https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=3Pup-XSH98o
And as soon as you allow for the possibility of like your footprints lasting longer than your lifespan, this is a whole new ball game, either in the form of there’s an afterlife or in the form of I want to leave a planet for my great-great-grandchildren. That’s going to be a more peaceful, wonderful one. Whoa, that’s a whole other world of like what you’re doing now. The footprints you leave after you are going to matter. Hello, everyone watching and listening. Today, I’m speaking with primatologist, neuroendocrinology researcher, and author of multiple books, including the upcoming Determined, a Science of Life Without Free Will, Dr. Robert Sapolsky. We discuss game theory and how it applies to human behavior, the unexpected success of the tit-for-tat negotiating principle, the role of the neurochemical dopamine in reward, reinforcement and the anticipation of the future, and the potentially objective reality of transcendent ethical structures operating within the biological domain. So I was reading Behave in some detail. I’ve read a number of your other books. I’ve followed your career for a long time. I’m very interested in primatology and in neuroscience, so that makes for interesting reading as far as I’m concerned. The thing that really struck me in Behave are the sections on game theory. And I wanted to start talking about game theory because it first of all, the terminology is strange because game theory, I mean, you could hardly imagine something that might sound more trivial than that. I mean, first of all, it’s games. And second of all, it’s theory. But there’s absolutely nothing whatsoever that’s even minimally trivial about game theory. It’s unbelievably important. And I kind of stumbled across it sideways. I was reading work by Jak Panksepp, who did a lot of work with rats. And Panksepp showed that if you paired rats repeatedly together, juvenile males, and you allowed them to play, the little rat who had to invite to play once dominance had been established, he would stop inviting to play if the big rat didn’t let him win 30% of the time in repeated bouts, and I thought, oh my God, that’s so cool because what you see there is something like an emergent morality of play in rats merely as a consequence of the repeated pairing of the same individuals across an indeterminate landscape. And that’s an unbelievably compelling and stunning discovery because it indicates something like the emergence of a spontaneous morality. Now you talk about game theory. Do you want to review for everybody, first of all, what game theory is and then what the major findings of the field are? We can talk about tit for tat and the variations, but please let everybody know what game theory is and why it’s so important. Sure. Maybe, well, just emphasize the point you made right from the start that this is not fun in games. Game theory was mostly the purview of war strategists and diplomats and people planning mutually assured destruction. So this was rather serious stuff. At some point, the biologists got ahold of it, and especially zoologists, and the sort of rationale was like you look at a giraffe and you’re some cardiovascular giraffe person and you do all these calculations about like if you’re going to have a head that’s that far above your heart and you’re going to have this body weight and blah, blah, whatever, you’re going to have to have a heart with its walls that are this thick or this like vascular properties. And then the scientists go and study it. And that’s exactly what you see. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t nature wonderful? Or like you look at desert rats and you do all this theoretical modeling stuff and figure out if they’re going to survive in the desert, their kidneys have to retain water at this unbelievable rate and then people would go and study it. And that’s exactly how the kidneys work. Isn’t that amazing? And it’s not so amazing because like if you’re going to have giraffes shaped like giraffes, the heart has to be that way. There is an intrinsic logic to how it had to evolve. And if you’re going to be a desert rodent, there’s an intrinsic logic to how your kidneys go about living in the desert. And the whole notion of game theory as applied to evolution, animal behavior, human behavior, et cetera, is there’s an intrinsic logic. The logic of our behavior has been as sculpted by evolutionary exigencies as the logic of our hearts, the logic of our kidneys and everything else in there. And by the time it comes to behavior, a lot of it is built around when is the optimal time to do X and when do you do the opposite of X. So you talk about, all right, so let’s review that for a minute. So your point, as I understand it, is that there’s going to be necessary constraints on the physiology of a organism. And those constraints are going to be reflective of its environment and the peculiarities of its morphology. And you can predict that a priori. And then when you match your predictions against observation, at least some of the times they match, there’s an analogy between that and behavior in that you can analyze the context in which behavior occurs and the physiology of the organism. You do that in particular and behave with the, as you map out the nervous system from the hypothalamus upward toward the prefrontal cortex. There’s going to be an interaction between context and physiology that’s necessary. The context of behavior isn’t the mere requiting of primordial and immediate needs. The context of behavior is in part the reciprocal interactions that occur in a very large social space between many individuals, many of whom will interact repeatedly. And there’s something about repeated interactions that’s absolutely crucial. So one of the things you point out, for example, is that, and this was also true of Panksepp’s rat studies, if you just put two rats together once, geez, the big rat might as well just eat the little rat because what the hell, you know, maybe he’s hungry and the little rat can be a meal. And there are circumstances under which that occurs. But if the rats are going to be together in a social environment and they’re also surrounded by relative rats and friend rats, then the landscape of need gratification starts to switch dramatically because you don’t just have the requirement of satisfying the immediate need of the single individual right now. You have the problem of iterated needs across vast spans of time in a complex social environment. And then wonderful jargon for it is the shadow of the future, which right, right, we talk about that, which is wonderful poetic way of, yeah, exactly that notion. Yeah, well, and the future has a shape too, right? Because the farther out you go into the future, the more unpredictable it is, but it doesn’t ever deteriorate exactly to zero predictability. And I know there’s a future discounting literature that’s associated with time preference that also calculates the degree to which people regulate their behavior in the present in accordance with likely future contingencies. One of the things you point out, and this is one of the ways your book is integrated, I believe, is that as you move upward in the hierarchy of the nervous system towards the more recently evolved brain areas, let’s say towards the prefrontal cortex, the more you get the constraint of immediate behavior by future, what would you say, future contingencies, right? And you describe that in behave as difficult. It’s very easy to fall prey to an immediate impulse. Anger is a good example of that, or maybe fear, right? That grips you and forces you to act in the moment, but you want to constrain your impulses, which would be manifestations of brain circuits that are much more evolutionarily ancient. You want to constrain those with increased knowledge of multiple future possibilities in a complex social landscape. And those are also somewhat specific to the circumstance. So the prefrontal cortex also is more programmable because the relationship between the future and the present varies quite substantially with the particularities of the environment. But the fundamental point is that in game theory is that the consequences of your immediate action have to be bounded by the future and by the social context. So I was thinking about something here recently. You tell me what you think about this, because you write a little bit about religious issues in your book too, although not a lot, but some. So I was thinking about this notion that you should love your enemy as yourself, and that you should treat your neighbor as if he’s yourself. I mean, one of those is an extension of the other. And I think there’s actually a technical reason for that. Tell me what you think of this logic. So the first question might be, what is yourself, the self you’re trying to protect? And one answer to that is it’s what you want right now and what would protect you right now. But another answer is, yeah, fair enough, you know, now matters, but there’s going to be you tomorrow and you next week and you in a month and you in a year and five years. And what that implies is that you yourself are a community that stretches across time. And as that community, you’re also going to be very varied in your manifestation. Sometimes you’re going to be like top lobster and dominant as hell. And sometimes you’re going to be sick and in the hospital. And there’s going to be a lot of variation in who you are across time. And so if you’re treating yourself properly in the highest sense, you’re going to treat yourself as that community that extends across time. And then I would say there’s actually no difference technically, and maybe this is a game theory proposition, there’s no difference between that technically and treating other people well. Is that you’re a community across time, just like the community is a community and the ethical obligation to yourself as an extended creature is identical with the obligation that you have all things considered to other people. So I’m wondering what you think about that proposition, if that makes sense to you, if you think there might be exceptions to that. That makes perfect sense, because that immediately dumps you into the, are there any real altruists out there, scratching altruists and a narcissist bleed sort of thing, that anything within the realm of self-constraints and forward-looking pro-sociality and all of that, what’s somewhere in there is running in between the lines is the golden rule. And in the long run, this will be better if I do this. And what defines species is, you know, two lobsters can do game theory dominance displays, but we are the species that is dominated by the concept of in the long run, with luck, or the more frontally regulated among us. But that’s absolutely the heart of it. And which has always struck me, it’s very easy to dump on utilitarian thinking. Because it’s always easy to say, oh my God, so would you push your grandmother in front of the runaway trolley and it just feels wrong? And would you convict an innocent person if that’s going to make society better in all of those scenarios where utilitarian thinking just sticks in your throat, it just doesn’t feel right? And where the resolution always is, is utilitarian thinking in the long run. If it’s okay to do this, what are we going to decide is okay to do tomorrow? And what slope are we going to be heading down? And it requires a sort of deep, distal, not just proximal, utilitarian mindset. And when you work in shadow of the future and in the long run, suddenly, what winds up being the easiest possible solution of maximizing everyone’s good looks a whole lot more palatable. Yeah, well, those strange questions that come up when people pick these contexts where utilitarian thinking seems to involve a paradox. I mean, those are paradoxes of duty and they do come up, but all that indicates, and I think this is what you’re pointing out, all that indicates is that there are often conflicts between what seems morally appropriate immediately and what seems morally appropriate when it’s iterated. And sometimes those conflicts are going to be intense. And of course, those are the ones that we have a very difficult time calculating, and no wonder. But I would also say those are also the times when intense negotiation is necessary. If you and I are in a situation where my immediate good and our long-term good are in conflict, then I better talk to you a bunch to find out what at least, you know, what the most livable solution is, even if we can’t do it perfectly. And the fact that there’s going to be conflicts doesn’t invalidate the general necessity of having to consider iteration. You talk a lot in the book about tit for tat. And so why do you outline that for people too, because lots of people listening, again, this is one of these things that just sounds, it sounds trivial when you first encounter it, especially the computer simulations, but it’s absolutely, it’s of stunning importance once again. So do you want to outline the science behind these iterative game competitions and the fact that tit for tat emerged as a solution and then the variations around that too? Let’s get into those. Well, first off, just to sort of build on one of your points there that repeated rounds, repeated rounds, repeated rounds of an unpredictable number. If you’re going to have interaction with someone, do you stab them in the back or do you cooperate? And your starting point is you’re never going to see this person again. And they have no means of telling anyone else on earth if you were a jerk or whatever. The only real politic thing that anyone could ever do is don’t cooperate, stab them in the back. If you have only one round that you’re going to interact with and then you get this horrible regressive thing that if you’re going to interact with them for two rounds, what’s the logical thing to do on the second round? Stab them in the back. So you’ve already defaulted into knowing that the second round is going to be non-cooperation. So what do you do in the first round? You already know the second round is a given, so you might as well stab them in the back on the first one. And if there’s three rounds, you go backwards and at every one of those points, if you’re hyper rational, no matter how many rounds ahead of you there are, if you know how many there are going to be, the only like uber spocky and logical thing to do is to never ever cooperate. Where the breakthrough comes in is when you don’t know how many rounds there are in the future. And that’s where you get selection for cooperation. That’s where you see a world of differences in social species who are migratory versus ones who are not. If I do something nice for this guy, is he going to be around next Tuesday to help me out? Not if he’s like a Syrian golden hamster. He’s migratory. He’s going to be gone. On the other hand, if he’s a human living in a secondary settlement, yeah, maybe if I could trust him or not. So yeah, key point of an unknown number of rounds in the future, because you never know, putting it most cynically, how much of a chance they’re going to have in the future to get back at you if you were a jerk right now in the present. So that emphasis on unknown number of rounds, what you allude to is like the poster child, the fruit fly of people who do game theory studies, the prisoner’s dilemma, where essentially there’s a whole story that goes with it, but you have to decide, are you going to cooperate with someone or are you going to stab them in the back? And the way it works is if you both cooperate, you both get a decent reward. If you both stab each other in the back, you both get punished to a certain extent. But if you manage to get them to cooperate with you, but you stab them in the back, they get a tremendous loss and you get a huge number of brownie points. And conversely, if they’ve suckered you into being cooperative and then they stabbed you in the back, you’re way beyond. So this whole world of when do you cooperate and when do you do anything other than that, always within this realm of multiple rounds, but unknown number. So this guy, Robert Axelrod, who’s like this senior major figure in sort of political science, teamed up with this evolutionary biologist, W.D. Hamilton, one of the gods in that field. And they said, well, let’s talk to a whole bunch of our friends, a whole bunch of our friends who think seriously about this stuff and tell them about the prisoner’s dilemma and have each one of them tell us what would their strategy be when playing the prisoner’s dilemma? How would you do an unknown number of rounds and maximize your wins at the end? And they asked Nobel Peace Prize winners and Mother Teresa and prize fighters and warlords and mathematicians. And they collected just a zillion people’s different strategies. And then they ran this round robin tournament on this ancient 1970s computer of just running each strategy against all the other ones, a gazillion rounds to see which one worked best, which one won, or in the terms that evolutionary biologists quickly started using, which strategy drove all the others into extinction. And the thing that flattened everybody was you had these people putting in these algorithms and probabilities and fuzzy logic and God knows what. And the one that beat all the others was the simplest one out there, tit for tat. You start off by cooperating. If the other guy is a jerk at some point and stabs you in the back, the next round, you tit for tat him back. You stab him back. If he goes back to cooperating, then you go back to cooperating. You forgive him. If he keeps on being a jerk, you keep on being a jerk. And even though what you see is by the person being a jerk, they’re always one round ahead of you. And that seems pretty disadvantageous. You’re always going to be one step behind the individual stab you in the back. When you get two jerky cheaters together, all they do is constantly stab each other in the back and they get the worst possible outcome. And what you see with something like that is with tit for tat, if you’re a nice cooperative guy and start off with that assumption, you lose the battles with the jerks, but you win the wars. Cooperators find each other. And this strategy out competed everyone and everyone couldn’t believe it because of how simplistic it was. And that was exactly, it was straightforward. It was easy to understand. Its starting point was one of cooperation, giving somebody the benefit of the doubt from the start. It was nonetheless not a sucker. It was punitive, who was capable of retribution. And if the other player who had sinned against them corrected their ways, it was forgiving. And it was a simple, and this out competed all of the other ones. And what everyone sort of in the zoology world went about saying at that point is, oh my God, do animals go about tit for tat strategies when they’re in competitive circumstances where they’ve got to decide, am I going to cooperate or am I going to cheat? And that sort of thing. Has evolution sculpted optimal competitive cooperative behavior in all sorts of species to solve the prisoner’s dilemma problem? And people went and looked and it turned out like, what do you know? Evolution had sculpted exactly that in all sorts of species. Like phenomenal, interesting findings where if you experimentally manipulate one animal to make it look like they’re not reciprocating in something that somebody else just did for them and everybody punishes them one round afterward and they go back to cooperating again and everyone forgives them. That’s tit for tat. All sorts of species out there we’re doing tit for tat. Fabulous example of this. I am forgetting his name, Wilkinson studies bats. Some bats species, they do communal nesting stuff. All the female bats have all their nests together and they’re communal in this literal sense. They’re vampire bats, which means they fly out at night and they like get blood from some cow or some victim or whatever. And they’re not actually drinking the blood. They’re storing it in their throat sacks and they come back to their nest and what they do is they disgorge the blood then to feed their babies. And the hugely cooperative cool thing about the species is it’s cooperative feeding, not just among like sisters, but through the everybody feeds each other’s kids. That’s great. So they’ve got this whole collaborative system and it buffers you against one animal’s failure to find food one night and like everyone scratches each other’s back and it works wonderfully. Now make the bats think that one of them is cheating. One of them has violated feeding all each other’s kids social contract. When the bat comes out of the cave or whatever, you like net it and get a hold of the bat and you pump up the throat sack with air and you put her back there in the nest and she doesn’t have any blood, but everybody’s looking at her saying, Oh my God, look at how big her throat sack is. Look at all the blood she has and she’s not feeding my kid. She’s reneging on our social contract here and the next round, nobody feeds her kids for one round. Oh my God, has evolved the optimal prisoners dilemma strategy of tit for tat. This was like phenomenal. What people then began to see was out in the real world straight tit for tat is not quite enough. Let’s suppose you get a signal error and this is straight out of, I don’t know, we’re roughly the same age. I don’t know if you grew up reading all those like cold war terrifying novels. There’s a glitch. Oh yeah. What was it fail safe or something? We’re going to drop an atomic bomb on Moscow by accident and the only way to prove to them it was an accident, they get to drop one on New York and tit for tat and all of that. And what that introduced was the possibility of a signal error. You’re cooperating, but there’s a glitch in the system and the other individual believes you just stabbed them in the back. According to a recent report, Planned Parenthood continues to rake in billions despite dwindling clients. The biggest takeaway here is that Planned Parenthood is generating vast profits, including millions in taxpayer funding. With the help of preborn, you and me, we are stealing their clientele, meaning the babies they are trying to kill. Preborn operates on a very slim budget as they rescue over 200 babies lives every day and they receive no government funding. Preborn’s network of clinics are situated in the darkest corners, competing head to head with the abortion giants. They need our help now more than ever. When you donate 100, but they can reject the offer if they don’t believe it’s fair. You play those cross culturally and the typical offer is $50, right? It’s about 50-50. But you know, I’ve wondered too, if the best offer isn’t 60, especially if you’re doing it in front of a crowd, because if you imagine you err, and the best graduate supervisors do this, by the way, if you err continuously slightly on the side of generosity, then my suspicions are is the accruing long term reciprocal reward of that would pay off better than just a 50-50 arrangement, right? And you could maybe see that with your, yeah, yeah, exactly that. Well, I think you see that with your wife too, right? Is maybe you want to treat the people around you slightly better on average than they treat you because that way you’re you’re doing this, you’re making the whole pie expand and including your own reputation. Then you get some interesting cultural stuff comes in because they’ve done all sorts of cross-cultural studies of like ultimatum game play and, and all of that and see tremendous cultural differences in whether 50-50, 50-1, 40, 90-10. Then you see there’s a handful of cultures out there where you get punishment of generosity. Somebody makes this viewed as an overly generous offer and you punish them for it. Oh my God, what is that about? And that’s this like pathological sort of retribution sort of thing. You’re punishing them because if they get away with being generous like that, people are going to start expecting you to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see that in families that are pathological all the time. If someone makes a positive gesture, they’ll get punished to death because of what that implies for the potential future behavior of all the other miscreants. And what are those cultures like some of the ones where like God help you if you wind up being part of one of those ex-eastern block countries have the high rates of this paradoxical punishment for generosity. Oh, this guy’s just going to make us look good. And then everybody’s, whoa, that is a troubled society. Well, that’s a vision of hell. That’s for sure where you’re punished for, that’s what Nietzsche said about punishment. It’s such a brilliant line. He said, and it was, look, if you’re punished for breaking a rule, there’s actually a form of relief in that because when you’re punished for breaking a rule, that validates the entire rule system. And that’s what used to predict the world. So there’s a relief in being justly punished. So what Nietzsche pointed out was if you really want to punish someone, you wait till they do something virtuous and they punish them for that. And that’s a good definition of hell. Hell is the place where people are punished for doing what’s truly virtuous. Yeah. And like you said, you don’t want to be in a society like that. Maybe that’s not as bad as it gets because things could get pretty bad, but it’s pretty bad. Well, that’s a pretty good predictor of societies with incredible rates of child bullying and spousal abuse and substance abuse and social capital that’s gone down the drain. And that’s what those cultures are like. Yeah, that’s a pretty bad world in which generosity is explicitly and enthusiastically punished by the crowd of Yahoo peasants who arrive to get to the forks at that point. Yeah, you know, one of the things that I’ve talked to my clinical clients about and my family members too, and a little bit more broadly lecturing, maybe it has to do with this initiation of an expanding and abundant tit for tat reciprocity is that if you’re really alert in your local environment, you can see people around you playing with the edge of additional generosity. So people will make these little offerings, that’s a good way of thinking about it, where they just go out of their way a little bit in a sort of secretive manner, you know, they’ll sort of sneak it. It’s like a student who writes you an essay and dares to sneak in one original thought just to see what the hell happens, you know, but if you jump on that and you notice and you reward people for staying on that edge where they’re being a little more generous and productive than they usually are, you can encourage people around you to be just doing that like mad. And they like you a lot for it too, because actually people are extremely happy when they’re noticed for doing something that puts them on the edge of that generous expansiveness and then rewarded for it. So even if you’re not in a society that punishes that, you can actually act as an individual to differentially reward it. That’s what a good mentor does. And it’s always a cost benefit analysis of how much am I willing to incrementally risk to start reaching things even further. That’s exactly it. One of the most fascinating wrinkles in terms of like accounting for like the world’s miseries and stuff is when you think about like dopamine, what are the things we anticipate? Well, if you’re a baboon, and I spent like 33 years of my life studying baboons and while during summers, if you’re a baboon, your world of pleasures and anticipation are pretty narrow. Like you get something to eat that you want, you get to mate with someone that you want, or you’re in a bad mood and there’s somebody smaller and weaker who you could like take out on with impunity. Like that’s basically the realm of pleasures for a baboon. And then you get to us and we have all that, but we also have like liking sonnets and we also have taking cocaine and we also have solving Fermat’s Last Theorem and we also have, you know, we’ve got this ridiculously wide range of pleasures. Like we’re the species that can both secrete dopamine in response to cocaine or winning the lottery or multiple orgasms and also secrete dopamine in response to smelling the first great flower in spring. And it’s the same dopamine neurons in all those cases. And what that means is we have to have a dopamine system that can reset incredibly quickly. Because some of the time going from zero to 10 on the dial is you’ve just gone from no nice flower smell to nice flower smell. And some of the time going from zero to 10 is you’ve just like conquered your enemies and gone over the ounce with your elephants or something and this is fabulous. We have to constantly be able to reset the gain on our dopamine system. Well, you point to something else there that’s really cool too is that, so now you could imagine a garden that has fruit in it and then you could imagine a garden that could even have more fruit in it, but then you could imagine refining your taste so that you can now learn to take pleasure in things that wouldn’t have given you pleasure before. That’s what artists do, eh? Is they offer people a differentiated taste. So, you know, if you think of a landscape painting, it’s like there are certain visual scenes now that we regard as canonically beautiful, but it’s virtually certain. I mean, I know there’s an evolutionary basis to that to some degree, but it’s virtually certain that our taste for beauty is at least in part informed by the brilliant geniuses of the past who were able to differentiate the world more and more carefully and say, look, here’s actually a new source of reward, right? People do that when they invent a new musical genre or a new form of dance, is right? So not only can we multiply the rewards indefinitely if we’re pursuing the proper pathway, but we can differentiate the landscape of potential rewards, I would say virtually indefinitely. Now that would be part of that prefrontal flexibility that can modify our underlying limbic responses too, even though we’re, you know, running down the same dopaminergic trackways, let’s say that the poor baboons run down. Which is totally cool and so human and all, but has like this massive tragic implication, which is the only way you could use the same dopamine neurons and same dopamine range from zero to maxing out for like both haikus and like, if the system resets, it’s got to keep resetting as to what the scale is, what the gain is on the system. What that means is it constantly resets, it constantly habituates. And what that means is like the most tragic thing about the human predicament, whatever was a great unexpected reward yesterday is going to feel like what you’re entitled to today and is going to feel insufficient tomorrow. So Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground, he wrote one of the world’s most compelling critiques of what would you call it, satiating utopianism. So Dostoevsky said essentially, if you gave people everything they wanted, nothing to do but eat cakes, lie around in pools of warm water and busy themselves with the continuation of the species. So sort of ideal baboon life, that people would purposefully, eventually, purposefully rise up and just smash all that to hell just so something interesting would happen because that’s the sort of crazy creatures we are. But you know, you said that’s a tragedy and you can understand that, right? Because it means that today’s satiation is tomorrow’s unhappiness. But by the same token, it’s also the enabling precondition for the impetus to discover new landscapes of reward and new forms of reward, right? Because if you didn’t habituate to what you already had, you’d, well, I think you’d fall into a kind of infantile satiation and maybe you just fall asleep, right? Because if you’re completely, this is the difference between satiation and incentive reward. If you’re satiated, then you just fall asleep. Consciousness isn’t for satiation. Consciousness is for expansion. Something like expansive exploration. If we didn’t habituate to reward, we would just satiate and then we wouldn’t need to be conscious. It’s something like that. I mean, this is a huge, like half full, half empty thing. We’re the species that’s always hungry because yesterday’s excitement is not enough tomorrow and that means it’s never going to be enough. And we’re the species that yearns in that way and is never satisfied. And thus, among other things, we’re the species that then invents, you know, technology and poetry and then the motor and wheels and fire and everything. Yeah. It’s like, it’s this double-leg. So, I’m going to go back to this Abrahamic story because it’s very interesting in this regard, right? We talked about it already in relationship to the possibility of a particular ethos coming to dominate an evolutionary landscape, but something very interesting happens at the beginning of the Abrahamic story. And Abraham is the father of nations. So, this is a good classic narrative example. So, Abraham is actually fully satiated at the beginning of that story because he’s like 75 and he has rich parents and all he’s done his whole life is like laying the hammock and eat peeled grapes. And like he has everything he needs, absolutely everything. And then this voice comes to him and says, this isn’t what you’re built for. You should get the hell out there in the world, right? And Abraham hearkens to that voice, so to speak. He leaves his satiated surrounding and he goes out into the world. And actually what happens is quite catastrophic. It’s certainly not, it’s not a simple comedy, the story, because he encounters war and famine and Egyptian tyranny and the aristocrats conspire to steal his wife and he has to, he’s called upon by God to sacrifice his only son. It’s like, it’s quite the bloody catastrophe. But the idea in the story is that the path of maximal adventure is better than the path of infantile satiation. And so you might say human beings are eternally dissatisfied. I mean, that’s one way of looking at it. Or you could say, well, there’s an abstract form of meta-satiation, let’s put it that way, that’s the same as being on, it’s like a bloodhound being on the trail. It’s the pleasure of the hunt. It’s the pleasure of the adventure. It’s the pleasure of that forward seeking. Right? And I like to think about it like Sisyphus, you know, except that what Sisyphus is doing is pushing a sequence of ever larger boulders up a sequence of ever higher mountains. It’s not the same, it’s, you know, it’s this continual movement upward towards some unspecified positive goal. And then the ultimate satiation isn’t the top of any of those mountains. It’s the sequential journey across that sequence of peaks. And I suspect that’s what that dopamine system is actually signaling when it’s, that would make sense with regards to anticipation. It’s the happiness of pursuit. Rather than the other way around. And that’s incredibly addictive in that regard. You know, you can’t get rats in a normative social environment addicted to cocaine. You have to put them in a, you have to isolate them in a cage. So if you have a rat that’s going about his rat business, you know, he’s got his rat friends and his rat family and his rat adventures, he won’t succumb to cocaine like an isolated rat in a cage. So one of the things that’s also worth contemplating, and this is relevant to your last book and maybe your next one is that, because you’re looking for a solution to something like the human propensity for violence, you know, you might say, well, if we’re not on the true adventure of our life, which would be signaled by optimal dopaminergic function, let’s say, then we’re going to look for all sorts of false adventures. And some of those false adventures are going to be addictive. And some of them are going to be downright pathological. You know, you talked about the baboons who take pleasure in pounding the hell out of this, you know, the weak guy that’s sitting beside him. It’s like, if you’re not on the track with your nose to the ground, optimizing the firing of those exploratory and playful dopaminergic circuits, you’re going to be searching everywhere for a false adventure. And that can come in all sorts of pathological forms. And often, like one of the falsest ones is getting what you were yearning for. Yeah, right. In terms of that. Why do you say that? Why do you say that? Why did that come to mind? Because, like, may you live in interesting times. Right. One of the greatest curses you can place on someone is to give them precisely what they’ve always thought they wanted. And things get a little more nuanced than that. And there, I love Borja’s stories, his one, the immortals work off going through this traveler journey, going through the deserts and the jungles and all of that, searching for this mythic tribe of immortals. And he eventually finds them because they found this river that you drink from it and you’re immortal. And they’ve been immortal. And how cool is that? And they’re perpetually on the move, because what they’re doing is they’re now looking for the fable river that will give them mortality. Immortality turned out to be a total drag. And they’re going out of their minds with how pointless this all is. So this is their new quest, because it turns out what they wanted wasn’t quite what they really wanted. Well, you know, there’s an old Jewish story about God. It’s a code. It’s like a Zen cone, except it was the ancient Jews that came up with it. What does the God who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent lack? And the answer is limitation. And so one of the corollaries of that is God and man are in a sense twins, is that the absolute lacks limitation. And so for there to be totality, the absolute has to be paired with limitation. And that’s because limitation has advantages. It’s very paradoxical that limitation has advantages, that totality lacks. And you can see that even in the creativity literature, because the creativity literature shows quite clearly that creativity is enhanced by the placing of arbitrary limitations. Like there’s an archive online. This is very funny. There’s an archive online of haiku that donated, devoted to nothing but the luncheon meat spam. There’s like 50,000 haikus written about spam. I think of course MIT engineers set this up because of course they would. But it’s such a comical example because it shows you that paradoxically when you impose limitations, and that might even include the limitations of mortality, that you produce a plethora of creative consequences emerging out of that. And it isn’t obvious, and this is what you were pointing to, it isn’t obvious that if you transcended that, absolutely that you would be better rather than worse off. I mean, it’s a tricky question because we’re always looking to be healthier and to live longer and no wonder. But there is something to be said for limitation and the fact that you have to transcend that in an adventurous manner, right? It gives you, maybe life is the game that a particularly daring God would play, you know, because it has an infinite cost. That’s death. And God only knows what that enables. At the same time, it constrains. I mean, so what’s it like working with baboons, sir? I mean, they seem like a particularly dismal primate species. So what’s it been like spending the time out there in the baking sun, washing these like pretty brutal animals go at each other for 30 years? They’re perfect. They’re perfect for what I study. My sort of roots as a scientist was as a stress physiologist and kind of understand what stress does to the brain. Not good things, but distress due to vulnerability and mental illness, not good things. What distress to your body, all sorts of stuff. What does it depends on who you are in your society and social rank and all of that. So in my lab, I spent forever studying the effects of stress on molecular biology of neuron death and all that. But out in the field, it was, okay, trying to make sense of these baboons. Who’s got the rotten blood pressure? Who’s got the bad cholesterol levels? Who’s got the immune system that isn’t working here? What does it have to do with their rank and patterns of social stress and patterns of affiliation and basically health psychology on baboons? And why them, they were the perfect species to study because they’re out in the Serengeti, which was my field site, which is an amazing ecosystem. Like if you were a baboon, you live in these 50 to 100 animals who are so out in the savannah, nobody messes with them. Once a year, a lion picks off someone. Most of the time you can’t touch them with that. Infant mortality is lower than among the neighboring humans. And you only spend three, four hours a day doing your day’s foraging. And what that means is you’ve got like eight, nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress for everybody else. They’re exactly like us. None of us get ulcers because we’re fighting for canned food items and bombed out supermarkets. We have this luxury of generating psychosocial stress because we’re westernized privileged humans. And baboons are one of the only other models out there because they’ve got nine hours of free time every day. And if you’re a baboon and you’re miserable, it’s because another baboon has worked very intentionally to bring that about. They’re all about psychosocial stress. They’re like bloody in tooth and claw. It has nothing to do with them. It’s all their chest, like awful to each other. They’re perfect models for westernized psychosocial stress. So they’re not nice guys. Like I did not grow to love a whole lot of them over the decades, but wow, they’re Machiavellian backstabbing and all their highest calling in life is to make some other baboon miserable. Right, right. So communal psychopaths. So you did point out in your book that you studied a baboon troop where because of a historical accident, there was a plethora of females. And then that took a lot of the competition stress away from the males and they actually started to become more civilized. And so I have two questions about that. It’s like, why did the baboons take the psychopathic prick route on the evolutionary highway? And what does the fact that that even what does the fact that that’s modifiable? It’s quite strange really, you know, that it’s modifiable. What does that have to say? Let’s say about free choice in the baboon world about whether or not it’s necessary to organize your whole society on on the grounds of, you know, tit for tat psychopathy. It tells you it takes some pretty special unique circumstances to jumpstart all the barriers to cooperation. Right, right. Okay, you can have one person who’s willing to gamble in incipit of vulnerability to see if somebody reciprocates, or you can have a founder effect of an inbred cooperating group, or you can have, you know, a whole bunch of ways of jumpstarting it. But then you get a totally quirky, unpredictable event, which was the thing that happened with my baboon troop. This was a troop my wife and I studied for years, and they had an ecological unprecedented disaster thing that happened at one point, there was an outbreak of tuberculosis. And not among my baboons, but among the neighboring baboons, one one troop over a troop that was living off of the garbage dump at a tourist lodge. And which is where the tubercular it was tubercula meat, anything that was launched, and tuberculosis, you know, it takes Thomas Mann would have enough time to write hundreds of pages of a novel before TB kills somebody TB kills a nonhuman primate in a couple of weeks. It’s like it’s a wildfire in terms of how destructive it is. So you had this neighboring troop that had, you know, pig heaven, they had this garbage dump from a tourist lodge and every day a tractor came and dumped all the like leftover desserts and stuff from the tourist dinners and banquets. So they were living off of that. I actually did some studies on that troop and showed they got the starts in metabolic syndrome, they got elevated triclosal bias, they got borderline diabetes, like, yeah, like us the same, but they had better infant survival. The same pluses and minuses of like a westernized overly indulgent diet. But they had the greatest spot on earth. And every morning, a subset of my guys would go over there to try to get the food would go over there and have to fight their way in, in this like twice as many resident males there who were pissed at who’s this outsider coming in here. These were only the most aggressive nails in my troop who were willing to go and spend their mornings trying to fight for the garbage next door. In addition, in the morning is when baboons do most of their like affiliative socializing sitting there grooming each other. These are guys who not only were willing to fight for food, but it was a much higher priority to them than sitting around grooming somebody and being nice. Right, right, right. So they were the most aggressive. So they’re the ones who wound up getting killed by the TB. It wiped out about half the males and it wasn’t the high ranking 50%. It was the most aggressive, jerky, least socialized 50%, which some of them were high ranking, but some of them were like hyper androgenic, jerky adolescent males who were like sending all day starting fights they couldn’t finish. It wasn’t just a rank thing. You didn’t lose the dominant 50%. You lost the 50% with the aggressive, unsocialized personalities. And that left like a completely different cohort of males. It left you twice as many females as males for one thing, which you don’t normally see in a baboon troop. So all these females who suddenly had a whole lot to gain from not having male baboons be the jerky, displacing aggression that characterizes them where they’re in a bad mood. And if you’re a smaller female, watch out. But most of all, the guys who were left were nice guys. They were socially affiliable. They didn’t take it out on someone smaller. They still competed for rank, but they weren’t displacing aggression on innocent bystanders that anywhere near the rate. And this brought in an entire new culture into the troop, which was great and totally amazing. And isn’t that cool? And what was also cool was stress hormone levels, which is what I was able to study. These guys were way down in them and their immune systems were working better. Yay, baboon utopia, all of that. So at that point, like sort of reality intergained. I couldn’t look at that troop for about a decade. I was finally able to get back to the troop. And it was the same culture, the same wonderful culture. Wow. Wow. Not every one of those. Well, so that’s another example in principle of how cooperation could initiate, right? Is that you could have a circumstance at one point where the real pricks get wiped out for somewhat random reasons, and then you get a cooperation between the two groups. And then you get a cooperative community starting. I’ve also read, and I don’t remember who wrote about this, who suggested that over time, human beings, we really domesticated ourselves by using third party enforcers to wipe out most of the psychopathic males. And that also might have been a contributor to the initiation of something like a cooperative tit for tat, reciprocating community. Exactly. And long before that, we figured out that you pay third party enforcers by hiring them as police or something, third party enforcers gain prestige and trust. That’s the payoff for it. But the thing that was most remarkable there is baboons, male baboons grow up obviously in their own troop and around puberty, they get totally itchy and they get ants in the pants and they pick up and they get ants in the pants and they pick up and they transfer to their adult troop, which could be next door, could be 60 miles away. They wind up being this like snively little parasite little kid who shows up at five years of working their way up the ranks and all of that. And so it’s this transfer business. A decade later, when going back to look at this troop, all of the males who were there at the time with the TB outbreak and survived it because of their personality, they had long since died. All of the adult males were ones who had joined the troop since then as adolescents. They had joined in and they were still civilized. They had learned we don’t do stuff here like that. Wow, that’s amazing. That’s really amazing. Cultural transmission and what became like so damn interesting to look at is how were they doing it? How were they transmitting this culture? And the best we were able to figure out, it wasn’t observational. It wasn’t that like these new horrible kids show up and they just watch all these other like male baboons being nice because there’s zero evidence for observational learning of any sort of cultural transmission and stuff like that. Whoever discovers that is going to be the like the king of non-human culture stuff. So it wasn’t that. So then you wonder if there’s self-selection. Like it’s only the nice guys who transfer into that troop. The males typically they spend a few months, they check out this troop, they check out that one. Maybe it was self-selected. I always thought this the, well, who would choose to go to read college model? Right. It’s the hippie. It’s the hippie baboons. Yeah. But as it turned out, when these new guys joined the troop, they were just as aggressive and displacing of like adolescents as adolescents showing up in any other troop. They were, it was not self-selection. And what it was, was males. Males, adult males were not dumping on females anywhere near as much as in the normal troop. As a result, females were much less stressed and their hormone levels showed this. As a result, females were much more willing to chance a pro-social interaction, reaching out to someone than they would have been in a normal troop because the odds were better. And what you saw was in a typical troop, it would be 70 to 80 days before one of these new transfer males would be groomed by a female. In this troop. Is that equivalent to offering a fruit? Yes. And in this troop instead, it was in the first week. Females were much more relaxed and were willing to take a chance. And what you saw was like in a world in which like females were grooming you and big adult males weren’t dumping on you. And you could sit under like olive trees and all of that over the course of the first six months after the transfer, these guys dropped the aggressiveness. It was not an inevitable state in them. It was a default. They defaulted. They were not stressed and dumped on because the females weren’t stressed and dumped on because the resident adult males were nicer guys. This trickled down, decrease of stress and they would default and six months into it, they were like one of the regular old like commune hippies there. It was transmission. That’s insanely cool. That’s an insanely cool story. And so positive and optimistic. It’s amazing that, you know, given the multi-generational proclivity, let’s say of the baboon tribes to be relatively psychopathic, it’s amazing that there’s that much behavioral variation left in this species to be transformed that rapidly. That’s a single generation, essentially. I mean, you get a bit more than one generation there, but that’s transformation within a single generation. It’s amazing. Anyone who says like humans don’t have that much cultural malleability hidden in them, what, baboons are more sophisticated in their potential variety of social systems? Anyone who says like humans are not capable of having a radical transformation, blah, blah, like if baboons can do it. And they were literally, I studied at college with this guy, Irv DeVore. I think you overlapped with him when you were at Harvard, who was like the king of baboon field biology. And I’ve been writing fan letters to him from the time I was 12 or so. I went to study with him and he was the person who literally wrote the textbook about baboons and made them the textbook example of the inevitability of stratified male dominated societies with high degree of protection. And like, ridiculously inevitability because they go out and hunt inevitably aggressive… Yeah, patriarchy, evil patriarchy. Exactly. Dawn of man, territorial 1960s, Robert Ardrey stuff. And like baboons were the textbook example and in one generation it could be transformed. That’s amazing. The thing is, what does in that culture, were their vulnerabilities built into it? Right, right, right. Like are they as good at defending themselves against lions, for example? Probably though, you know, they probably are. I doubt if it’s that simple. It’s that you get rid of the aggressive guys and the, you know, the hyper aggressive guys, because they’re not exactly heroic aggressive defenders. They’re more like impulsive psychopaths. So I doubt very much that that would constitute a downside. We have to stop. We’re 106 minutes in. I don’t want to stop because I didn’t get to talk to you about stress, which I really did want to talk to you about. And we just barely touched on your field work. And so maybe we would have a chance to continue this discussion because there’s lots of other avenues we could walk down, especially on the stress front, because there’s like, there’s, and there’s more on the dopamine front too. I talked to Carl Friston about the fact, for example, that dopamine also signals incremental progress towards a valid goal and reduction in entropy. So positive emotion signals reduction in entropy and negative emotion signals, signals increase. And that’s like, you can talk about that for like five decades. And so I would love to talk to you again. I am going to talk to Dr. Sapolsky for another half an hour. For those of you who are watching on the YouTube side, we usually delve into more autobiographical issues. So I’m very curious to know, for example, how the hell he ended up on the Serengeti surrounded by baboons. You know, he must’ve done something terrible in a previous life. That’s my theory. So we’ll find out about that when we switch over to the Daily Wire Plus side. Thank you to the film crew here in Florence for facilitating this conversation and to the Daily Wire Plus folks for making this possible. And thank you very much. I’ve been trying to get you on this podcast for a long time. I’m a great admirer of your work. I learned all sorts of things from you over the years that have been extremely useful to me. So it’s a pleasure to talk to you and, and to everyone watching and listening. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you, sir. Huge pleasure at this end. I feel giddy with intellectual stimulation. Hey, we got the dopamine circuits mutually entangled, man. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll talk very soon. And for everyone else, bye and we’ll see you on another YouTube site.