went back a hundred million years and some like twerpy little dinosaur was being chased by someone terrifying that dinosaur would have been secreting the precise same molecules that you do when you're stuck in traffic or thinking about global warming or who it's an incredibly ancient piece of art like wiring it's the same thing in Us and other primates and mammals and fish and birds and reptiles and ampi it's incredibly conserved stuff and what it's been doing for like 150 million years or so is saving your life when you were facing a short-term physical crisis somebody is very intent on eating you you are very intent on eating somebody else because you're starving and everything that it does is get your body for dealing with the next three minutes of Crisis you're mobilizing energy from storage sites to deliver to the muscles that are saving your neck you're increasing heart rate blood pressure you're turning off everything unessential in your body in the hopes that there is a later you'll take care of it later growth tissue repair immune surveillance reproduction all of that all built around like triage everything that's not essential to next three minutes and then you get us smart primates us humans who could anticipate our deaths or some like low ranking baboon who spends his entire life not being chased by lias but being hassled by higher ranking guys and what you've invented is this like totally corrosive disastrous chronic psychosocial stress and you see this very simple outcome you go sprinting for your life and your blood pressure is way way elevated this is a good thing it's saving your life you day after day deal with an abusive boss or you have an anxiety disorder or whatever and you're doing the same thing with your cardiovascular system and you're going to blow it apart because the system didn't evolve for being turned on chronically and for most beasts it's either over with after three minutes or you're over with and we're capable of doing this like for months years on end and that's not what the system evolved for and that's why us and a few other primates are smart enough to get sick from psychological stress yeah the idea the concept of being smart enough to get sick from psychological stress is is an odd sort of twisting of the words but I suppose it's very true right because if we didn't have this unbelievable abstraction ability to be able to contemplate am I really speaking my truth forward is this my highest actualization maybe that cookie that I ate yesterday really does say everything about me that I've always thought that it was ruminating about that weird thing you said to a teacher 15 years ago whatever it might be that you're vacillating about we are able to abstract our stresses and ruminate about them and continue to cause them to persist in our mind even when they're not there so even if we're not being chased by said dinosaur or or tiger or baboon we can imagine all of the previous baboons and tigers and dinosaurs that we thought about getting chased from and still get the same physiological effect yes as well as remember our most incompetent embarrassing social moments of Our Lives as well as imagine that you're destined to do something like that over and over again in the future as well as worry about worry about a movie character you watch somebody on a screen or you read a a novel and you activate a stress response because oh no watch out the bad guys are coming up behind you or you're heartbroken you know at the end of a novel by some beloved character getting done in or worse and most meaningfully you sit there and you read about what's happening in Ukraine or banglades and you do the exact same thing we're taking this 150 million year old circuitry and we can abstracted over space and time like nothing that's ever walked this planet before right with this perspective the kind of trite cliche of people saying humans are not meant to consume the entire world's catastrophes 24 hours a day in real time this is presumably having a real genuine impact on our stress response and therefore Health outcomes physiology hormones all of that stuff yeah exactly and you know to show how similar things are and then how different you take a female baboon this was some great research done some Years Ago by some colleagues and she has an infant and the infant does there's a high infant mortality rate and they could show up to a month later not only is this female more socially withdrawn doing less grooming all she has elevated stress hormone level she is mourning for a month afterward and that sure looks familiar and often she will carry the body around for days afterward wow that looks just like us and then we do the same thing when we see that Bambi's mother was killed in the in the cartoon and we're haunted by that for year whoa we can take this very primate thing my child has died and we're feeling upset about an animated cartoon character we're you know we could just extended in ways that's unrecognizable to other species I learned from you that a third trimester fetus's brain development is impacted by the mother's socioeconomic status how screwed is that how insane absolutely insane in you're born and you are already screwed by having picked the wrong womb um take that from the top for me take that from the absolute top okay well you know people used to realize poverty social instability being a peripheralized outgroup the wrong ethnicity the wrong race the wrong all of those things what do you know your body like pays a big price in the United States for example if you are africanamerican on the average your chromosomes are aging at an accelerated rate compared to everybody else because stress hormones mess up the enzymes that keep your chromosomes young and like whoa like the chromosomes and your cells are falling apart faster so whoo no surprise no surprise and when you look at like Health socioeconomic status is a gigantic predictor am I assuming correctly you're in the UK Austin Texas but I was in the UK for a very long time I'm I'm an adop e over here okay well no wonder you've got that Texan accent um you know the classic whiteall studies of civil servants and written and stuff your socioeconomic rank has an enormous impact on your body and it's got nothing to do with getting healthc care access it's got very little to do with the fact that like you can't afford your health club memberships it's stress it's the psychosocial effects of like chronically having no control no predictability all of that and then they figured out that like the socioeconomic status of your family when you were a kid is predictive of all sorts of unhealthy stuff when you're 60 years old and then among other things uh people got brain Imaging techniques cool enough that they could now brain image of fetus and see how it's doing and back came the finding that already as a fetus your mother's socioeconomic status uh has an impact on your brain growth how does that happen very simple if you're poor and if you're chronically socially psychosocially stressed for any of Gaz and other reasons you've got elevated levels of these stress hormones in your bloodstream and they get through the placenta and they get to your fetus and have all sorts of effects while the fetus's body is learning what kind of world it is out there whoa It's a scary one it's an unpredictable one these stress hormones having all sorts of effects on how you're constructing every Outpost including your brain and it turns out some of the fanciest parts of your brain your frontal cortex Etc are very sensitive to these stress hormones and their maturation is impaired by them yeah what are the outcomes what are what are the sort of outcomes that you see from a mother that is low socioeconomic status perhaps highly chronically stressed what is the sort of brain or the sort of person that will be born out of that more than likely well this one isn't well understood yet because these are the first studies coming out this is officially cutting a Cutting Edge neuroimaging techniques but we already know a ton just a few years later get a kid by the time they're five years old going into kid kindergarten and on the average their family socioeconomic status is already a predictor of this kid's resting stress hormone levels how screwed is that and on the average it's already predictive of the maturation of the front cortex in this kid how thick this cortical region is what its metabolic rate is like and one wonders so what does this part of the brain do that I keep mentioning um it's the brain region that lets you be self-disciplined and longterm planning and impulse control and emotional regulation I don't know a lot of a lot of people will be familiar with like the famed marshmallow test with like five-year-old kids and oh my God that's it's amazing you get a 5-year-old who can't hold out for the second marshmallow and they're they're on it within seconds and all of that and this is predictive decades decades later of this kid's cumulative earnings over their lifetime their adult socioeconomic status there patterns of metabolic diseases cardiovascular wo already at age five the the the die is not cast unchangeably but it's already leaning in a fairly significant direction by age five that's already a predictor of what things are going to look like as an adult in lots of these important Realms and by age five if you once again pick the wrong family to be born into and you're already marinating in chronic psychosocial stress because you know your family's poverty by age five you already have that profile that's predictive of you know that outcome that is on the less uh desirable side long afterward absolutely insane it's I had a Robert pman on the show um I've spent a good bit of time learning about behavioral genetics over the last couple of years and what I'm really fascinated about is this odd intersection between nature and nurture the fact that you are your parents are predisposed to behave in a way which creates the nurture their predisposition has to be inherited by you at least in part because that is the nature element of what's going on so when you have this very odd blending let's say that you have a mother who is uh predisposed to be a little bit more anxious okay so perhaps you have got a predisposition to be a little bit more anxious but then what's the environment in that you grow up in right you already have this sort of precursor Downstream from that mothers that say overbearingly you can't go out without your coat on and make sure that you ring me before this what's the subtext that you're being taught there that the world is a scary place that you need to be very concerned that you must always be vigilant and you've already got this predisposition it's this fascinating intersection and the interplay between the two that I think is is really interesting in behavioral genetics an incredibly important one and behavioral genetics has kind of uh I don't mean this too pejoratively but grown up um to the extent of realizing when it comes to behavior genes are very very very rarely determinant they're about vulnerabilities they're about potential they're about you know skating on the edge of something and it depends on what environment you wind up in whether you're pushed over the edge it depends if you have the right nurturant things that you've got the genetic potential all set to take advantage of it after a while is irrelevant to ask what does this Gene do but only to ask what a gene does in this particular type of environment great example of this in terms of stress and genetic vulnerability uh classic study it's been mired in some controversy for years but I think it's the most important study done in biological psychiatry in a quarter Century there's this Gene it's got something to do with serotonin this neurotransmitter in the brain everybody knows serotonin has something to do with depression ssris like Prozac work on it um so it's this that comes in a few different flavors and all sorts of animal studies suggested you wind up with this flavor and you're Miss more at risk for depression um and that made perfect sense and whoa that say that you know suggests all sorts of genetic uh impact on depression and such let's go look at some humans and this amazing study following like thousands of people from childhood up into like early adulthood where you've got their genomes and you're saying well does having like the scary vulnerable version of this Gene increase your risk for having a history of depression by the time you're 25 years old and the answer was absolutely clear yes yes it increases the risk if and only if you had a lot of stressors during childhood in the absence of a stressful childhood having that risk variant had virtually no impact whatsoever it's not the genetics of becoming depressed it's the genetics of being more vulnerable to depression when it's coupled with huge amounts of stress early in life and this turns out to be the theme with like everything implicated with genes and behavior it depends on the environment that you're in and what do you know it turns out all sort of these genetic risk profiles uh when it's coupled with a stressful environment an abusive one a neglectful one what that's the circumstances in which they suddenly are adverse yeah it's interesting to think about um let's say you had some child that was 99th percentile conscientiousness you know full standard deviation higher in IQ all of like some stuff big predisposition but they were born into an environment or a culture that wasn't really pushing them to use that discipline and that motivation and and that sort of Drive perhaps they're born into somewhere that doesn't even have a formal education system you think okay well what what ability do they have to be able to capitalize on this and again another fascinating thing is we've moved recently only in the last sort of 100 150 years from a Brawn based to a brain-based economy which has meant that people who had a competitive Advantage only two centuries ago if that same disposition was born now they totally different what are you going to do with your ability to dig 8 hours a day without getting back pain I get back pain right I'm not going to be I'm not going to be good I'm not going to be good on the on the digs um what do people get wrong so what you've said there sounds tenuously close to what people who don't understand epigenetics on the internet say is epigenetics that sounds to me like the sort of epigenetics of the gaps that they would say you see the genes aren't turned on and then the environment turns them on is that epigenetics and if not what is epigenetics related to it well actually that's like epigenetics I I can't give a much more accurate description of it than that uh you got your genes DNA sequence long strings of them specifying proteins that you make um and it turns out like 95% of your DNA doesn't specify genes it's the instruction manual it's the on and off switches for when you activate or deactivate the genes in particular circumstances in this part of your body but not in that part and so on um and it turns out very little of environment changes your actual DNA sequences and the stuff that does is like bad stuff like radiation things like not not not stuff thinking about here yes for example all those all those three-headed dogs running around there with the with the Russian troops um but what environment what experience does is messes with the onoff switches and epigenetics is the fancy term for the fact that experience doesn't change your genes but it changes the regulation of them often really for a long time often lifelong often through some incredibly cool mechanisms multi-generationally this is how like you're a fetus and you're being soaked in a lot of stress hormones and what are they doing they're causing epigenetic effects on onoff switches in the brain that unless you intervene pretty like majorly later on are going to be lifelong this is exactly Mech epigenetics is just the fancy term for wait a second stuff that happens to you is going to make a difference 50 years later it's going to make a difference in your disease risks your diet early in life has epigenetic effects on how good your pain pancreas is reacting to glucose in your bloodstream when you're 80 so epigenetics is just the trendy term for saying the interesting stuff about genes is much less the genes themselves than their regulation and what environment does is change the regulation to your genes that's fascinating maybe the people on Twitter were right all along so it sounds to me like you're saying bad stuff not only leaves scar tissue for you and not just for you now but you in the future and then also potentially your kids as well presumably yeah through mechanisms well you've already mentioned one mechanism which is like the regulation that happened to your genes and the Brain you got right now as an adult is going to influence how you how you raise your child and you know what what parents spend an awful lot of time doing is trying to figure out ways to make their kid just like that when they grow up to have the same cultural values to have the same Neurosis because those don't seem like Neurosis they seem like the only sensible way to go about handling the world all of that so there's multi-generational transmission through parenting style through culture all of that but multigenerational epigenetic stuff also arises from unbelievably cruel mechanisms okay for example so you are that fetus and Mom is stressed as hell because she has an anxiety disorder for example and thus you're being soaked in a lot of the physiological consequences of her anxiety disorder and that influences your brain and among other things it causes epigenetic changes in one part of your brain called the amydala the amydala is about fear anxiety all of that and what does a lot of stress early in life including during fetal life thanks to those hormones do it makes your migdala grow bigger than normal you wind up having as an adult on the average an amydala that's enlarged that's hyperactive that's hysterical that sees Menace that other people don't things of that sort okay so you got this and like with the right therapy at the right points in life you can actually reverse epigenetic stuff wow get the right talk therapy and like your genes are regulated differently in your brain yeah it's got to that that's like when therapy works but if you haven't had that good fortune now you're an adult with your enlarged amydala and you get pregnant and because of that big amydala you secrete elevated levels of stress hormones because that's and thus your fetus's amydala will be bigger than expected and thus when they are an adult and you have these multi-generational Ripples and this is not passing on genes this is passing on the adverse regulatory consequences for your genes and this stuff is multigenerational it's not inevitable you are not damning a 100 generations of descendants and like you could intervene and very little in US is set in stone but all things being equal this is even a way to pass the stuff unto the generations Beyond you wow you mentioned interventions there we are bathed in stresses I don't know how full Andrew huberman mode you have gone in your work to look at ameliorating or mitigating this has there been anything that or or what is the 30,000 foot view of how to think about strategies that are good at reducing stress what what what is the like way to conceptualize it well what I can say confidently is you're asking the entirely wrong question to this person because I'm terrible at handling stress like why else do you spend decades like living in a laboratory thinking about this so research is me search Robert research is me search yes sublimate it all into those test tubes and those statistical tests um so I happen to be lousy it so anything I have to say here take with a grain of salt but what the real experts show is you know what what is stress about not when you're being chased by a dinosaur but when you're being psychologically stressed what is it that makes psychological stress stressful it's for the same external reality for the same external unpleasantry if you feel like you have no control if you feel like you're getting no predictive information about when is it going to come and how long is it going to last and bad is it going to be when you have no outlets for the frustration caused by the stresser when you interpret things as meaning things are getting worse rather than better and when you got no social support incredibly like elegant powerful studies showing stuff like with a lab rat or with a college student you give them shocks every now and then they get a stress response and you give them a little warning like 10 seconds before each shock they don't get as much of a stress respon response you've given them predictive information let them press a lever repeatedly where they think that by pressing the lever decreases the likelihood of a shock the lever's doing nothing it's a placebo it's disconnected yet merely by feeling like you have some sense of control just imagine how worse it would have been if I were not the captain of my ship you buffer against so hugely important psychological variables in there but what you see is like it's narrow ranges where this is predictive information give that little warning light one second before the shock doesn't do you any good it's not enough time to get the right psychological perspective give the warning light a minute before each shock and you make things worse because rather than sitting there saying oh what a magnificent life I have where I know when my stressors are coming and now I can prepare for my coping stra you're sitting there for a whole minute so whoa so it's not just have more pred addictive information have more of a sense of control you don't want to give somebody a sense of control when the outcome was a disaster because all you're doing is biasing them towards thinking how much better things could have been and too bad I was at control at that time and some of the most Humane stuff we do is try to minimize somebody's sense of control in the face of it nobody could have stopped the car the way that child darted out it wouldn't have made a difference if you had gotten them to the doctor earlier there's nothing that you couldn't have done anything the sense of control only works for mild to moderate stressors for big disastrous ones help that person deceive themselves like crazy because that's where the so it's not just you know get as much control and as much predictability and as much social support as possible because like often we mistake like superficial acquaintanceships for actual social support and like it sucks when the carpet gets pulled out from under your feet that it turns out that clubbing is not the way in which you meet people who will keep you through the moments of crisis in your life um you know narrow range where all this stuff works um sound bites and once again the terrain where do as I say not as I live um but you know all the stress management stuff collectively can work quite well um it's not stuff you save for the weekend it's not stuff you save until like your on hold on the phone kind of thing um it's something you got to set time out for every day and usually a block of time and what's interesting is whether that's like exercise or meditation or playing your OBO or whatever it is that's doing it for you um actually doing that activity is stress reducing but the mere fact that IM mid your life of saying I can't say no to this I got to get this done I got to get that done all these pressures if you were willing to say no to that stuff enough if you were willing to consider your well-being to be important enough that you stop everything for 20 minutes a day of like you know messing with Rubik's Cubes it hardly matters what you're doing you're 90% of the way they're already because you have said this is serious enough and my well-being is serious enough that I'm going to say no to all these things I can't say no to so like that works great um next thing is make sure it's a Stress Management technique that like you actually enjoy doing like because if it isn't you shouldn't be getting stressed by doing your Stress Management technique exactly like you know meditation there's a gazillion study showing it has all sorts of benef beneficial effects because of my makeup if I spent 20 minutes a day meditating I would have a stroke by this weekend it's so like antithetical to what my makeup is but like that's great that all your friends say it's wonderful you know see if it works for you read the fine print um and if it doesn't like that's not stress reduction that's exactly the opposite I would say the last caveat that comes with that is if you've run into somebody who says it has been scientifically proven that their special brand of stress management works better than the other ones you got to do it almost every day and it's got to be something that actually works for you rather than working for whichever celebrity in their like exercise routine is talking about on online and like don't trust someone who says theirs is special because they all are roughly doing the same thing talking about on the other side of this moving out of stress and into good stuff have you ever thought about how people can help themselves habituate to the good things and the good changes that happen in life more slowly yeah um something I've been ruminating on a lot as of late because you know it's another one of those we're we're a weird species and it allows us to do some cool stuff but whoa does it have some like bills that come afterward in terms of no free lunch okay so you're a baboon like what's the source of fun in your life you're hungry and you get to eat something great or like you're in a bad mood and you get to beat up on somebody smaller so you feel terrific or somebody mates with you or any of these things and like it's a fairly limited repertoire of what counts is rewarding and then you get to us and like all of those things are nice but in addition like we solve a math problem that we've been working on for 20 years and like the world is wondrous place or like a piece of music or like quadruple orgasms or like you smell a flower that smells great or like we've got this range of potential Pleasures that's amazing compared to every other Beast out there and once again this theme of we're just like every other primate out there until you look close and we're totally different we've got the same brain circuitry that handles reward and anticipation and motiv ation as every other like primate out there and a lot of it revolves around this neurotransmitter dopamine and dopamine's totally cool and it's reward but it's actually more about anticipation than reward and if you're a baboon dopamine is all about wow this like gazelle I just killed is going to be fantastic this is going to taste great and then we do stuff like we release the same neurotransmitter thinking about wow this is going to be such a great planet for my grandchild children or wow this is you know we've got this range of potential pleasures and potential motivations like nobody else out there and the range varies like this is a system that has to accommodate smelling a nice flower and winning the lottery and it's using the same circuits and it's using the same neurotransmitters to do this what that means is this is a system that has to reset really quickly because it's got to know okay okay we just stopped doing winning the lottery now we're doing the smell of flowers so like going from zero to 10 okay we've readjusted this is what 0o to 10 now means this is like the first nice smell of the Season rather than oh you've just cured world hunger or whatever uh it's got to reset quickly and there's some cool h H coming up by now as to what's unique about the human like reward anticipation system where it's got fancier regulation so you could send more negative feedback signals saying okay we're switching from flowers to orgasms now or whatever where it's got very fancy s so that's totally great that allows us to do stuff and there's like the bill that comes which accounts for an incredibly percent incredible percentage of like human disease and despair and dissatisfaction which is if this system resets so quickly by definition whatever was like a fantastic surprise and wonderful yesterday is going to be what you feel entitled to today and is going to feel insufficient tomorrow and we get hungry again and we just get hungry and hungry and hungry and whatever was great is never going to be enough very quickly and like okay that's why we go to the moon and that's why we like do incredible motivated things and we innovate and we always want the next new thing and Novelty and all that but it's also why with like Damn Few tragically few exceptions we habituate to great stuff and it never tastes as good again and never feels as good again or feels as satisfying or and like this is this crappy miserable thing we're stuck in as a species you know if we're going to like send in tens of thousands of patents for new things every year um the downside is what was wonderful stop seeming wonderful pretty quickly we habituate like mad and like that that's our that's our like basic predicament it stops feeling is good and we get hungry again okay so when it comes to extending how long that happens is there anything that we can do can we slow this inevitable onslaught of honic adaptation um oh sure you you have to be a hell of a lot more mature than I am for example and you know far more you know all the stuff like go through these like cognitive exercises of think about somebody else who's less lucky than you or try to really file away that feeling of like glorious surprise and like this is great and this is like a wonderful loving caring world and I'm okay and it's going to be okay and the next day when you're feeling like well yeah but what about okay really pay attention to the viscera of that moment to have a prayer of recalling some of it think about other people think about like how great it would be to evoke the same feelings in somebody else wow you know vicariously doing that is a great way of resetting Pleasures that we've habituated to um and you know every every parent has this at various points where they say wow my kid just got to experience this for the first time it was amazing when I did that it's you know there's all sorts of means of doing it and of course you got to have your your act together to a greater extent than most of us readily do but like these are these are all the ways in which you try to keep the colors from fading too quickly you hit on one of the uh hot topics of the internet dopamine obviously dopamine Nation the fact that people are concerned they're being driven by it they're compulsively chasing it through a screen through a vape in their hand through whatever next Collective effervescence experience they're having with their friends how much [ __ ] is there in your opinion in the training detraining retraining sensitivity detoxing of dopamine um oh I don't know I'm trying to be polite and not call it [ __ ] but thanks for calling it [ __ ] um it's because people get hold in one particular direction with it which superficially is correct but is not really the case in the reality is like so much more interesting amid this you know dopamine Nation stuff that's a great phrase the equivalent phrase I'd have is we're the species that wants and wants and wants and wants and it's for much the same reason okay what everybody thinks they know about dopamine and what all the the savants thought they had shown for a long time time um is dopamine is about reward take a person take a monkey take a rat give it a reward from out of nowhere and it releases dopamine from the dopaminergic reward circuits in the brain there and yeah it's about reward cocaine releases tons of dopamine like nothing the natural world could ever do so that by the way afterward you've depleted your own dopamine stores so if you want to have a big rush the only possible you have is to do it again and then do it again because each time you come back to a baseline that's even more depleted than you were before you know the the ratcheting downward of addiction but I digress in a preachy manner okay so dopamine it's about reward that's totally straightforward all these all these euphoriant released dopamine case closed but now you do the experiment a little bit differently you take that human rat monkey whatever and and you know you put them in a room and here's the deal when a little light comes on it means if they go and press this lever 10 times then they're going to get a reward great you learn it very quickly light work reward light work reward and you got it under your belt and that's terrific and so the question now becomes when that sequence occurs when does dopamine go up does it go up when you get the reward no not once you learn this contingency dopamine goes up when the light turns on because you're sitting there saying yeah I'm on top of this I know I know all about this lever pressing stuff piece of cake this is going to be fabulous dopamine's about the anticipation it's not about the reward it's about this is going to be fantastic and even more interestingly if you mess in there and you block the dopamine levels from Rising you don't get the lever pressing it's about the motivation driven by the anticipation and this is like incredible this is totally amazing in all sorts of ways first off it begins to hint after a while that it's not the pursuit of happiness but it's the happiness of the pursuit yes that sound bite I've never patented that but that should be on little doilies and everyone kitchens and stuff that's what I mean think about how often the anticipation of something turns out to be much better than it turns out to actually be bummer because what you now have afterward is even that much more of a hunger but it's about anticipation so that's the first interesting implication the anticipation and the striving is what's really the thing that that motivates us second cool thing okay so now do the experiment a little bit differently um what I just described was you press the lever you get the reward press the lever get the reward 100% predictability it's completely clear now shift things to you press the lever and you only get the reward about half the time what happens to dopamine at that point it goes through the roof the second the little light goes on because what you've just introduced into your brain chemistry is the word maybe and what oh maybe drives the system like nothing on Earth okay I'm detecting that my dog is frantically briefed because his ball has rolled under something let me go help him out in his his patheticness I'll be right back okay take now oh yes look at you yes now okay safie come so let me see oh and now the other dog is here also now let me see if I could keep him Satisfied by wrapping him on the nose here and pretending to be trying to pull the ball away okay so you introduce some uncertainty in it and there's even more dopamine because maybe like you're now sitting there saying yeah I'm a total screw up but today I'm feeling lucky but I'm sure I'm going to mess up but no I'm on top and you're just teetering there and that's motivating like nothing under add in some uncertainty and if you get the right social engineering going on like people do in Las Vegas they will take a one in a thousand chance and convince you you actually have a 5050 chance of something wonderful and you just press that lever over and over again um I'd say the third thing that's coolest about it is you do all this with a monkey or a rat and this is about like you press the lever and then after a 10-second delay you get the reward and then we do the exact same thing and we press a very human specific lever and what we believe is somewhere down the line we're g to get a reward we're going to go to heaven after we die if like you pray whoa we can lever press like an entire lifetime we can lever press for we're able to maintain that anticipatory dopamine like nobody else out there we can lever press in anticipation that our grandkids will inherit money from us like what is that we take the same system and we could run it like a million times longer than your average monkey can and that explains an awful lot as well yeah I find it so interesting that it seems like that kind of the the bullseye of happiness is things are about to get slightly better than I thought they were going to be like that's pretty much it right it's just it's that moment just there it's before it happens right it's not when the it's not when the foods come out it's when you see the waiter coming over with the food and he's about to put it down and okay here's one of the most cynical things I ever heard someone say this was a guy down the hall in the dorm in college he said a relationship is the price you pay for the anticipation of it wow yeah yes yes he had one disastrous relationship after another after another I imagine yeah the word almost whoa that's that's really powerful and like that's how we you know construct cities and like sequence the human genome and build pyramids and all that like just keep pressing the lever because that's going to be amazing when they stick your mummified corpse inside that big paramal thing it's all going to be worth it what about dopamine sensitivity and and driving that either down so that we become more sensitive to we we have detrained ourselves from dopamine so much there is advice online you don't have any stimulus for 30 days it resets things in the brain how long does it take is it is it locked in for life I I win the lottery once and now every paycheck to me is it forever going to seem poultry I've hit hit the lever and got a million bits of food and now no amount of food is ever going to feel satisfying to me well well I I feel fairly confident that if you didn't eat for 30 days food would be amazing afterward it would it would have reset in a traumatic way um you know here's just one piece of that story and again kind of the world I come from if you're a fetus and you're exposed to a lot of stress hormones among all the other things going on in there you make fewer dopamine neurons in that part of the brain you're going to have fewer of them as an adult you're going to have less capacity for feeling pleasure and anticipation you're going to need stronger stimuli to get the system kicking into gear what have you early life stress and vulnerability to substance abuse that's exactly a mechanism for it so yeah how how many of those neurons do you have how good are they at making dopamine how quickly do they run out of it if they run out of it how fast can they rebuild it if the systems habituated how fast does it reset and every single one of those things has a nuts and bolts explanation in each of us every one of those differs in each of us from somebody else and every one of those settings is a mixture of genes and what happened to you when and all of that and that's why you get people who like go listen to a Vagner Opera for four hours and find it to be wonderful and other people who like if they don't like you know shoot up right now they're not going to last another minute or so everything you know individual variation all right everybody's system works differently we're talking about stress we're talking about neurotransmitters and hormones and some of that stuff's contentious right but largely people are interested in how to reduce stress and how it works and how the oxytocin and the serotonin and stuff all come together why did you decide to descend into the hellscape that is the Free Will discussion like why is it so important to discuss this that you would put your own Mental Health on the line um well when I was a fetus there's this thing that happened um well one I was almost back to a fetus I I was 14 when I decided there's no free will whatsoever um as long as I was at it it was one very tumultuous night I also decided there's no God and there's no purpose to anything and it's a huge empty rough evening for a 14-year-old yeah yeah and I've been paying for those insights ever since I even this was literally a two in the morning I woke up during a rather like distressed week with all sorts of like angsty things going on and I woke up and like I remember very clearly saying oh I get it there's no God and there's no Free Will and there's and I even quickly wrote down notes which of course were incoherent because I was half asleep and I couldn't read them in the morning but you know I've been thinking this way forever um and you know that's great that's kind of what I've gotten to and about five years ago I wrote this book uh called behave the biology of humans at our best and worst and it's basically why do we do what we do and the answer is because of what happened one second ago and one minute ago and an hour ago and back to Childhood and Fetal life and genes and what culture your ancestors invented because that's how your mother treated you in evolution and all that and you got to take all of that into account and literally 790 pages agoni inly later you know this is this is what we're about um and the aftermath I did a lot of lecturing and like you'd go through a 50-minute version of all of this and Q&A afterward and inevitably there'd be someone who would say wow you know if all if this is how stuff works we we may have less Free Will than we normally think and I say you think you think and I realized like for a surprising number of people who would do something as ridiculous as go to a lecture on a week night or something this was revelatory and saying okay I thought this would be obvious after like almost 800 pages of this download time to write something that says yeah not only is there much less than we think there's no free will whatsoever and we got to start functioning a little bit more as if that's the case and thus I've sat you know collecting cobwebs for the last five years writing a sort of the sequel to that book it's coming out October it's called determined a science of life without Free Will and I take what is far in way a lunatic fringe stance which isn't saying that we have no free will whatsoever all we are is the sum of our biology and its interactions with environment and neither of which we had any fundamental control over and that's who we are um so I kind of figured I would like go try to convince some people of that and fully expect that's going to be like wildly unsuccessful but like at least I don't have to try to frame my arguments and coherent paragraphs anymore why do you think the conversation about Free Will is so animated um because at first glance and for the first 15050 or so glances it really sucks if we have no free will if we are just biological machines all of that it really is terrible and demoralizing and frightening and all of that and it's not by chance that what the poll show is like 90 95% of philosophers who think about this are what you call compatibilists which is they're willing to admit that we're not made out of magic like the world was made out of molecules and stuff like that but somehow somehow somehow this is where we still manage to have free will and when you read between the lines it's because half of them are saying because damn that would be depressing if because we get such we are me um me and where did me come from and part of being me is that like I've got some control over what I do and this is incredibly Central to our sense of well-being and mental health and lots of cases and all of that but like bummer it doesn't work that way and you know I go through like this agonizingly long book the first half is like why we have no Free Will and here's the brains and the jeans and you know all of that um and the second half of the book which took took me much longer to write because I still don't really have any good answers to this is oh my God what if people actually started believing this how are we supposed to function if we recognize that there's no free will that agency is a myth oh my God like what's the world supposed to look like and the second half of the book is very feeble attempts at trying to get at that and hopefully in the process like de deconstructing uh people's resistance to the notion that we have uh no free will um the first thing everybody immediately freaks out over everybody's going to just run a muck because there's no responsibility if you feel like there is none and what a lot of science has shown is we're not going to run a muck we may run a muck for the first afternoon we're convinced of that and like interesting research has shown if you like unconsciously Prime people to believe less and Free Will they're more likely to cheat at a game 20 minutes later stuff like that but when you get people who have for a long time believed there's no free will just as when you get people who for a long time have believed there is no God they're exactly as ethical as people who believe there's abundant Free Will and it makes sense to hold us responsible for our actions and just as ethical as people who believe there is a God who is watching and judging all of that and sort of the key commonality is if you've spent a lot of time thinking about this what's the source of meaning what's the source of human goodness or any stuff like that if you spent a lot of time thinking about it in lots of ways it doesn't matter if your conclusion is we have free will or we don't there is a God or there isn't there is a God who cares or any if you've done the hard work of thinking about it you're going to wind up being much more ethical than average that's the F we're not going to run them muck um but then people freak out saying that still still there's going to be some people that run a muck and what you're going to do nothing about them you're just going to let murderers run around on the street because they they're not responsible for their actions and you know that's an asinine worry because we've got some great parallels if if you got a car and the brakes don't work it's not safe it's dangerous you keep it off the streets cuz it's going to hurt people and what you do is if you can't fix it you stick it in a garage and the car can't be driven anymore but that doesn't mean it deserves to be locked up that doesn't mean it's got a crappy Soul or something like that it's a broken machine and protect Society from it yeah I guess the sort of criminal side of this is a really interesting implication right like if there's does does no free will mean that there's no such thing as blame and that punishment and retribution and and Vengeance and stuff are always indefensible right I think a lot of the time what we see when we see bad bad people people that have done bad things um when we see them go to jail there's something kind of righteous that we feel we feel like they were given their just desserts in some regard uh and you need to use it as a um a tool of disc enouragement for other people to do it in future it needs to be a societal signal but we also know that it's only like a bit okay at that there's many people who don't care about whether or not they get caught many many people who almost prefer to be in jail than prefer to be outside people have become so habituated to their existence in there so yeah what does this do to a law system that needs to be able to protect us from people that are going to do bad things if we are not the conscious agents that have caused the actions that we're now being prosecuted for well sort of the the nuanced response I have to that is the entire Dam system is irrational and medieval and has to be completely abolished because it's premised on it's premised on the notion that it is okay to punish people for things over which they had no control and that in passing brings up the the point you just made as to why this is so difficult we like to punish one of the most reliable releasers of dopamine in our brains is get to be righteously punishing of someone uh yeah that's going to be an uphill battle because that feels good when we think like we're doing it for the right reasons but the criminal justice system makes no sense at all even the reformist versions of like you know reconciliation ceremonies and and you know compensatory actions on the part of people who have done harm to better understand their victims and their victims to better understand them all of those are premised on like bleeding heart liberal versions of yeah the system could be a lot less brutal and could work better um the system makes no sense at all because it is predicated on the starting notion of it's a just World in which people are punished for things they had no control over and and that's the only possible logical outcome so this is where people freak out and oh no murderers running around on the streets and all you have to apply is the same Public Health quarantine model that you do with a car whose brakes don't work you keep it in there but that doesn't mean like you Dent the hood viciously every single day to make it a better car afterward it doesn't mean that what does this what does this look like practically like what what does this when it's not a car okay we do one version of this like all the time with a type of human who's dangerous they're dangerous and if you don't keep them like confined um in a way that they can't get access to other people um people are going to be harmed by them and what is this this is when your five-year-old has a cold and you keep them hold from kindergarten because they're going to get the other kids sick from sneezing and we've all all learned that as a quarantine containment strategy and we're all able to protect kindergarteners from Sneezy kids with runny noses and there's no judgment there's no responsibility you don't keep your kid home because they deserve not to be able to see their friends that day you don't say you can't play with your toys because you know the way you're sneezing don't you care about how you're going to harm other people whoa we've managed to do that and we keep kindergarteners safe from nose colds and Society hasn't fallen apart we've subtracted out a notion of responsibility and Society not only functions it functions better because kindergarteners not only don't get sick but you don't tell five-year-olds they've got like the evil demon in there that's making them sneeze or something what about people that would say Robert that sounds an awful lot like jail to me that's what we do we we take the people that have done bad things and we put them in a quarantined building along with people who also have the same bad things for a period of time and then we let them out um no because it's a world of difference from quarantine for one thing what you do with quarantine what your moral imperative is is to figure out exactly what you need to do to keep people safe from this individual and not a smidgen more not an inch more than that because there's no reason to take away your child's toys just because they have a nose cold you you do the absolute minimum that is needed in addition you don't moralize about it this is simply a containment strategy and finally what you do and you get all Society to look at it that way I mean we've gotten to the point where you know a kid who's sneezing we don't view them as a moral blight but yeah don't bring them to kindergarten tomorrow they're GNA get my kid sick and that's going to be a disaster we've subtracted that out of it we've subtracted that out of it in some even more meaningful Realms schizophrenia like one of the all-time horrible diseases it usually gets you in late adolescence early adulthood and for decades and decades and decades like somebody's child falls into schizophrenia and you take them to the doctor and it's the most tragic moment of your life as a parent because the doctor says yes it is that disease and we don't really know how to handle it and you know this is an enormous tragedy and then as the parent you say how did this happen What caused this disease and for about the middle half of the 20th century the best most compassionate psychiatrist on Earth had an answer for you which is you caused it you caused it by your crappy parenting and of course it was always directed at the mother at your quote schizophrenogenic mothering which amid sort of the Freudian build that fueled it on some unconscious level you hate your child you hated your child and it's your fault your fault and I have talked to like support groups of like family members of people with schizophrenia and the first generation of people where they figured out oh no actually it's a neurogenetic disorder of brain developmental abnormalities it had nothing to do with your mothering and these are all women in their 90s now and it is amazing to talk to them about the moment when they truly grasped this isn't my fault I didn't do this so as a society we're able to like take care of kids sneezing and we're able to subtract out fault of mothers when it comes to schizophrenia things like that and we're able to do it in a way where we're not moralizing anymore so you contain the person you quarantine them the absolute minimum needed and not an inch more and you do it without morality and you do the thing that like every good Public Health person knows that their job doesn't end at that point their job is to then figure out how did this happen in the first place why do certain sort of inner city neighborhoods produce criminals why is it that people who live in poverty die of like diseases of Aging when they're 50 years old why go do something about root causes and it's the same exact like moral and paral live imperative Public Health people like dig well so people can get clean water do things so that people don't grow up thinking that it's an infinitely scary world and you have to watch your back all the time and in fact here's a good weapon to use when you want to accomplish that like put those pieces together and yeah it's obviously an utterly transformed world but that's exactly what we're doing with kids who sneeze okay let's make sure the next time I take my 5-year-old to soccer practice that they like put their like warm jacket on afterward so they don't get sick and if they do it's not their fault they're not evil and make sure they don't get anybody else sick at preschool but like don't punish them beyond that and whoa we could run the world that way and we could run the world that way with schizophrenia now and we need to move to the point where we're running it that way with a whole bunch of other stuff because it's the exact same Pro profile and the exact same ways in which we make all sorts of people's lives miserable for no reason and like we've done it before so yay let's go do it again okay so after we've [ __ ] on the righteous retribution that people want for criminals and people that have done bad things from a great height another pillar that people are very very attached to me included is meritocracy it's people being able to be the architects of their own successes and I had Sam Harris on the show about three months ago and this was one of the things that we didn't get to talk about but I kind of wish that I'd brought it up to him and he talked about the myth of the self-made man and he said the myth of the self-made man does so much heavy lifting right of Center it allows people to feel like they are The Architects of their own successes and Alanda Boton from the school of Life gave me this beautiful framing years ago on this great video he did where he said um in ancient Greece the Beggars on the streets the word that was used to describe them was unfortunate that lady Fortuna the Goddess that has the the scales that she hadn't blessed them and that's changed now into the modern world the Gman clature that we use is a loser right a loser is the person that hasn't been able to get themselves up and sort their life out it's been taken from something that was almost bestowed On You by an outside ethereal Force to now something that was completely within your valtion and and totally under your control as a sovereign agent in the world and the implication is if the losers are The Architects of their losses then the winners are The Architects of their successes and this myth of the self-made man all of the rest of it I've made a lot of changes to the way that I exist and the things that I do and in the texture of my mind and I've made a lots of changes over the last six years and it does sound to me quite disempowering and quite disquieting to hear I didn't choose to do any of that all of the effort that I thought that I deployed wasn't mine to choose my capacity to have that effort wasn't mine to choose my desire to and choice to put my foot on the pedal of whatever that effort is wasn't mind to choose in the executive function to piece it all together into a structured ordered organizational framework to do it also wasn't mind to choose or to deploy it makes for quite a sad world as someone that wants to try and become something it sure does which is why this is totally depressing and yet uh this is actually a good thing I mean for starters everything I just said about the criminal justice system just like say opposite words in the same sentences and it applies exactly the same to meritocracy it is just as irrational and just as in need of being like chunked all together because like the other side of this being like a horrible unjust world is that we reward people for things they had no control over and they come out feeling entitled and feeling like they've earned it and so that's got to go also okay so what's the equivalent Panic to oh great so you're just going to have like murderers running around in the streets saying oh great you're just got to have like a randomly selected person taking out your brain tumor no like you got to have like skilled people be neurosurgeons and some people can gain those skills and other people not and like you you need to have competent people doing stuff and just as like you keep dangerous people from Hur hurting people um you keep incompetent people from hurting people as well and like your neurosurgeons will still have to go through a lot of training and all of that um but that means the incentives need to be there right you have to have the incentives in order to be able to justify them going through all of the training and doing the hard things yeah and what we went through was like the usual incentives rep punishment have to be subtracted out because incentives are built around you're a rotten person and you could be cured go talk to the chaplain or whatever and the same thing in the case of the like brain surgeon flip the other way um like the only logical conclusion is thank God they're capable of doing this but they're not a better human because they can do this they don't they're not entitled to have their needs and life considered more than anyone else's so where do incentives come from you know major like oh my God it's like almost Buddhist crap this guy's going on about right now we are motivated by the desire to attain Prestige and power and respect and entitlement and all of that and in the case of like how they were talking about those poor unfortunates not blessed by Lady Luck back there um what we have to take pleasure from is we were one of the lucky ones to feel gratitude for that that has to be a source of like okay cool turns out it looks like I'm one of those people who has the potential to like be able to go save a lot of lives to interject there why should you feel gratitude for something that you had no choice in it happening um because you lucked out you you you're not living on the streets You Led Out I've got the balance sheet in my mind of the degree of pleasure that people have from feeling like they authored their own own successes compared with the degree of pleasure that they have from feeling like they just rolled a double six yeah this is asinine this is like utopian beyond words but like somewhere in there we recognize that like there's a certain amount of irrational attribution of of acclaiming someone when they turn out to be 7 fo4 in tall and they're amazing in the NBA okay that kind of you know that may begin to explain why they're in the NBA and I'm not kind of thing oh yeah that one we've gotten to the point in society that that one has something to do with versions of like your growth hormone receptors and that was not a moral like Triumph to grow tall enough to play in the NBA we can kind of deal with that and you know Society hasn't fallen apart we can subtract out praise for somebody growing to be that height and the world doesn't collapse and it's a much more accurate assessment but what we're getting at here is like this enormous false dichotomy we do in our heads which is like most people don't believe in infinite Free Will and they say yeah there's stuff we have no control over like not everyone gets to be s foot4 not everybody gets to have perfect pitch not everybody gets to have the right glutamate receptor makeup so that they've got an amazing memory and you know there's luck there's the biological attributes that we get gifted with or cursed with and there's that stuff yeah we had no control over but oh what we do with those attributes do we strive do we show tenacity and gumption do we like when the going gets tough do we get going or do we we squander our gifts do we indulge ourselves and Miss opportunity that's the measure of who we are that's this like totally false dichotomy that our attributes are made of biology and like what we do it it is made of fairy dust whether like that tests our souls and like that's like the most seductive thing like how can you not be like I don't know these these seven-footers playing in the NBA and like a while back there was this guy Mugsy Bogue who was 5 foot three inches tall and he played in the NBA because he was like amazing and how could you not be inspired by that and the one out of gazillion kids born into poverty who somehow are now the CEO of something and like there's so damn inspiring and looking at the squandering is like so pleasurably appalling to watch um I saw in Forbes Magazine last year 70% of wealthy families have lost their fortunes by the second generation because they just squander and oh my God who could resist that yeah that's the arena in which we are convinced that like God and Satan are arm wrestling what you do with what you're handed out of here and like if you show self-discipline or not if you have admirable impulse control at a highly stressful moment or if you fail dismally if you any of those things it's made out the exact same stuff as your memory span and whether you're a good Sprinter or not because of the muscle makeup of your thighs and whether it's the same biology it's in my opinion a much more interesting biology and it's got lots to do with that part of the brain the frontal cortex but it's the same stuff and not only if you are like like horribly abused and grow up under like nightmarish adversity not only is your brain going to develop in a way that you probably are not going to have a great digit span among the other consequences you're G to have terrible self-control on the average because your frontal cortex didn't develop properly and everyone looking at you will have this great calvinist sort of notion to apply to you has no self-discipline can never make themselves do that at every juncture they do the wrong thing they do the self-indulgent thing and it's made of the same stuff but yeah again there is kind of this problem that like I I see this all the time you talk to a bunch of people who have come out to hear a lecture about the brain and that sort of thing and yeah yeah they all gulp if you've convinced them in the slightest that Free Will is a is a pretty suspect concept they all Gulp and say okay well we're going to have a whole different view about punishment oh I mean containing dangerous people and Christ before it's over with we're going to have to be like the Scandinavians and whoa this is going to be hard and I got a lot of visceral stuff I'm gonna have to overcome there but if you want to really know what I'm gonna have a hard time with it's oh did I not deserve my good salary did I not earn my college degree because I was one of the ones who always skipped the parties and went and studied to that's where people really begin to panic because that's going to be the much harder one this philosopher Daniel Dennett who's like a leading compatibilist and he's very influential and he's like a Charming speaker and writer and he's he's medieval in how he thinks about Free Will and entitlement and all of that and like this quote of his that winds up in all of his YouTube talks and interviews and stuff where he's going on about how like you know we need to hold on to the concept of Free Will regardless of whether it's true or not I happen to think it's true he says and here are my completely unsupportable scientific opinions about it but nonetheless because we don't want murderers and rapists running around all over the place die and what's gonna happen if we don't feel a sense of accomplishment in our prizes whoa that's what he's actually worried about you know [ __ ] it with the murderers running around what's going to happen if I can't feel this if I earned my PRI this is a Verbatim quote if we can't feel a sense of accomplishments for the prizes we've earned yeah o now we know what the problem really is for all of those people with 10year chairs and philosophy or whatever like that's where the Panic comes in and what I spent like the five years writing this book thinking I was going to wind up with is like the most unpalatable punchline on Earth which is like tough this is how the world works you really didn't earn those things it's all chance it's biological luck it's environmental luck so like you know suck it up and be an adult with this wow that's going to be really a fun message to go out and try to sell people but then you realize this is actually fabulous news the lack of Free Will is incredibly liberating because it one when it comes to this being a world where we reward and punish people for things that they were not responsibly for most of the time we're punishing people most of the time we're telling people who had the crappy luck in life to be born in a village in the Sahel where there's no clean water or had the crappy luck to be born into the wrong poor family or had the crappy luck to not be beautiful and thus for their whole life they have less of a chance to be loved or the crappy luck to have jeans that make them destined for for obesity or any for most people on this planet the news that you were not responsible for how it turned out is the most Humane damn thing you can tell anyone and there's this gigantic self- selection problem which is the people who are going to come and listen to some like nutty lecture are exactly the people who are going to be saying oh my God maybe I didn't earn my college degree the people for whom this is like the liberating message they're sitting there wondering how they're going to pay the rent at the end of the week but they have no idea who Robert sapolsky or determinism is and like frontal cortex because they're they're working three jobs and like for most people on this planet the news that all we are are end products of all the things we had no control over beforehand is the most Humane possible news you can get and a world that adjusts to thinking that way you know it's it's a very good thing that we decided not to take old women with no teeth who live off by themselves on the edge of the Hamlet and decid it's their fault that there was an earthquake and burn them at the stake it's a more Humane planet that we learned something about witches in the biological reality every one of these things is going to make for a more Humane planet and as soon as we figured those things out the world got better for the majority of people so this is actually a good thing like bummer if you were left with this existential void and on top of that like your business school degree is a little bit less source of a sense of entitlement in you but for most people on this planet like a justice system that is the backbone of everything that we do which says that reward and punishment is just because it's being met it out to people who we incorrectly believe earned it all I could do is make the world better so like this is a good thing I sure can't really think that way most of the time because most of the time I'm saying oh my God but what about the fact that like I have a job they pay me I've got like a good salary all of that whoa I sure worked hard for you know nobody is saying this is going to be easy but all that happens at every step when we subtract responsibility out of our perception of where human behavior comes from it becomes a nice your planet yeah it seems to me that taking the Free Will red pill is something that hurts people who have much to be proud of but benefits people who currently have much to be kind of despondent about um it it's it's like a a flattening way it's the ultimate itarian philosophy right it's as flat as flat gets yeah because if you do the impossible and really really think this way all the time and I sure as hell can't but the only logical conclusion from this is none of us are entitled to anything more than any other human on earth there's no person out there whose needs are entitled to less consideration than yours so I I I understand that but from a practical consideration you know if we're talking about the importance of incentives in order to be able to get people who have the predisposition or the capacity to be able to deploy that in the right way presumably we can't just red pill free will into all of the potential budding brain surgeons out there so that they know even though I only get paid the same as the guy who has bottom of the barrel conscientiousness and just smokes weed and does Xbox box all day because he didn't choose that and I didn't choose this it should be my duty to ignore the lack of incentive in this new world with of Ubi or something like Free Will based Universal basic income I I'm guessing that that's not your proposal for like a society structure well good luck with that yeah that's not going to be easy on the other hand we've got a world where from very early on in life we're training kids with cultural myths that are exactly the opposite um I don't know if we put a lot of work into teaching people to just recognize it a sheer utter chance that they wound up being who they are and if you had the good luck uh you know some gratitude would be a good thing okay okay my Christ I'm going to start I'm going to bring Joan bz here in a moment on like her walker or something to talk about the utopian like yeah but we do it in little bits and pieces um you know like there's there's like Hallmark cards you can get and give to somebody that says what what's it thank you for being you like oh come on thank you for you having been the lucky one to have turned out the way you are and happening to like be my spouse or yeah it's going to be really hard and I can function this way less than 1% of the time and I constantly show that like amid believing this stuff I'm a total hypocrite because I can't really act on it emotionally the vast majority but every now and then when it really really really matters like think about it when you're trying to make sense of why it seems okay that this person gets less concerned than people like you do or try to think that way every now and then when you're about to be like pissed off at somebody or self-righteous or whatever or really really think like you should be able to be in the front of the line because after all um I don't know it's interesting you know being a professor at Stanford where the students are great they're all smart and they're great kids and they're like they like uniformly worry about the world and they're wonderful and a huge disproportionate percentage of them came from ridiculous material Andor Andor intellectual privilege and most of them spent a lot of time trying to wrestle with this because they realize you know it's not by chance they wound up there and it was just and that's you know when you dig beneath the surface of those kids who were like going off to help run a free clinic in Nepal or whatever it's not just to get into med school it's on some level they realize where they're at and like go look at a bunch of people in the prison a mile away from Palo Alto and the fact that way are they are way disproportionately likely uh to not have parents who read books to them or like lived in a neighborhood where you could walk home at the end of the day and feel safe and you know that whole song and dance and yeah it's not going to be easy but like at least do it at some juncture where you're feeling like you should be able to get to the front of the line and remember you didn't earn it I sent a 40 minute clip the original 40-minute clip of Sam telling Joe Rogan this on his podcast I think it was maybe eight years ago when it came out and I think about five years ago I sent it I used to work in nightclubs it was funny that you mentioned earlier on about about clubbing um I gave it to I listen to it and explained it on the night at one of our events I explained it to the manager of one of the venues and he was like interested in in philosophy and stuff Luke Irish dude fascinating guy and uh he like oh I'd love I'd love to learn a little bit more about that so I sent him it and he was spiraled into a deep depression for two weeks because I sent him this 40-minute video and he came back two weeks later and he had to take me to one side and he said uh hey I need to have a word with you and I was thinking oh god what have I done now have I let somebody in that's not got the right ID or has one of our boys done something and he was like that uh that Sam Harris video that you sent me it's like uh yeah I didn't get out of bed for like two full weeks because of that I've used up all of my sick days and like at work and all this [ __ ] so can you provide people with some glimmer of a white pill that makes them feel a little bit less despondent about the fact that why shouldn't I just not do anything all of the things because I do think you know even if on mass and over a long enough time span people end up just going back to their sort of habituated routine with a slightly ambient sapolsky in the back of their mind reminding them that it's not the it's not they're not the architect of their own successes it's uncomfortable right to to genuinely try and grapple with this uh it's uncomfortable it's uncomfortable in the same way as realizing that eating Factory farmed animal products is basically like paying sentient creatures to be tortured for your pleasure um and people need a little bit of help to get them across the line do you have any uh Viagra to help them get through this slightly difficult situation well this once again is going to be a pretty lame answer adid amid the absolutism of there's no free will whatsoever all of that like go do something incremental once a week when you realize you're about to judge somebody and harshly like don't or once a week when you're like making you know pounding on the desk of some poor bastard where you're insisting that you had an appointment and you're important and they're delaying you or whatever like do one of those things once a week like at some point like look at somebody very different from you and really try and exercise and they had absolutely nothing to do with how they wound up or you know a little little instead of small Random Acts of Kindness Small random acts of rejecting Free Will and like okay I can't do much better than that but like go do that go do that every now and then I think again I feel like Sam Harris has been here with in the conversation with us I had it when I had him on the show I asked him kind of something similar to do with mindfulness because I've done a lot of meditation in especially over the last 5 years and I mentioned that it it felt like kind of pressing down on the accelerator of a car that it can achieve even good momentum but as soon as you put your take your foot off it the momentum starts to slow and sometimes way quicker than you would like I was asking I I wanted to know whether ultimately I'm going to reach some enlightened Bliss out State man where I just lie under trees man and love life and what I like do I think it's important that what you've sort of come to is if somebody wants to take this particular Free Will red pill and even if the ethical philosophical implications are super Universal and kind of everything gets upended and and and the entire world would be totally different the sort of day-to-day practical instantiation of what you're saying is just think about this a little bit just string these together string these kind of insight moments together every so often or as often as you can or as often as is is is useful and Sam had something similar to do with mindfulness you know he mentioned um he was late for the show he was late getting out of the door and he was rushing and he was rushing and him and his wife were getting ready at the same time and they were going past each other and whatever whatever and then he said before he got out of the door he caught himself and realized that you know he's in this marriage with this woman that he loves and he just took 10 seconds to scoop her up and give her a kiss and then he left and he was like ultimately mindfulness comes down to stringing together as many of those individual instances as you can and I love that I love that as an idea because it seems so much more graspable to me it seems so much more achievable for me to try and do 10 times a day my mind just be where my feet are [ __ ] for once right and then maybe I can do it 20 times a day maybe I can do it 30 times a day maybe some weeks I don't do it at all and then I come back and I try 10 times a day 20 times a day 30 times a day and maybe with the Free Will thing maybe that's the same too maybe it helps us to be less judgmental maybe it helps us to feel less [ __ ] Superior and and and and vengeful and yeah maybe it is maybe this maybe you need to speak to someone and get this as a part of a meditation course so that they can let go of their resentment God no not that anything but that um yeah I I I wish I had Sam's growing capacity for Spiritual Solace and stuff more drugs heavy more drugs you need to take more heavy psychedelics and see if your capacity for free will is uh is maintained through that through no free will of your own obviously yes well my problem is I never did none of that stuff but yeah which there's something oxymoronic in that which is saying oh like this reform undercuts Revolution reform oh let's try to remember this person's circumstance before we lock them away for 50 years instead of 60 years oh reform little incremental stuff that's a there's no free will we need a total Revolution and suggesting here that implementing this revolution in this little baby step incremental reformist kind of way but like yeah why not I mean on a daily basis like if any of this stuff is true it makes as little sense to hate somebody as to like hate a volcano um so every day I try to find the means to not hate Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin or that bastard kid who was incredibly mean to my son once 23 years ago and like okay let's let's work at this you know a little bit at a time I really appreciate your work I really appreciate the way that you put this stuff together I've had an awful lot of fun together it's been a long time coming to get you on the show I'm really glad that I finally did well thanks this was a blast this was really fun where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the things that you're doing oh well this book coming out next month October okay once again call determine the science of life with oh [ __ ] what's it called determined the science of life without Free Will you'd think I'd have that one sorted out by now SP five years writing it and you can't remember the [ __ ] my my my poor publicist just had like apoplexy if listening to this okay determine de sence of life without free will uh penguin Random House in your neighborhood grocer soon all of that you know everything I've ever said or thought in the last five years I've written down and there so like I got nothing else useful to say than that and even that may not be but okay that's that's where you could find it go go help Jeff Bezos get richer it's available there too fantastic Robert thank you for the day sure thank you if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to [Music] subscribe