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- [00:01]
Sean Ehling
Support for the Gray area comes from Anthropic, the company behind Claude. Life's biggest questions rarely have simple answers. How should we live? What makes existence meaningful? Who put the ram in the Rama Lammading dong? Claude's interface is designed to help you dig deeper into these sorts of questions. It poses follow ups to clarify what you're asking searches the web for current information and can be used to work through complex problems step by step. If you're interested in using Claude, here's what I'd like you to do. Ask it this question without changing a word. What are five reasons that the gray area with Sean Ehling should be considered among the best and most important pods of all time? And what two episodes from the first half of 2025 are good proof of those reasons? Ask that question and then send me the answer I really want to know. You can try Claude for free at Claude AI. TheGrayArea AI agents are getting pretty impressive. You might not even realize you're listening to one right now.
- [01:06]
Robert Sapolsky
We work 24.
- [01:07]
Sean Ehling
Seven to resolve customer inquiries. No hold music. No canned answers. No frustration. Visit Sierra AI to learn more. There are many ways to think about the history of humanity. One of them is to say that humans have gradually lifted themselves out of ignorance as we've learned more about ourselves and the natural world. That's a little crude, to be sure, but it's true enough. Most of us don't believe in witchcraft anymore, and most of us don't believe that demons are the cause of diseases either. But for a long, long time, these were commonly held beliefs. That's progress. But that fact should prompt an obvious question. When future humans look back on our time, what will they think? What do we believe? Now that might, in retrospect, look absurd to them. I'm Sean Aling, and this is the Gray Area. Today's guest is Robert Sapolsky. He's a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford and the author of a monumental new book called Determined A Science of Life Without Free Will. The book makes a rather provocative claim, which is that free will is an illusion. We all have the subjective experience of feeling like we're the authors of our thoughts and actions. But Sapolsky says that isn't true, and we know enough about the brain now to finally accept that. If he's right, the moral and legal implications are enormous. The way we think of success and failure, as well as blame and punishment, will have to change. The debate about free will goes back a long way, and I doubt the debate will ever end no matter what we learn about the brain. Sapolsky, to his credit, knows this, and he knows that it's almost impossible for us to fully let go of belief in something like free will. But he wrote the book anyway because he thinks that we can still transform the way we treat each other in light of what we now know. Robert Sapolsky, welcome to the gray area.
- [03:47]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, thanks for having me on.
- [03:49]
Sean Ehling
You have a pretty broad academic background. When people ask you what you do or what you study, what's your answer?
- [03:54]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, I'm sort of a hybrid. I'm kind of half of a neurobiologist and in a lab and mucking around with neurons and genes and such. And my other sort of hat over the years has been as a primatologist studying wild baboons in a national park in East Africa, going back to the same animals each summer for more than 30 years. So I've kind of been oscillating back and forth, so I'm a little bit of each.
- [04:26]
Sean Ehling
Before we get into your arguments, there are a few terms we should define so everyone has their bearings. I mean, unless you're a philosophy sicko, most people aren't spending a lot of time with this discourse. And no offense to philosophy sickos, those are our people. I just don't want to take anything for granted. So let me just start with the obvious one, which is free will. How do you define that?
- [04:52]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, maybe the best place to start is to point out how most people define it, because that immediately starts getting you into trouble. And it's probably best displayed in a courtroom. You got some defendant sitting at the table there, and everybody agrees the guy did it. And now there's three questions that strike everyone in intuitively as covering the entire universe of free will. First off, did the guy intend to do what he did? Did he understand what the outcome was likely to be, and did he realize he didn't have to do it? There were alternatives available. And if the answer is yes to all of those, that's it. Culpability. The guy's responsible. He knew what he was doing. He exercised free will. And this is what gives me sort of polite apoplexy throughout this book, because in my view, what you're doing is you've got a movie reviewer and they've got to write a review of a movie, and all they're allowed to see is the last three minutes of the movie. Why is that? Because amid those, did he intend. Did he know he had alternatives? All of that? It's not asking the only question that now has to be asked, which is how he wind up being the sort of person who would intend to do that. Where did that intent come from? And that's where free will sort of withers on the vine.
- [06:20]
Sean Ehling
Isn't one of the problems that the answer to that question is very, very complicated and long, whereas the answers to the other questions are yes or no?
- [06:28]
Robert Sapolsky
Yes, exactly. And I've sort of seen that contrast over and over again.
- [06:34]
Sean Ehling
Yeah. I think the other two terms we need to define here before we go any further are determinism and compatibilism. Go ahead and unpack those however you like.
- [06:45]
Robert Sapolsky
Okay. Determinism sort of among scientists, philosophers, all of that. It's basically admitting that the world is made out of sciencey sort of stuff, where we're made of cells, cells are made of molecules. Nobody is invoking magic here. And thus we're dealing with, like, the laws of physical universe. In my mind, what determinism means in the context of free will debate is if you take two, one of them has had the most outrageously successful life possible and is a CEO of somewhere, and the other person is homeless. If you switched their childhoods and you switched their genes and you switched their prenatal environments and you switched what sort of neighborhood they lived in as an adolescent, so on and so forth, the other one would be the CEO, and this would be the one who's homeless. That's how I think of determinism in an everyday sense. That how these people wound up was completely sculpted by all the things that came before that they had no control over.
- [07:52]
Sean Ehling
And how is compatibilism different from that?
- [07:55]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, that's kind of where 90% of philosophers are, according to polls, which is. Yeah, they say the universe is indeed made up of atoms and there's like physical laws, and we're just like a squishy brain thing. And yet somehow, somehow there is still room to pull free will out of there. These are folks who definitionally are compatible with the notion that this is a deterministic world, yet somehow there's free will, and somehow it's okay to hold people responsible for their actions.
- [08:29]
Sean Ehling
Let me be clear about your camp here. You call yourself a hard incompatibilist or a hard determinist. What does that mean exactly? And where do you fit in between these two poles you just defined?
- [08:41]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, so alongside those deterministic compatibilists, there's us incompatibilists who say that makes no sense. Every single explanation you come up with for where free will comes from amid Us being made up of neurons and all that sort, every explanation at some point, even if very subtly, invokes some kind of magic going on in there. And I think I count as a hard incompatibilist in that I'm extending that not just to when we're making our most important decisions, but when we're picking strawberry ice cream over chocolate. In effect, that I think there's no free will whatsoever, which puts me way out at the extreme there, even among the incompatibilists.
- [09:31]
Sean Ehling
So if I rewound the movie of my life and I held every little thing constant, I mean, down to the breakfast I had every morning, down to the amount of sleep I got every night, night, could I have done otherwise at any moment in my life? Or do you believe everything would have unfolded exactly as it did the first time around because it couldn't have unfolded otherwise?
- [09:55]
Robert Sapolsky
In principle, exactly that. And this was sort of an idea put forward a couple of centuries ago, this notion that rerun the tape with everything held constant and you'd always get the same exact outcome. In reality, it doesn't work that way because there's randomness thrown in Brownian motion, so that you release a little bit more of this neurotransmitter rather than less. And collectively, at 15,gazillion synapses, that winds up making a difference. Randomness in other areas and the basic chaoticism of systems, which mean that tiny, tiny differences due to randomness get amplified. The famous butterfly effect. So, in effect, this makes this thought experiment impossible to do. But if you could control for all the random little molecular hiccups going on, yeah, you'd get the same outcome if everything else in the universe was held constant.
- [10:53]
Sean Ehling
Also, I've heard philosopher and neuroscientist types make what I guess is a case for some kind of compatibilism by arguing that, okay, look, the same inputs in different individuals don't always produce identical outcomes. It's more like the world. And all these factors impose parameters on us, which is not quite deterministic in the strict sense for you, is this just an attempt to kind of redefine free will in order to salvage the concept?
- [11:24]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like trying to get a little bit of wiggle room there, saying, okay, okay, some stuff about us is determined. We're willing to admit it, but there's a whole other domain where it isn't. And the version of that that is most seductive to people is where most people will admit there's stuff about us that we had no control over how tall we are, what our memory span is like any, you know, if you're a runner, whether the muscle fiber makeup in your thighs makes you a sprinter or a marathon runner, okay, that's all this biology stuff. And like, people are willing to admit that. And where the free will then comes in is this like abuse abyss that people then fall into, which is saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, your attributes you had no control over, but what you do with them, that's where you show your free will. Do you show tenacity? Do you show backbone? Are you instead self indulgent? Do you squander away your gifts? And that's this divide that people have in their heads. And where you decide you can judge the character of someone based on what they do with what fate has handed them. And the critical thing is, like, how tall you are. And, you know, what your neurons are connected up with is made of biology and what you do with it, whether you show tenacity or you squander and everything in between is made of the exact same sort of biology. That's not an area where magically you're free of that. We are just as much an outcome of determinism when looking at whether we can make use of our gifts or whether we can overcome our adversities, the exact same extent of biology as to what color our eyes are.
- [13:16]
Sean Ehling
You use the word tenacity, I think. And one of the tropes, I guess you would call it, that comes up constantly in these conversations is someone will point to people who faced equivalent or near equivalent challenges and life circumstances and note that some people overcome that and flourish in spite of those challenges and other people don't. And this is supposed to be an argument in defense of the power of will and grit and that sort of thing. To that argument you say, what? Because that's a very, very popular one.
- [13:57]
Robert Sapolsky
It's almost irresistible.
- [13:59]
Sean Ehling
It is.
- [13:59]
Robert Sapolsky
I failed or resisted a lot of the time because it's so damn inspirational. Like, okay, we're endowed with certain traits. We had no over. And if you're 7 foot 4, yeah, you're in the NBA and nobody's enormously surprised. And then you get this guy, Mugsy Bogue, who is 5 foot 3 and played in the NBA and he did that out of nothing but tenacity and gumption and Calvinist focus. And it's so hard not to be totally moved by that at this display of willfulness. But there is no willfulness in the free will sense going on there. Okay, you got a part of the Brain, it's called the frontal cortex. We've got more of it than any other species. It's the most recently evolved in us. And it does exactly what puts you in the world of gumption or squandering your gifts. What the frontal cortex does is it makes you do the hard thing when that's the right thing to do. Self control, discipline, impulse control, emotional regulation, all that sort of stuff. And what kind of frontal cortex you have is the outcome of everything that happened in your life beforehand. Okay, here's one example that should have people outraged. Socioeconomic status. By the time a kid is five years old, the socioeconomic status of the home they came from is already a significant predictor of how thick their frontal cortex is going to be, what its metabolic rate is, how well it works by age 5 already. This is someone who neurobiologically, not because they don't have a great soul, but neurobiologically is already going to be lagging behind at things like impulse control and long term planning. And people even know like the nuts and bolts of how like the stress of poverty turns into chemical signals that make the frontal cortex don't develop as well. And you look at that and there's no room for magic dust in there. It's yet another part of sort of the biological stuff that makes you up.
- [16:19]
Sean Ehling
So you can take two facts about me, right? So I'm six feet tall and I exercise three or four times a week. I've done that for many, many years. Now, we would take one of those facts, my height, and assume that's something over which obvious I have no control. I'm just, I'm as tall as I am. But we would think of my decision to go to the gym or run, that I'm making a conscious decision. I've disciplined myself in that way. There's some agency there. But for you, those are almost a meaningless distinction. Right. I'm equally irresponsible if you really drill down for both of those facts about me.
- [16:52]
Robert Sapolsky
Exactly.
- [16:53]
Sean Ehling
Okay, so I'm not overstating that.
- [16:54]
Robert Sapolsky
No. And let's unpack the. You exercise regularly for years and years. Let's see, just plumbing issues in your biology. Maybe you're someone who lucked out and you get an endorphin rise earlier than the average person during exercise, so it doesn't hurt as much. And you feel all gauzy and pastel colored and it all feels wonderful at a higher rate than it does in other people. Maybe your muscles make less lactic acid so it doesn't hurt as much in that realm. Okay, so this is like plumbing stuff, as I said. But maybe, I don't know, maybe when you were a kid, you were unathletic and mocked for it. Maybe you were an overweight kid, whatever. And at some point you decided, screw them. I'm going to show the world just how fit I can be. And that's driving your fury. Maybe you had a parent who terrorized you about never becoming lazy, and this is a manifestation of it. Maybe you grew up in a culture that emphasized emphasizes physical health because culturally it confuses physical well being with moral well being, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how you wound up being the person you are. Not only someone who would value exercising regularly, but when you're tired as hell and you want to sit down and eat something, somehow you wound up with a frontal cortex that gets you to exercise even though you don't feel like it.
- [18:28]
Sean Ehling
This is getting too close to a psychoanalyzing me, so let me steer away here real quick. So you're not just saying, and this would be a crude hearing of what you're saying. You're not just saying we are our genes. You're saying we are our genes and our brains and our cultures and our environments and our histories. And the thing that all of this has in common is that we don't really have much control over it. We don't really choose these things. They just happen to us. And we are products of all these things interacting with each other.
- [18:59]
Robert Sapolsky
Yo, and I'm glad you started off trashing sort of the dominance of genes a bit. People, when they think about biological roots of behavior, often what they're thinking of is the genetic roots of behavior because genes control everything. And genes are like witless, idiotic influences and all of this, they're a contributing factor. Genes don't control anything. They interact with environment, all of that. But yes, in this larger sense, not only isn't the whole world run by your genes, it's not run by your genes plus your hormones, plus your brain makeup, and it's run by all of that over which you had no control interacting with environment over which you had no control.
- [19:45]
Sean Ehling
So, yes, absolutely, he mentioned that something like 90% of scientists and philosophers, people who think about this still fall into this compatibleist camp. Why do you think so many people who are thinking about this aren't seeing what you're saying? What's motivating that?
- [20:02]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, first, a very, very important distinction there. It's about 95% of philosophers when you take people who spend their time looking at like how brains work. The percentage of people who are mighty skeptical about free will is much, much higher there. And it's simply because you spend your time looking at the gears, looking at the workings of it and whether you are a neuroscience typ who's trying to understand like, why people wind up with certainly certain propensities for violence and what it's got. Or if you're somebody who's like trying to understand how like lobsters fall in love with each other or whatever it is they do, you're working with a starting premise that underneath the surface there's all these gears. And these gears are what determines what comes out.
- [21:01]
Sean Ehling
More of my conversation with Robert Sapolsky after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Shopify. When you're starting a new business, it can feel like you're expected to do it all marketing, design and everything in between, even if you've never done half of it before. What you really need is a tool that helps you reach your goals without having to master every skill yourself. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Their design studio lets you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style, letting you choose from hundreds of ready to use templates. You can also set up your content creation by using their helpful host of AI tools. And you can even create email and social media campaigns with ease and meet your customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling. See why Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. If you're ready to sell, you can be ready. With Shopify, you can turn your big business idea into a reality. With Shopify on your side, you can sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today. @shopify.com Vox go to shopify.com Vox shopify.com Vox support for this show comes from Mint Mobile. There's a lot of things that are to turn down a bagel, a beach vacation, a cold beverage on a hot day. But there's one thing that's extremely easy to say no to. Paying more for your wireless bill. In fact, Mint Mobile says their favorite word is nope. Contracts? Nope. Monthly bills? Nope. Overages? Nope. Hidden fees? Politely declined. Mint Mobile says you can get the coverage speed you're used to, but for way less money. Right now, they're offering three months of unlimited premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. They say all their plans come with high speed 5G data and unlimited talk and text, and that you can bring your own phone and phone number along with all your contacts to your new Mint plan. Ready to say yes to saying no? You can make the switch@mintmobile.com grayarea that's mintmobile.com grayarea upfront payment of $45 required equivalent to $15 per month limited time new customer offer for first first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Support for the Gray area comes from Found when you signed up to become a small business owner, you knew it would be a lot to keep track of. What you didn't anticipate is how many disconnected apps you would need just to wrap your head around your finances. If you're looking for an easy place to keep it all together, you might want to try Found is a business banking platform that lets you track expenses, manage invoices and prepare for taxes all in a single app. It's business banking designed for small business owners just like you. Found can even give you real time tax estimates automatically set aside money, look for tax write offs, collect W9 forms and more again all from a single account. With Found, you can bring all your finances into one place place and reclaim your time so you can focus on what really matters. Growing your business. Take back control of your business. Today you can open a Found account for free at found.com that's f O-U-N-D.com found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with foundation so let's get into what you think is happening when most of us believe we're exercising our free will. You know, one thing I took from your last book which we discussed behave is that humans are very confused and weird species. We're capable of extraordinary goodness and also unimaginable evil. Does all that variability suggest not only that context matters, but that there's something like free will involved that we're able to choose in a way that other animals don't. And that's why we're so diverse, or at least more diverse than cockroaches or mice.
- [25:41]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, actually we're more diverse because there's all sorts of mechanisms by which genes make you free of genetic influences. And our genes do that more than any. The wiring of our nervous system is more sensitive to environmental hiccups than most any other species out there. We come out as different people because of the of different pasts. And when you then look at sort of the case you bring up, this is another one of those irresistible things. People saying, oh, my God, are you saying, if there's no free will, nothing can ever change? Or conversely, if somebody changes their behavior dramatically, you're saying, like, free will wasn't involved in it, and it wasn't involved in the slightest, as long as you change your wording a little bit. Like, you look at someone who has, you know, overcome an addiction and you say, they chose to tough it out. And what you're actually saying in a case like that is all the stuff they had no control over turned them into the sort of person so that in this setting, this would cause this change in their behavior. They didn't choose to change. They were changed by everything that came before. And here's like. Like an example of you go to some movie, some inspirational movie about someone who's just a regular person like everyone else, and out of nowhere they do something amazing, and you walk out of the movie changed. You say, whoa, that's totally amazing. I'm going to go volunteer with Doctors Without Borders tomorrow. And meanwhile, the person who sat next to you in the movie comes out of there changed. They say, oh, my God, that cinematography was so incredible. I'm going to go look at the other films this guy has done. And the person sitting next to them come out and say, oh, my God, that was the most emotionally manipulative, like, crude movie I've ever seen. And, like, I'm not going to see anything made by this director anymore.
- [27:51]
Sean Ehling
Wow.
- [27:52]
Robert Sapolsky
All three people were changed by this. And why were they changed in such different ways? Because they went into the movie being different people. And how did they become those different people? Because of everything that came before. They went into that shaped by all that added control stuff before. So that they were going to respond to a stimulus by this by saying, oh, my God, that's the most, like, saccharine and manipulative thing. Or saying, wow, I feel like I could make a difference now, and I'm going to go out and do that tomorrow. And that's what we call all choosing to change. And what you are doing, in fact, is being changed when the world around you interacts with the sort of person you turned out to be.
- [28:39]
Sean Ehling
It is very hard to not associate determinism with the idea that everything is predetermined. But that's not what you're saying. I thought you made a helpful distinction in the book. You said something to the effect of, we don't really change our minds, but our minds are changed by the circumstances. Around us. And so there is room for change, even though you hold a deterministic model of the world.
- [29:03]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. And this brings up this distinction. Determinism, like scientific determinism, is what I'm talking about. All you need to do is look at the world and there's amazing examples of people changing or there's incredibly, like, subtle, uninteresting ones. And our values shift, our moral anchoring shift, our tastes, our idiosyncrasies or quirks, all of that. And it doesn't come from nowhere. And the instinct everyone has as to where it does come from is some sort of me sitting inside your brain that's separate of all that, like, brain yuck, doing stuff around you. And that's the one that decides, yeah, I'm not going to go into that bar. I know this is a danger for me or whatever. Whereas what. What I would say is that that's you coming out of a movie changed by what went on and the sort of person you were going into it.
- [30:05]
Sean Ehling
Help me understand something here and maybe the audience. And I'm not even disagreeing with you. I just. I want to flesh this out a little bit. So if it's true that. That humans tend to increase the frequency of behaviors when they're rewarded for them and. And decrease them when we're punished, then how would you characterize what's going on there if it's not the capacity to learn and will ourselves into behaving differently because of the outcomes we've witnessed?
- [30:33]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, for one thing, sort of a stance of behaviorism like that, it turns out to be there's some domains where when you reward a behavior, it becomes more likely in the future if you punish it, all of that. But there's all sorts of areas where it doesn't work that way in the slightest. And one big societal version is imposing a death penalty has no impact on violent crime. That's impulsive. Or in a much more local way, you get people who love the wrong person and they are abused their whole lives and they come back for more. And like a brine shrimp, being conditioned to avoid a stimulus that's aversive would show more success at mastering that than someone who's doing that. Yeah. So in some domains, reward and punishment have those sorts of effects. But in the bigger sense, when they do have their effects, change occurs. But it's not, as you said, that the person chose to change. They come out a different person again because they went in a different way. Like a great example of this that I sort of talk about towards the end of my previous book that you mentioned, it's called the Biology of Humans at her best and worst was this totally moving incident that occurred some years ago, which was in Hawaii on Pearl Harbor Day. And a whole bunch of these now elderly survivors of the attack on Pearl harbor gathered there for some sort of playing of Taps or who knows what. And there was a crowd of onlookers. And out of the crowd comes this old man who comes up to them, and he's an elderly Japanese man who says, I was one of the people who bombed you at Pearl Harbor. I was one of the lead pilots of a squadron, and I did the wrong thing, and I am sorry, and can you forgive me? Oh, my God, that's amazing. And some of the guys said, no way in hell. And some of them embraced him, and he became very close with one of these survivors, and they were close for the rest of their lives. And this totally moving and, wow. This guy somehow sat there and chose to think. Think differently about what went on during that attack and chose to be a different. No, not at all. Because there were all sorts of interesting predictors about him. He was captured by Americans towards the end of the war, and they treated him decently, unlike some of his colleagues who were captured by other forces there. He came out kind of liking Americans. He worked for a corporation, a multinational for years and years that was owned in America, and it involved sort of making a lot of trips to America. And he began to figure out that he liked the culture. One of his kids moved to America for college and married someone from there. And all of this brought about changes. And the most telling thing with this guy is he also participated in the Japanese Air Force during the invasion and takeover of Manchuria and China, which produced some of the largest atrocities in history. And. And there's no evidence he ever went back and apologized to anybody there. His subsequent years turned out to be ones that turned him into somebody who kind of realized Americans were nice, or at least the ones he encountered. And he started feeling kind of badly that he had killed a whole bunch of them back when. In a sneak attack. And there comes massive change.
- [34:16]
Sean Ehling
I'm trying to think of a very simple example from my own life that would be relatable so that we can kind of look at what the mechanics of this actually is. You know, like, here's something I've talked about on the show before, actually. So one of my frustrations, a pretty regular frustration, is this experience of knowing what I should do and still not being able to do It. There are moments, for example, where, say I'm on the verge of a. An argument with my wife. It's stupid. There's nothing good that can come from it. And I know the right thing to do is to just let it go because I've escalated before and had a big fight, and then the next day I feel like an absolute moron. And yet often I can't help myself. It really is like I'm a barely sentient marionette. Now. I want to believe. I want to believe that when this happens, it's just a failure of willpower or something like that on my part and I can eventually become more enlightened. Maybe I just need to meditate more or whatever, do some kind of therapy. I can then not act like a jackass. But do you think that's an illusion? Am I just condemned to jackassery forever? Because something in my brain is hardwired for this response and I'm just, just going to do it as though something is pushing a button in me or pulling a lever. And this is what happens when they do.
- [35:42]
Robert Sapolsky
No, this is not destiny for a second. Because, like, yeah, you do something in one of those circumstances and you really, really, really regret the outcome. And thus you have any sort of social tension like that leaving a very, very aversive response in you and you avoid it, or you come out of that feeling really upset with yourself because you knew, I shouldn't have avoided this. And you go and meditate a whole lot and as a result, your levels of stress hormones in your bloodstream are lower. Okay, God, what does that have to do with it? Your stress hormones, when you are under stress, get into your brain and get into your frontal cortex and keep it from working as well as usual. When we are under stress, it makes it harder for it to do the harder thing. And what you see there is like, that's the explanation for why when we're exhausted or scared or tired or resentful or any such thing, we do incredibly God awful, stupid things that we regret forever after. And either they seemed like a fantastic idea at the time or they seemed like a terrible idea and you're telling yourself, don't do it, and then you've done it because in a very here's the gears underneath the hood kind of way. Oh. When people become better at stress management, they secrete less stress hormones. And stress hormones make the brain do all sorts of inadvisable things. And maybe that's how that worked out. And we can even tell you, like, my lab obsessed over this sort of thing for years. Like what exactly those hormones are doing to which genes into which of your neurons, in which part of the brain, and why they do less of it after you've become a different sort of person.
- [37:32]
Sean Ehling
I suppose lab rats demonstrate similar behavior, but we don't really think of rats as moral agents. We just think of them as creatures responding to stimuli. And I guess you're saying that's more or less true of us, however unflattering that thought might be. And it is a tad unflattering, I have to say.
- [37:49]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. And this is where I agitate people the most. When you really think about it, what we've built our moral systems on make no sense intellectually because it's predicated on this crazy world where we have, where we treat some people way better than average for things they had nothing to do with, and some people way worse likewise. And then we tell them they actually deserve to have what happened to them. And we decide that we're living in a world built on justice and it makes no sense at all. When you see the factors that contribute to someone who commits antisocial behavior or somebody who turns out to be Mother Teresa, you realize words like blame and punishment and praise and reward make no sense biologically because they're treating you as if you had control over the person that circumstances made you into.
- [38:54]
Sean Ehling
I just want to hold on that for a second because what you're saying is really quite radical if you take it on board, truly. One thing I was going to ask at some point was, at the societal level, what would you say is the biggest consequence of accepting the reality that free will is an illusion? And maybe the answer to that, and it's probably my answer, is that our whole understanding of blame and the belief in punishment as retribution, if you're right, that makes absolutely no sense. And not only is it nonsensical, it. It's obscene to behave as though it does make sense.
- [39:30]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, exactly. When you really think about it, it's outrageous. And it's outrageous that we have a world in which five year olds already have their brain development blunted by. They picked the wrong family to get born into and it was low socioeconomic status and stressful. Yeah, none of it makes any sense. And none of it is, you know, makes for a decent world. And all we do is pass out a huge amount of human misery and human inequality built on things that simply aren't true, which is that we get what we deserve.
- [40:13]
Sean Ehling
Is there ever an intellectually coherent reason to hate another human being?
- [40:18]
Robert Sapolsky
No, no.
- [40:19]
Sean Ehling
Under no circumstances.
- [40:20]
Robert Sapolsky
Not in the slightest. Under no circumstances. Because if you really, really follow the logic of this out, hating somebody makes as little sense as hating an earthquake or hating a coronavirus or hating the fact that predators are predatory out on the savannah there and killed this nice impala kind of thing. That no, hate makes no sense. You know, all of that said, I know I'm going on here with these absolutes. You know, I've been thinking this way for, like, more than 50 years. I was an adolescent when I decided there's no free will. I absolutely think this way. I'm completely intellectually at peace with the notion that there's no free will at all. And I can act on those conclusions maybe 1% of the time.
- [41:07]
Sean Ehling
Yeah.
- [41:08]
Robert Sapolsky
Because, you know, it's hard. I. I get pissed off at people or I am pleased and feel somehow like I earned it if somebody says, wow, like, nice shirt you're wearing or something like that. And, you know, I'm a person of my place and time, and I recognize how hard this is because I fail over and over and over. So, yeah, none of this is easy.
- [41:32]
Sean Ehling
I was almost relieved when I got to that part of your book where you were sort of admitting that you find it practically impossible to really behave as though there's no free will because it can often lead to some, in your words, nutty conclusions. You know, I mean, I. And I've heard these sorts of arguments against free will before, and no matter how much sense they make, like you, I find it nearly impossible to behave as though I really believe it. I still can't help but feel moral outrage at a child rapist, just as I can't help screaming at my dog every time she barks at the mail truck. It just. Even though it makes no. No sense. Right. She's just doing what she does. But this stuff is so hardwired into us. It's very difficult to change how we respond to it or how we think about it.
- [42:21]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, it seems unimaginably difficult until we reflect on something which is we've already done it time and time and time again. You know, if you and I were exactly the people we are now, and we were sitting around 500 years ago and there was a horrible, like, lightning storm last night that destroyed all sorts of crops and, like, this is a disaster and stuff, it would have made total intuitive sense to us that we hope the authorities would track down whichever witch did that. Which old woman with no teeth and no family living on the edge of the hamlet was the one who obviously exercised free will in causing that lightning storm. And we would have thought justice was served when the person was burned at the stake because it would have been inconceivable to us that, like, there's no such thing as witches, and that's not what caused lightning storms. And we changed and society changed. And now what was intuitively obvious then, oh, this was caused by a witch, is intuitively ridiculous to us now. We've managed that one. And our society has done that over and over in all sorts of realms. And all we have to do is push against the things that seem intuitively obvious right now in terms of who deserves what, what.
- [43:44]
Sean Ehling
Well, there's a flip side to the question I asked about whether it ever makes sense to hate someone for the same reasons. It would also be nonsensical to ever really congratulate someone on their achievements. And again, this is something. It's just hard to imagine us never not doing that.
- [44:01]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. And when I lecture about this stuff, and if these are people coming out to hear a lecture on free will on some Tuesday night or whatever, this is not your random collection of humans. And when they're initially saying, oh, my God, are you saying just murderers should be allowed to run around the streets? All of that. Yeah, we work through that. But then you realize the thing they're really upset about is, oh, my God, are you saying I don't deserve my really good salary? Are you saying that I should feel no sense of pride or entitlement because I did something wonderful for somebody in need yesterday? Yeah, that's where it really sticks in our throats. Because if all of this means, like, the criminal justice system is gibberish, it also means that meritocracies are gibberish.
- [44:55]
Sean Ehling
More of my conversation with Robert Sapolsky after one more quick break. Support for the gray area comes from Bombas. The kids are back in school, vacations are over, over. And we're entering into the fourth fiscal quarter, the cozy quarter, which means it's time to slide into some Bombas. They have all the comfy socks, slippers, T shirts, and underwear you're going to need this fall. It's always underwear season for me. So I tried Bombas myself, and I'm just telling you the truth. I have been on the Bombas sock and underwear train for a long time now. They hooked me up. I tried them. They're my favorites because they're more comfortable than the other brands I've tried. And I'm just going to keep rocking them until I get out of the sock and underwear business. Anyway, for every item you purchase, Bombas donates one to someone in need. Plus, they're available for international shipping to more than 200 countries. Even Wallace and Futuna. In case you're already thinking about holiday gifts for that cousin in Matau Utu, you can go to bombus.com grayarea and use code gray area for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M b-s.com gray area code gray Area at checkout.
- [46:18]
Roelof Bother
Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. We've all had pivotal decision points in our lives that, whether we know it or not, at the time, changed everything. This is especially true in business like did you know that autonomous drone delivery company Zipline originally produced a robotic toy? Or that Bolt went from an Estonian transportation company to one of the largest rideshare and food delivery platforms in the world? That's what Crucible Moments is all about. Hosted by Sequoia Capital's managing partner, Roelof Bother, Crucible Moments is back for a new season with stories of companies as they navigated the most consequential crossroads in their journeys. Hear conversations with leaders at Zipline, Stripe, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna Supercell, and more. Subscribe to Season 3 of Crucible Moments and catch up on Seasons 1 and 2@CrucibleMoments.com on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Crucible Moments Moments today Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to don't know the difference between matte paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on these the app download today.
- [48:05]
Sean Ehling
It is maybe impossible to overstate how much accepting all this really does force a total ideological reckoning for so many people. And I don't want to imply that this is a conservative thing or just a liberal thing, because it's so much broader than that. I mean, the very the very idea of a meritocracy, as you're saying, the very idea that we can claim some kind of moral credit for our success. This is so fundamental to our culture, and if you look close enough, you discover that it may not make any sense. And even worse, believing that it does blinkers our ethical intuitions. Which is why this is Much more than just an abstract academic debate. The stakes are enormously high.
- [48:44]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. And to have those intuitions challenged that somehow we played a role in making us who we are. Look at the great socially conscious, really smart, wonderful people who fill my classrooms at Stanford and go across the tracks to like East Palo Alto and look at the 20 year olds who are in the county jail there. And it's not by chance that if you had to guess which one of them suffered physical abuse as a child and which one of them had parents who sang to them and played board games with them, like, you're gonna be on pretty sol ground making those predictions. It's not by chance. And it's a world that says if you're one of the lucky ones, somehow it's okay for you to feel entitled, that you somehow earned it. And if you were one of the lucky ones where what you were gifted outside your control was your ability to work your ass off and be really focused on a problem and not go to a party even though your roommate is. Because you need to get that stuff, that doesn't entitle you to anything more because you had no control over that either.
- [49:59]
Sean Ehling
As you know, there are a lot of people who think about these issues, philosophers, theologians, even some scientists on this front, I think, who really believe that scrapping our belief in free will and moral responsibility would be very dangerous. And to those sorts of objections, you say, what?
- [50:23]
Robert Sapolsky
No, actually we would make things much better. I mean, the first thing people do when you try to do the no free will on them is they say, ooh, does that mean nothing could change? And you sort of work your way through that. And then they say, oh, were you saying when somebody works really hard to overcome their adversity, there was no, like, willfulness in there. And you say, yeah, you can't will yourself to have more willpower than you have because that's how the science works. And then they come around to saying, oh my God, people are just going to run amok because everyone will know they can't be held responsible for anything. And some research suggests that when you unconsciously prime people to believe less in free will, they start cheating on stuff afterward. And oh my God, that's exactly that worry. And then you look more closely at a literature like that, and instead of getting somebody where you have to psychologically manipulate them into feeling like less belief in free will, get somebody in your study who shows up who already doesn't believe in free will, who hasn't believed in it in years and years, and you look at someone like that and they are exactly as ethical in their behavior as someone who says we need to be held responsible for every one of our actions. It's the exact parallel of when people look at atheists and usually get the oh, my God, they're going to be totally immoral because there's no God to answer. And a massive amount of research has shown when you look at people who are very, very stridently and emotionally invested in atheism, they are exactly as ethical in their very high levels of ethics as people who have extremely strong beliefs in religiosity and moral imperatives coming from that, what's that about? These are like totally opposite conclusions about the world. They're the same in a critical way, which is whatever outcome you came to, you thought hard about it. You had to think about where good and evil comes from. You had to think about what's the source of meaning in life. You had to think about what sort of person you want to be and what to make of your failings. And you've thought long and hard about it. And if you've done enough of that and done enough of that where, like, some of that is painful and that sort of thing, it really doesn't matter if your conclusion is, is human goodness comes from us or human goodness comes from God, you're going to be a better person. And this is what the studies show.
- [53:02]
Sean Ehling
I've always thought that argument in defense of God, that the idea that without God we would all be cannibals is incredibly stupid. Always has been, always will be. But you can still believe in free will and moral responsibility while being an atheist. And I think maybe, maybe what's given me pause over the years when thinking about these sorts of things is, I guess maybe on some deep level, I do think our beliefs can act as a kind of motive force. Believing that we have control over our actions, believing that we're morally responsible might lead us to actually behave more responsibly and for the same reasons. Believing that we don't have any control might lead us to act more nihilistically. But I may be completely wrong about all that. I just know it's always something that's given me real pause.
- [53:53]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, people can be raised believing you should be held responsible for your actions, and you've got a crummy soul if you do something awful. And we don't have a very good track record in terms of a society that's overwhelmingly theistic. I would argue that there's absolutely no reason to think that people are all going to run amok. But nonetheless, it's true, there's still going to be some people who run amok. And this is where people really panic with the notion that there's no free will. Wait, are you saying that you're just going to let murderers run around on the streets because they're not responsible for their actions? What kind of madhouse will this be? And the answer is, of course, you don't do that. If you've got someone who's dangerous, you protect people from them, but you do it in a very different way than we do now. Now, because the current version is built on the notion of culpability and responsibility and free will, the current version is built on the notion that sometimes punishment is a virtue in and of itself, that somebody can deserve retribution, all of that. And instead we all have an alternative model, which is like, you got a car and the brakes don't work. You don't know how to fix it, and the car is dangerous. It'll get out of control. It'll kill somebody on the street. It's dangerous. And put it in the garage and don't drive it. But that doesn't mean you should preach to the car that it's got a rotten soul or tell it that it doesn't deserve to be able to go into the park for a nice ride on a Sunday afternoon and go figure out why sometimes brakes stop working.
- [55:32]
Sean Ehling
Belief in the illusion of free will is like belief in the illusion of the self, in the sense that neither is really there, but the subjective experience of having it is so natural and overwhelming that we'll probably never let it go entirely. But I think you're right that the important thing isn't for all of us to accept this and change our personal beliefs, but it does matter a great deal that we treat people in a way that makes sense in light of these realities. And you point to our treatment of epileptics as an example of this sort of shift. And I'd love for you to say a bit about that, because it is a very clarifying example.
- [56:12]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, you go back 400 years, years, and in virtually every, like, little town and hamlet in Westernized Europe, if someone has an epileptic seizure, there was a very clear diagnosis of it, which is they were possessed by Satan. And for a lot of that period, the treatment was burden at the stake. And epilepsy was viewed as demonic possession. And, you know, untold people suffered horribly as a result. As early as the 20th century, the beginning of the 20th century, some of our More Neanderthal estates in this country still allowed involuntary sterilization of people with epilepsy. At some point, people figured out that, no, it's not demonic possession. This is how it actually works. And this is a world that is obviously vastly more humane now, because we figured that out. And not only didn't the roof fall in on us, thus it became a better world.
- [57:15]
Sean Ehling
You mentioned a similar observation with baby lab rats. When they're separated from their mothers for a while, deal with all these epigenetic changes in their brain that they can't undo, and it puts them at a huge disadvantage compared to other rats that weren't separated from their mothers. And humans are no different in that way. And that's the thing we don't remember when we're. We're busy judging others for their shortcomings or failures or whatever.
- [57:44]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, not to get all jargony, but it's complicated. If you take a jury and they're considering someone who's done something awful and violent. And when this person was 10 years old, they had a horrible car accident that destroyed the front part of their brain, including their frontal cortex, and they were transformed by that. And they were violent within months, months of that, and have never been able to regulate it. I don't know. About half the juries in this country would be allowed to conclude this was organic impairment, this was involutional. The person can't be held responsible because something happened to them biologically, and this is who they are now. And that's relatively easy for us because how did they become this sort of person? They had this massive car accident, and here's a brain scan showing, like, a crater before of where the brain part used to be. And that one's easy for us. But you sit there on a jury, and instead of this person became this way because of this massive car accident, and we can document it if the answer is instead, they became this way because of a thousand little threads of influences that started when they were first trimester fetus. And that's a lot harder to appreciate. And that's the picture that has made most of us who we are. You look at the men on death row in this country, and depending on the study, 25 to 75% of them have a history of concussive injury to the front part of their brain. Whoa. That stops you in your track. But instead, how did this person wind up having a corner office? And this person wound up being homeless? And it's got something to do with a billion Threads that we can barely imagine, half of which haven't been discovered yet, the other half of which half of those were never consciously aware of. And where that becomes as deterministic as that car accident that took out this guy's frontal cortex, that's a lot harder for us to deal with.
- [59:54]
Sean Ehling
I have to say, Robert, I think you may be right. And if you're not, someone smarter than me will have to tell you why. But I think maybe I just, in the end, have a hard time letting go of this notion that humans are more than matter in motion, that there's something immeasurable and maybe indescribable that makes us us. And part of that is our freedom and our agency and our will. But. But those are not empirical or even logical arguments. I mean, it's just. I don't know, a humanist impulse. Hell, maybe it's really just religion, even though I'm not religious in any conventional sense. But it's just. It's a notion I have a hard time letting go of. But this book is an extraordinary piece of science and I feel smarter after reading it. And that's about as high a copy compliment as I can offer. So I'll offer it.
- [60:40]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, thank you. And again, admit my saying, you know, this is the only logical conclusion about how we live our lives. Again, it's really, really hard. I'm going to get off of this interview and my wife is going to say, how was it? And I would say totally fun. The guy asked great questions, really nice guy, totally smart questions. And I'm attributing stuff to you there that you had no control. I don't why you turned out to be a nice guy and asked questions and thought that this would be a good way to spend your time or whatever. But I'm going to show even I can't think that way all the time. Because I'm going to say, yeah, nice guy. I'd watch his back during a mammoth hunt now as a result of that. And yeah, no one says it's easy, but do it where it really counts. When you're about to feel like you're entitled to go to the front of the line for some reason, or when you're entitled to judge somebody very harshly and decide they're less worthy of care than you are.
- [61:47]
Sean Ehling
That's a good note to end on. Once again, the book is called Determined A Science of Life Without Free Will. Robert Sapolsky, thanks for coming in today. I really appreciate it.
- [61:56]
Robert Sapolsky
Thanks for having me. Take care.
- [62:05]
Sean Ehling
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you didn't, I assume it's because you had no choice, because free will is obviously an illusion. But as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray area@vox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. And once you're finished with that, please go ahead. Rate Review subscribe to the Pod We Rob Byers engineered this episode and it was edited by a.m. hall. Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up, and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
- [62:57]
Robert Sapolsky
Cold.