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

30:32And the remainder have amazing 25-year careers. And what's the difference between them? And there actually have been studies done on this. You get somebody who's the burnout one And four hours before he goes on duty, he's already hypertensive. His stress hormone levels are through the roof. His stomach is already secreting acids that are wiping out the stomach walls. All of that, he finishes his eight-hour workday. And four hours later, he's still hypertensive and he's still a wreck from what was almost a close call, etc. And then you look at the guy who's going to last for 25 years and up till 30 seconds before he sits down in his chair, he might as well be a Buddhist meditator or something.

31:18His body is zero evidence of a stress response, low blood pressure, his autonomic nervous system, all of that. He's doing perfectly fine while he's still in the parking lot, gets into his chair, and 30 seconds later, his system is going at maximum. and 30 seconds after it ends, he's thinking about dinner. What you see in sort of the optimal profiles, you know, cybernetic people talk about that this is a system that optimizes signal-to-noise ratios. You activate the system when it's needed like crazy and not the rest of the time. Robert, you write a lot about the link between inequality and poor health.

32:02And I think we, both of our countries, it strikes me, have got real issues of inequality. What are the long-term implications for the psyche of our nations that that continues? They're horrible. I mean, just to show how bad things are, your country sounds like a shining paradise up on the hill there because you actually institutionally believe that all of your citizens should get health insurance unlike us. So you're light years ahead of it. I know the national health services kind of having some challenges these days. But nonetheless, you've got a national health service. You believe it's the duty of a government to watch out for the health of its citizens.

32:45But nonetheless, you look at every westernized culture out there, and what you see is what they call the socioeconomic health gradient. For every step down on the socioeconomic ladder that you see, health is worse, the sheer number of diseases, the incidence of them go up, their impact goes up, life expectancy is shorter the further down you are. And what people have been trying to figure out for decades, really smart public health sort of people, is what's the cause of this? How is it, and this is the jargon in the field, how is it that low socioeconomic status gets under your skin and winds up being terrible for your health?

33:29And the easy answer, if you're an American, is, oh, unequal access to healthcare. You can't see a doctor. You wait four months. You go into a teaching hospital. You get incompetent 23-year-old med students. You take out your kidney, whatever, or you can't at all because you can't afford it. And, oh, it's healthcare access, but then you look at a country like yours where you do have universal healthcare and you look at the Scandinavian utopians and they've got a socioeconomic health gradient also. It's not as steep. The United States is the worst in the world and it's been getting worse with every decade, but it's not healthcare access.

34:09Okay. So then you say, well, it's obvious if you're poor, you can't afford a health club membership. You're going to live next door to a toxic dump. You can't decide you're getting stressed out at work and take a six-month sabbatical to learn how to play classical guitar or something. You have fewer protective factors and tons more risk factors. You're more likely to smoke, to drink in excess. The food you eat is high fat, high carb because that's cheaper, all of that sort of thing. And you look carefully and about a third of the gradient is explained by that. What's the rest of it about? It's about the psychological stress, the stress of subordination.

34:52What's the evidence for that? Wonderful studies where you look at somebody and what's their objective socioeconomic status? And it turns out that's a significant predictor of their health. Now look at their subjective socioeconomic status. Ask them, it's like the fanciest research equipment in the world, you give them a picture of a ladder with 10 rungs on it and you say, when you compare yourself to other people, where do you put yourself on this ladder? A total measure of somebody's subjective socioeconomic status. And it turns out your subjective one is at least as good of a predictor of your health as your objective.

35:33It's not being poor, it's feeling poor. And then the question becomes, what is it that makes people feel poor being surrounded by plenty? For the exact same income across countries, across states, across provinces, across city blocks in some cities in the United States, the more inequality you are surrounded by, the worse your health is going to be. But Robert, in that case, why do so many Americans who probably be defined as poor and probably define themselves as poor, why do they look at somebody like Donald Trump who defines himself as superior to them, wealthier than them, more powerful than them?

36:19So they seem happy to have him saying he's at the top of the ladder and supporting him while they're putting themselves on rung one and two. What's happening in the psychology of your nation that that's happening? I don't understand it. Or stated in the way that political scientists just pull their hair out over here. Why is it that the poor over and over and over vote against their best interests? They vote for people who favor the economics of the wealthy and decrease social services and less of a safety net. And they do it over and over. And it's sort of at the intersection of really interesting science that shows your temperament, your emotional makeup, et cetera, is a much better predictor of your political views than whatever it is you claim you've thought through carefully.

37:07People who are made anxious by ambiguity and novelty wind up being political conservatives. If the future is an exciting place, you're going to be a political progressive. If the future is a scary place and the past is when it was great, you're going to be a conservative. If ambiguity makes you feel like you are overwhelmed and you look for patterns and you look for structure, you are going to love autocrats. You are going to have an orientation towards social dominance. You're going to find things, decide that things like social order is more important than social freedom and things of that sort.

37:45And then you see it in the craziest sort of things. You look at, at least in the US, political progressives versus conservatives, and conservatives are more freaked out by dirt, by getting soiled. They have more cleaning products in their home on the average than do progressives. You show somebody a picture of like some open gaping wound filled with maggots, and the more their stomach lurches, the more that's a predictor that they're a social conservative because they're running their opinions on a litmus test of if it's different, it's kind of disgusting. And if it's disgusting, it's wrong, wrong, wrong.

38:28And that's all I need to decide on it. And that's an amazing measure of this sort of thing. Political conservatives get disgusted more readily than do political progressives. Robert, can I also, there's a moment in your book Behave, where you also talk about some very troubling, disturbing research around race and the way in which if you show someone a very brief image of somebody from a different racial group or assign them to a different racial group, they judge their facial expressions in a different way. They lose the ability to distinguish one face from another. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

39:04Yeah, it's depressing as hell. It's this whole literature, whether it's looking at juries and And not just the race of the defendant has a dramatic impact on jury decisions and judges' rulings and what bail is required and all of that. But the hue of the person's skin, the more Afro-stereotypically Afro-American somebody looks here, darkly skinned, facial features, all of that, the more likely they are to be convicted than a light-skinned African-American. And there's just a massive literature on this. But from my sort of neuroscience world, the most interesting version is you put somebody in a brain scanner and you're flashing up faces and faces of people who look just like you.

39:53and somewhere in there you put in a face of someone who looks way different. And if it's a white American subject in there, you show them somebody of a different race. And for about 75 % of white American subjects, within a fraction of a second, 70 to 80 milliseconds, that is faster than conscious awareness, part of the brain called the amygdala activates. What's the amygdala about? fear and anxiety and aggression. It's activated before you were even consciously aware of what you're looking at. And meanwhile, there's another part of the brain, a primate specialty called the fusiform cortex that you use for recognizing faces and show the face of somebody from a different race.

40:37And it doesn't activate that part of the brain as much as if it was for an us. Their faces don't count as much. You look at their finger being poked with a needle and a part of the brain having to do with empathy doesn't activate as much. It's depressing as hell. Fortunately, once you look closely, it's a little bit less depressing. Okay. Let's just take a quick break.

41:09Robert, you've written a lot about free will. In fact, I think your most recent book, determined the science of life without free will. And if I'm reading it right, you're arguing that we don't have free will. Now, does that mean that I kind of don't know where to go with that? Because, I mean, that sort of says to me, well, there's no point trying to do anything. There's no point trying to change the world because we have no free will. But there is. There's every reason to do it because of people's wrong intuitions about what free will or lack thereof is about a whole scientific song and dance about how we're nothing more than the sum of our biology over which we had no control and its interactions with environment over which we had no control.

41:59And all any of us are is the outcome of the luck that made us who we are at this moment. Okay, so suppose you buy into my conclusion and I'm sort of out on the lunatic fringe in that regard. Even among neuroscientists who say there's so much less free will that we have to rethink basic institutions. I don't think there's any whatsoever. and people immediately panic and start kicking back along a number of lines one is the fear that we're all just going to run amok and i can take you through the science that will show how we're not going to all just run amok the other is oh my god we're just going to have murderers running around in the streets and it could be shown that we have endless societal mechanisms that we've been developing for centuries where we could subtract responsibility out of somebody's damaging actions and protect society from them and still not sermonize to them about their rotten soul.

42:58And you can deal with the existential void, but the one that people then come to is exactly the one you hit on, which is, oh, if the whole world is determined, nothing can ever change. Why bother? And that's completely wrong. All you have to do is look at amazing examples of people whose behaviors have changed, of societies that have changed. People change dramatically. But the key thing is we do not change. We are changed by circumstance and we respond to that circumstance as a function of the person we got sculpted into being. So we have free will but it's limited? No, it's none at all. Okay.

43:38None of this. Don't try to sneak into the back door there. Okay. Here's an example. You get two people, they go to a movie. It's some inspiring movie about some everyday Joe who does something heroic from out of nowhere. One person comes out of the movie changed by the experience. The person's behavior changes. They come out and say, wow, that was the most inspiring thing I've ever seen. I'm going to go over. There's a booth right over there for Amnesty International, and I'm going to give them my life savings. The second person comes out of the movie, changed by the experience, their behavior changes.

44:14They come out and say, that was the most manipulative, emotionally puerile movie I've ever seen. I can't believe they tried to manipulate us that way. And I hated the cinematography as long as we're at it. And I'm going to go over to the ticket taker right now and punch the person because how offensive it is that they even showed this movie. Whoa, two people's behaviors changed by this experience two in totally different ways. And you know, it's not by chance that each one of them went into that experience having been sculpted by a lifetime of stuff they had no control over that made them who they were in that moment.

44:53They did not choose to change in watching that movie. They were changed by it as a function of whose circumstances construct them into being. Robert, I mean, one question I guess is at the personal level, which is, if we're determined, if there's no free will, how does one as an individual deal with a sense of guilt or obligation? I mean, how do I work out whether what I should be doing is getting up in the morning and thinking, I really hated being a politician, but I've got to go back into public service because this is my duty to do this stuff. Do any of those kind of questions make sense in a world in which I'm determined?

45:30And should I be putting myself through miserable things out of a sense of public duty? Robert, Rory is now using you for free therapy, I should warn you. Well, you've already done the best thing possible, which is you changed your prior egregious profession. And I assume both you and those around you are thankful for that. Yeah, this brings us to, if there's no free will, if you really buy as extreme of the stats as this, blame and punishment make no sense. Praise and reward make no sense. A criminal justice system is not only intellectually but ethically unacceptable. Likewise, any sort of meritocracy is intellectually and morally unacceptable.

46:16Add we are nothing more or less than came before and none of us are entitled to anything more than anyone else because we didn't earn it. We don't deserve it. Nobody is entitled to having their consideration be less than average because of damaging things they've done, et cetera, et cetera. How are you supposed to function that way? I don't know. I managed to function that way about three minutes every two months. It's incredibly difficult because we're people of our time and place. And we have been inculcated to see responsibility in all sorts of places where there isn't. And it's an uphill battle for us to work through.

46:56This person is not worthy of blame. This person is not worthy of a better salary than 99 % of the population. And hating somebody makes as little sense as hating an earthquake. It's hard. Robert, I'm very sympathetic to this. Both Alistair and I have been very involved in prisons and criminal justice. One of my government jobs was being responsible for our prison criminal justice system. And I tend intuitively to be on your side. I mean, something like 40 % of the people in our prisons had been in care, in other words, removed from their families. 40 % had been removed from school. This is compared to 2 % of the general population, very high levels of education, et cetera.

47:38So I tend to be very sympathetic towards this, but it does raise enormous political questions. I mean, if we look at what's happening in Gaza at the moment, clearly partly what Israel is doing is not just a practical act of dismantling a terror network. It is deterrence, it's revenge, it's a desire to demonstrate violence. How does your insight on free will and determinism help one respond to these kind of big international events? Does it inform the way that you think about something as difficult as Israel Gaza? It tries to make me dispassionate about it. It is monstrous, the crime. that are being carried out there against civilians.

48:25It is disastrous what is being done. It is Old Testament biblical vengeance of the most savage animalistic kind, but it's not by chance that that is a country that turned out that way. And it is not by chance that Hamas turned out to be people who would sexually mutilate victims and things of that sort. historical exigencies guaranteed that they were plunked down in a position in 1948 as sort of a last grand gesture of British colonialism to give away the Palestinians' land to somebody else and say, there, two of you go out and spend the next 70 years turning your children into bloody savages because you hate each other so much, and let's see how it looks.

49:11Yeah, they need to be stopped. is a nightmare there, but they are all victims of the circumstances again, but that never ever means don't bother doing anything. And forgiveness is an irrelevant concept. But at the same time, so let me sort of move that on to another disaster that's happening in the world right now, which is Ukraine. You're on record as saying that, and as Rory said, we've probably got similar views on the weaknesses of the criminal justice system. But you're sort of saying something else. You're saying that even the worst criminals, and even right now, somebody like Putin, we should be more understanding, more compassionate towards them because they have been, as it were, made into what they are.

50:00Now, is that not giving Putin and Netanyahu and Hamas and anybody else, is it not giving them a sort of get out of jail free card? Um, it's a get out of moral condemnation card. Um, like everyone else, they're biological machines and that's how they turned out. And they happen to turn out to be incredibly damaging ones and people need to be protected from them. But nonetheless, none of this happens by chance. And I think something sort of, it's inconceivable to not be horrified by a Putin or to be horrified by anything that's been going on since October 7th or so. And that's intuitively obvious that these are terrible people who are deserving of some form of retribution.

50:47And the key thing is, if it was 400 years ago, the three of us could have been the same reflective, introspective people that we are now. And it probably would have seemed intuitively obvious to us that some elderly women with no teeth are able to control the weather and thus you need to burn them at the stake when there's a hail storm. Witchcraft would have made perfect intuitive sense and 400 years later it doesn't anymore. The notion that some people are meant to be slaves because they can't take care of themselves and in fact it's a mercy to enslave them was once intuitively obvious. four-year-old kids being worked to death in textile factories seem perfectly fine in the industrial revolution.

51:33And all of these things no longer seem intuitively obvious that that's okay. Instead, we have different explanatory systems and one that could subtract blame out of it and still protect society from them. We've learned like if the weather, I don't know, you fly planes that seed clouds if there's a drought rather than deciding that there's witchcraft responsible. We've gotten better. And people who have had responsibility attributed to them that is not actually there have much better lives now, not being burned at the stake. And the challenge is it's as hard for us right now in our place to imagine the people who seem intuitively, obviously agents of their own destructiveness, free agents of it, in fact, are just accused of witchcraft.

52:25Robert, we're coming towards the end, but I wanted to now bring you back to you as a person and your life and reflect a little bit on two things. One is, what on earth motivates you, I guess you're about the same age as Alice, to be up at 1.30 in the morning doing a podcast. I mean, what is it that gives you this kind of energy or commitment? What is it that interests you in it? Why have you not given up, put your feet up and gone to bed four hours ago? Tell us a little bit about what makes you tick and what keeps you going as a professor, a public communicator, a writer. Well, I would say, you know, just to fall in line with my dogma, just the perfect combination of good and bad luck in my prior 66 years.

53:13I mean, my parents traumatized me to the perfect extent so that I didn't wind up as a sociopath, but nonetheless, I wound up with a very driven sense of needing to excel. Well, and I've got the same sort of just the perfect level of insecurity so that I'm not generally like a jerk out in public. But I have had to generate a CV that's long enough that I feel like I can beat people over the head with it who were mean to me when I was 12 years old. You know, it all makes sense to me without going into any gory details. Yeah, nothing is by chance. But what is it that makes you want to do a podcast at half past one in the morning?

53:57I mean, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to communicate with British people? I mean, why are you not having a drink with your wife or watching a movie or getting some sleep? Well, it's operating on two levels. One is highfalutin and laudable, and the other is totally human. The highfalutin one is, this is a world in which some people are treated way better than average for reasons they'd had no control over, and other people are treated way worse. And this is crappy and it's a much better world if we like all of that and social justice and, you know, hooray for that. So there's that. And at the same time, like, you know, if somebody says to me, like, oh, nice book that you wrote, or they say, oh, nice shirt for at least two and a half seconds, I will transiently believe I'm a better human than average as a result before I hopefully get that.

54:51Yeah. You know, all these levels going on. Robert, let me tell you that on this podcast, I've been told by publishers that whenever Rory or I mention a book that we've read and liked, that there's a little spike on UK Amazon. So at the very least, you will shift a few books. And I mentioned your book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, at the swimming pool this morning. Oh, perfect. Yeah. And a woman who's a midwife said, that is a great title. I'm going to get that. So there you go. You've already sold one. Now, listen, my final question, if I may, and this is quite a personal one, and it may lead us down to all sorts of routes, but I watched, in preparation for this, I watched a couple of your lectures at Stanford.

55:40So I mentioned to you that I get depression, and I also had a brother who died age 62 who had schizophrenia, or schizophrenia, as you call it. I know this is, we've only just met, but why did I get hit with depression and why did he get hit with schizophrenia? Because that is a question that troubles me a lot. Because the two of you had different versions of shitty luck. Most straightforwardly, there are genetic modifiers for risk of schizophrenia. There are genetic modifiers for risk of depression. In both those realms, these are not determinate versions of genes where you are guaranteed to get it.

56:19They are more or less consequential in different sorts of environments. And the sources of environmental influences that change the way biology plays out are incredibly subtle. You look at identical twins, and at birth, they already have significant differences in their gene expression profiles in their brains. Already, they've had nine months of different luck and different experiences because this blood vessel that went to this one carried more nutrients than the blood vessel that went to that. At birth, already these vagaries of environment interacting with biology is already sending people hurling into who they are.

57:05The best evidence at this point is you're more likely to have had certain sort of social stressors growing up than your brother. Your brother is more likely to have had some perinatal stressors around the time of his birth that set up for a vulnerability to schizophrenia. There's all these hints there, but two different versions of thoroughly crappy luck, but of different sorts that just sent you down different paths. It's kind of what he used to say. He just said, I got a shittiest thing that you did, is what he said. Well, it would be probably not very productive to arm wrestle as to who got better bragging rights over that.

57:53But yeah, pretty crappy in either case. Yeah, well, you did a very long lecture on schizophrenia at Stanford, which we should put in our newsletter for listeners as well. But listen, it's been great to talk to you. I hope that the American people wake up to the fact that they really don't want the biggest baboon in the jungle running their country again. And I hope you carry on doing what you do at whatever time of day it is. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me on. And I sure help my country heeds your advice because fascism is really going to suck here in the United States. Yeah. Love it. And thank you from me too.

58:35This was a great, great privilege. Really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your evening. Thank you again. Lots of fun. Have a good day. Take care, guys. Thank you. Bye-bye.

58:47Alistair, so tell me, what did you think? Well, what I thought before the interview was why I was going around the place saying, have you ever heard of Robert Sapolsky? And people say no. And then there's always this really interesting guy that Rory thinks we should talk to on the podcast. And then I found it more interesting when I started to watch some of his lectures. But I found it fascinating talking to him. I really did. and I like the fact that we didn't have to push him too hard for him to be perfectly clear that he can't stand Donald Trump, which is obviously a good, in anybody's book.

59:21But no, I thought he's obviously a very interesting character, but he has a way of saying things which, so like he was talking about baboons and I was thinking about American politics. I don't know what you were thinking about, but he has a way of sort of making it what he does relevant without him saying, by the way, this is why it's relevant. So I enjoyed that. Yes, it's extraordinary, isn't it? He's very good at bringing up, as it were, the metaphor or the parallel. I also think, I mean, he got this incredible thing called a MacArthur Genius Award, where you get, I think, half a million dollars just for being super smart at the age of 30.

59:55And I think like a lot of truly brilliant people, he is a great communicator. I'm always a bit suspicious of people who you're told are very clever and they're completely incomprehensible. He's somebody who you can really imagine if you were a student at Stanford, you'd really want to have as your professor because he's prepared to turn his brain anywhere. The lecture that I watched when he was talking about schizophrenia or schizophrenia, it was like an hour, one hour, 40 minutes. And so far as I could tell, he wasn't using notes at all. He just had a whiteboard, he had a pen, he was walking about.

1:00:27Now he may have had notes. He doesn't look to me the sort of guy who has notes on a sort of massive auto queue at the back of the room. So I think it was just a guy sort of imparting his knowledge. And there is something, as you touched on this, this idea of not just going to sort of look at a family of baboons once or twice, but doing it every year for over 30 years is pretty impressive. And no qualms about what he does and how he does it, the darting and liking the fact that his wife could get closer to dart the baboons. And then this whole thing about how hierarchy. I mean, he must make a lot of assumptions though.

1:01:05When he talked about it, he goes there and he picks up the gossip from the baboons. Well, what is that actually? I wanted to sort of go down a bit on that. But no, he's obviously a very interesting guy. And I think a lot of our listeners probably will start out as I did thinking, why are we talking to some neuroscientists? But actually I came away with quite a lot of interesting thoughts about our careers and politics. Now, I'm not sure I was, was I not understanding what he was saying about free will. I think I was getting a bit lost there. Well, his book Behave is the answer for people who want to follow up on that.

1:01:36But well, I also think it's just so wonderful for those of us who don't spend our time reading science properly to be reminded of the incredible progress that we've made on understanding human brains, particularly. And this whole point about the fact that whole areas of our brains are hundreds of millions of years old. You know, his point about the fact that 150 million years ago, some dinosaur has the same stress responses going on. I think geckos and things today still have a lot in common with our brains. The other thing I think that listeners may not pick up unless you're watching this on YouTube is that Professor Sapolsky also looks a little bit, this is very unfair, but a little bit like a baboon.

1:02:16I mean, he's got the most, and I think he's got enough sense of humor for me to say that, got the most enormous beard, the most incredible hair. And ponytail, massive ponytail. Massive photo tell. And there's a New York Times profile on him which describes his house, which apparently is completely chaotic and sort of consists of baboon skulls. And he called his son Ben after his favorite baboon. So there's a sort of element of amazing kind of childlike enthusiasm. And he says he wanted to be a primatologist from the age of eight, clearly started writing letters to distinguished primatologists when he was 12.

1:02:48And clearly has, in some sense, it's sort of, he talks about his anxieties and his luck, But in some ways, you can feel a kind of envy for somebody who's found a life that he's clearly found so richly interesting. Yeah, and he made it on free will, Rory. He got there on free will. He had the free will to make all these amazing choices. Anyway, no, I thoroughly enjoyed that. Very good start to the day. Very good end to his day. And I'll see you soon. Thank you. Thank you, Alistair. Bye-bye.