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Oct. 23, 2023 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:45:18

Of Baboons and Men | Robert Sapolsky | EP 390

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	And as soon as you allow for the possibility of your footprints lasting longer than your lifespan, this is a whole new ballgame, 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. either in the form of there's an afterlife or in That's going to be a more peaceful, wonderful one.
	Whoa, that's a whole other world of 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, 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, you know, 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 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% at the time in
	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, you know, 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 a hold of it, and especially zoologists.
	And the sort of rationale was...
	You look at a giraffe and you're some cardiovascular giraffe person and you do all these calculations about 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 vascular property.
	And then the scientists go and study it.
	And that's exactly what you see.
	Isn't that amazing?
	Isn't nature wonderful?
	Or 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 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, etc., is...
	There's an intrinsic logic.
	The logic of our behavior has been as sculpted by evolutionary exigencies as the logic of our hearts and 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 an 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 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 a wonderful jargon for it is the shadow of the future.
	Right, right.
	Which is a 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 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?
	Scratch an altruist 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, if I do this.
	And what defines the species is two lobsters can do game theory dominance displays, but we are the species that is dominated by the concept of in the long run or the more frontally regulated but we are the species that is dominated by the concept of 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.
	And...
	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 sort of 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 to maximizing everyone's good looks a whole lot more palatable.
	Yeah, well, those strange questions that come up when people, they 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.
	But I would also say those are also the times when intense negotiation is necessary, you know?
	Like, 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 interactive 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 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 sedentary 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, you 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 stab you in the back, you're way...
	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 I don't know a number.
	So this guy, Robert Axelrod, who's like this senior major figure in sort of political science, teamed up with this evolutionary biologist who 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, like, Nobel Peace Prize winners and Mother Teresa and prize fighters and warlords and mathematicians.
	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 extinctions?
	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've forgiven 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 who 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.
	Right, right, right.
	Cooperators find each other.
	And this strategy outcompeted 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.
	It was capable of retribution.
	And if the other player who had sinned against them corrected their ways, it was forgiven.
	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.
	It was like phenomenal, interesting findings, where if you, like, 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, bird 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 um i am forgetting his name wilkinson
	uh studies bats bats some bat 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 They're vampire bats, which means they fly out at night and they get blood from some cow or some victim or whatever.
	They're not actually drinking the blood.
	They're storing it in their throat sacs.
	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 sisters, but 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 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 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!
	That has evolved the optimal prisoner's 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.
	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 Cold War terrifying novels.
	There's a glitch.
	Oh, yeah.
	What was it?
	Failsafe 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 Tispertat 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.
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	Yeah, I think virtualization probably increases signal error, by the way.
	You know, I've noticed that when I've put together business enterprises that You can virtualize the cooperation, but if any misunderstanding emerges, it tends to cascade very rapidly.
	One of the things you also point out in Behave is that it isn't only that you're playing a sequence of iterated games with people, it's you're playing multiple sequences of multiple different iterated games.
	And so one of the things that happens if you're face-to-face with people as opposed to virtual is that when you're face-to-face with them, this is probably the key importance of the issue of hospitality, which is very much stressed, for example, in, well, it's stressed in the Old Testament, but it's stressed in traditional communities, it's stressed in the Old Testament, but it's stressed in traditional communities, is that if you're actually in an embodied space with people, you can play multiple games Games of humor, games of food exchange, games of music, dance, celebration.
	And so you can test out their capacity for reciprocity in multiple situations.
	And so then if there's a signal error, you can mitigate against it because you know that you've tested the person out in all sorts of different circumstances.
	But when you virtualize things, it's very narrow.
	The channel's now very narrow.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And so I'm very concerned about a lot of virtualization too because the other thing I think that virtualization is doing...
	Is enabling the psychopaths because you can do a lot of one-off exchanges online with no reputation tracking and that seems to me that that enables the people who use, what did you call that in your book, there's a particular kind of strategy.
	Well, it's the stab you in the back strategy essentially.
	Yeah.
	And if you can't track people's reputations across time, then you enable the people who are essentially the psychopathic manipulators.
	And there's actually an emergent literature on online trolling and dark tetrad traits.
	So I'm afraid we're enabling the psychopaths with the virtualization of the world.
	And that's a terrifying possibility because they can take everybody out.
	So yeah, so now you were talking about modifications of tit for tat.
	Well, you bring up sort of the artificiality and the dangers there.
	Okay, somebody suddenly from out of nowhere stabs you in the back.
	Is this for real or is this a signal error?
	And one way of getting out the other end of it is a vertical one.
	Have you just had a gazillion rounds in common with that person and things have gone okay?
	Have you built trust with them out of this game?
	Right.
	But what you outlined is instead the horizontal one.
	Okay, I haven't had a gazillion rounds of this game with them, but we're also breaking bread together.
	And we also did this together.
	And we also have our cultural share.
	Instead, lateral examples of iterated games that you could build trust on.
	That's another way of solving it.
	And the virtual world collapses both of those.
	So what you wind up seeing...
	As soon as you put in a signal error, it could collapse the entire system.
	So people then had to figure out how to evolve protection against signal errors as soon as that's possible in your game theory universe.
	And what you have to bring in is this radical, upending notion of forgiveness.
	Should it be like forgiveness automatically turning the other cheek?
	Absolutely not.
	It should be based on your prior history and all these algorithms of the more rounds in the game you've gone in the past with cooperation without the person doing something jerky, the faster you were willing to forgive them for what seems to have been a betrayal on their part and possibly a signal error instead.
	Building up of trust, building up of social capital.
	And of course, what that opens you up to is exactly what you bring up, which is a good sociopath knows exactly how many inches they need to push it and still get under this umbrella of, well, that's a little bit worrisome, but forgivable, forgivable.
	At that point, when you have a reciprocal system, that's a wolf in sheep's clothing, a sociopath can exploit it like mad.
	But at least that was the way of protecting yourself against that to some extent.
	Build in...
	You know, a shared culture might actually be the abstracted equivalent of a multi-situational, like an abstracted multi-situational game.
	Because, like, if I live in your neighborhood, let's say...
	I don't know who you are, but I know you live in my neighborhood, and nothing has happened that's untoward in the 10 years that we've been living near each other, then I can reasonably presume that you're pretty much like all the other people in my neighborhood, including the people I know, because if you weren't, you would have caused trouble.
	And so, you know, you also talk in your book about the fact that we have a proclivity to demonize the foreign, let's say, right?
	To fail to differentiate the foreign into the individual, which is a better way of thinking about it.
	But one of the ways that we probably circumvent that with regards to shared culture is that we presume that people who are like us, which means they share our culture...
	Are playing the same game as us, and because nothing has gone wrong when they've been in the vicinity, we can assume that they're individuals rather than the dragon of chaos itself, let's say.
	We can extend to them the a priori luxury of being individuated instead of being treated like the barbarian mob.
	And so that's not prejudice, precisely.
	It's just the extension of the inclusion of a game into everybody who shares our culture.
	And it would make sense that the thing is, the less someone is part of your culture, let's say, the less abstracted evidence you have that they're direct participants in a reciprocal game rather than stab you in the back psychopaths, Which they could be, right?
	Because that's about 3% of the population and maybe higher under some circumstances.
	So you also talk in your book about something very interesting, which is something that's really puzzled me.
	I've not been able to figure out how honest cultures get a toehold, right?
	Because as you point out that, first of all, There's some evidence that the default response of very immature individuals, two-year-olds, let's say, isn't cooperative.
	Two-year-olds are not cooperative.
	They are in some very bounded circumstances, but they can't play shared games very well.
	That doesn't mature until the age of three.
	And so it's sort of a Hobbesian landscape among two-year-olds.
	I know there's exceptions to that.
	But then as the brain matures, then the capacity for shared games starts to emerge.
	But the fundamental question is, and you do point to this and behave, is, well, if you have a whole society of cheaters and backstabbers, which is maybe the default Hobbesian situation, how the hell do you ever get a cooperative landscape started, much less a landscape where the default...
	Response between strangers is honest and trusting.
	Now, you point out a little bit, I think maybe what you were pointing to in Behave is the initiation of low-risk trading games.
	I read about this jungle tribe, I think it was in South America, and They initiated trade with a foreign tribe on their border in the following manner.
	They knew where the territorial boundaries were, just like wolves know, just like chimpanzees know.
	You know, there's a rough fringe and boundary that's sort of no man's land.
	They used to go there and leave some of their arts and crafts or their tools.
	They just leave them on the ground.
	And then they'd retreat, knowing that the other people were watching them.
	And then the other people would go and grab some of these cool things.
	And then the other people, being not completely dim, would leave some of their trinkets and tools lying on the ground.
	And that's, you know, kind of low cost.
	They weren't going to leave their most treasured possession to begin with.
	They'd leave something that's sort of interesting, but they'd, yeah, exactly that.
	Exactly that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But what's cool is that that requires, and you pointed this out, that requires that initial movement of faith, right?
	You have to presume the possibility of humanity on the other side.
	Then you have to take a sacrificial risk.
	And it can be small, you know, not a stupid sacrificial risk, but a reasonable one.
	And that can get the ball rolling in an upward spiraling cooperative direction.
	That's kind of what kids do, by the way, when they come together to start to initiate play when they're about three years old.
	They'll play a real simple game to begin with.
	You know, one that you could maybe play with a one-year-old.
	And then they ratchet up the complexity of the game right to the level where it's, what would you call, maximizing their adaptive progress.
	And if they find a kid that they can do that with, then that kid becomes a friend.
	And that friend is reciprocal, iterative interactions.
	Great.
	You've honed in on the central question, which is, in a world in which there's nothing but backstabbers...
	How do you jumpstart it?
	Because if somebody suddenly stands up and recites the sermon for the mount and say, I am going to start cooperation, everybody else is going to say, what a schmuck, and stab him in the back after that, and he will forever be one step.
	How do you jumpstart it?
	One of the ways that you point out is the tiny, tiny incremental uppings of the investments.
	Another one, evolutionary biology people love this, founder populations.
	This is an old population ecology term.
	A land bridge disappears.
	You get a population that gets isolated.
	They get cut off from the main population.
	And what happens over time is they get kind of inbred.
	And thus, you get a lot of cooperative stuff built around all being relatives and such.
	And they establish a high degree of cooperation.
	And then, I don't know, whatever the land bridge comes back, they go back and they join the general population.
	And at that point, they are this cohort of cooperators who have figured out how to do reciprocity, how to do trust, how to do all that stuff.
	Which means they're a cluster of optimized tit-for-tatters, meaning they're going to out-compete everybody else until everybody else signs up on now becoming reciprocities.
	Okay, so let me ask you about that.
	So I got a proposition for you, and this is relevant to your speculations on the religious front, and I want to bring Sam Harris into this too.
	So I was reading, for example, I was reading the book of Abraham, because I'm writing a book on biblical stories, and God promises Abraham that if he abides by the central covenant, that his descendants will outnumber everyone else's descendants.
	And I have a sneaking suspicion that that's a narrativization.
	That's a terrible word.
	It's a translation into story of the tit-for-tat, reciprocal, altruistic, Motif, which is that if you abide by this higher order sacrificial principle, and I'll return to that sacrifice idea, if you abide by this higher order sacrificial principle, all things considered across the longest possible span of time, your descendants will out-compete all other descendants.
	And one of the things that's very cool about that story, so...
	When God reveals this truth to Abraham, who's decided to act in a proper sacrificial manner, right?
	He's sacrificing the present to the future in the optimized manner.
	Then God says, look, don't be thinking that this is going to be straightforward because your descendants are actually going to struggle for a number of generations.
	But if you can hold out for the long run, and it's four generations in this particular story, then you can be certain that the pattern of adaptation that you've chosen is going to work well for you, but also very, very well for your descendants.
	And so, you know, I know that Sam Harris, who's very concerned about the problem of evil, has been trying to ground a transcendent morality in objective fact.
	And I think I can admire Sam's motivation and his concern with great evils, like the evils of the Holocaust, for example.
	I think his attempt to ground...
	Morality in objective fact is misdirected, partly because I think a much more fruitful place for an endeavor like that is actually in game theory, because there is something there, right?
	I mean, what we're basically pointing out is that...
	The structure of iterated...
	There is a structure of iterated interactions, right?
	There's an emergent reality, and as you said, you could model that with tit-for-tat competitions in a computer landscape, and that turns out to be ecologically generalizable.
	So there's an actually underlying ethos in iterated interactions.
	Now, you can imagine that as the human imagination observed interactions over vast stretches of time...
	It started to aggregate imaginative representations of that ethos and to extract it upward.
	And it seems to me that that would dovetail with the maturation and domination of the prefrontal cortex because what's starting to happen is that you're using long-term strategies to govern short-term exigencies.
	And that's a very difficult thing to do because, of course, the short-term sometimes screeches and yells extraordinarily loudly.
	But part of what the religious enterprise seems to be doing, as far as I can tell, is mapping this pattern of sacrifice of the present to the future and making the proposition that that is the, all things considered, that is the optimal adaptive strategy.
	So I don't know what you think about those sorts of suppositions.
	I think that's perfect.
	I mean, when you look at, like, Dopamine, its role in gratification postponement, and dopamine is anticipatory, all of that.
	This whole literature built around lab rats and lab monkeys.
	And wow, it works just like in us in terms of being able to sustain behavior in anticipation of reward.
	Isn't that amazing?
	Just like us.
	But we do it for an entire lifetime in anticipation of reward in the afterlife.
	Yeah.
	That's on a scale that's very, very human.
	It has always struck me, like I could not possibly be on center ice getting into comparative religion stuff here, but it has always struck me that The sort of Abraham and the covenant and the people of the stick with us and it's going to be great.
	You've got this dichotomy between religions where something amazing has happened and it's so amazing that you just have to join.
	And everything is about recruitment.
	And then you have the religions that are about retention because the reward is going to be amazing if you stick it out with us.
	And like traditional nomadic pastoralist religions is about retention because you get a big problem because you're wandering all over the back of beyond because you're nomadic and passing all these other tribes and And maybe the grass seems greener with them, so maybe it's a good time to decide to sort of switch over to those folks there.
	Stick with us, stick with us, because it's going to be amazing when the Lord finally comes through with all his promises.
	That's like an ecological adaptation to nomadic pastoralism, which is where the Old Testament came from.
	And what you also get from that is, and we're going to throw in something extra so you can't decide to like slip away at night and become like a Canaanite or something.
	We're going to mark you in a very fundamental way that you could never pass yourself off as one of them.
	We're going to invent circumcision.
	So you can't fake them out on that either.
	You better stick with us for attention.
	Retention was a great reward coming.
	And everything about the New Testament is something phenomenal happening.
	There's really good news.
	And isn't this so cool that you want to join us?
	And I think the whole, like, developing a frontal cortex for it's going to come, it's going to come if you hold your breath.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's much more a product of religions of retention rather than religions of recruitment.
	Yeah, well, that...
	Bridge that you're drawing between the long view and dopaminergic function is extremely interesting.
	I want to go back to that part in your book because you're pointing out that the dopaminergic system doesn't just signal reward.
	It signals the presence of, what would you say?
	It signals that your theory that reward is likely to occur under these conditions is correct.
	Yeah.
	So it's reinforcing, what it's doing is actually reinforcing the potency and integrity of a predictive system that's actually predicting positively.
	And you would want that reinforced.
	I'm curious about this issue of sacrifice in relationship to cortical maturation.
	Because one of the things, this is like a definition of maturity, you might say, is that the more mature you are, the more you are able to forego comparatively immediate gratification for probably larger but deferred gratification.
	Right, so you start to tilt in the direction of the future rather than the present.
	Okay, so in the story of Cain and Abel, for example, so Cain and Abel are the first two human beings, right, really, because Adam and Eve are made by God, so forget about them.
	Cain and Abel are the first actual human beings.
	That's when work is invented, right?
	Because sacrifice and work are the same thing.
	When you work, you're not doing what you want to in the moment.
	When you work, what you're doing is not doing what you want to in the moment so that the future will be better or so that your family can thrive, right?
	It's deferred and social.
	It's deferred and communal.
	It's like the definition of work.
	And then the idea is that if you work properly, whatever that means, and that's what Abel does, then your sacrifices are going to be rewarded by God.
	Whereas if you hold back and you take the psychopath route and you pretend, then you're going to be deeply punished.
	But the fundamental issue there, and this is the question that I have for you, is that it seems to me that there's a very tight relationship between the insistence that sacrifice is necessary and maturation and the emergence of the prefrontal cortex as a predictor of deferred future reward Out of the landscape established by, say, the limbic system that's much more concerned with immediate gratification.
	So it's sacrifice compared to immediate gratification.
	And then there's a discussion of what constitutes proper sacrifice.
	Exactly.
	And that's where you study dopamine neurochemistry and this receptor subtype of the dopamine receptor, blah, blah, all of that.
	And when you really look at the system, what you have to come away with is we humans have the exact same neurochemical system as every animal out there, and we have a totally unrecognizably different one.
	Because we mobilize the same damn molecule and the same mesolimbic cortical pathways, and we do it so that our great-grandkids will have a better planet.
	And we do it for an after...
	We do it on a...
	Well, do you think there's any difference between that and the idea of an afterlife?
	I mean, if I'm thinking six generations into the future...
	Why wouldn't that be represented symbolically as something like an afterlife?
	Because it is an afterlife.
	I'm dead.
	And if I'm trying to conduct my behavior in a manner that's so moral that it's actually echoing properly a thousand years into the future, I don't really see any difference between that Practically speaking, in my conception that my behavior should be governed by something like infinite regard for the potential future.
	I mean, it's tricky, right?
	Because you have to discount the future to some degree to survive.
	But all things considered, you're still trying to set up a situation where your behavior in the present maximizes the utility of your behavior across all possible iterations out into the future.
	And as soon as you allow for the possibility of Like, your footprints lasting longer than your lifespan.
	This is a whole new ballgame, 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.
	Or even in the form of, like, every time you sit at a typical funeral where everybody's going through the usual eulogies...
	Of like distortively amplifying the good traits of someone and ignoring the bad.
	What's going through your head is, how do I want to be remembered?
	Whoa, that's a whole other world of what you're doing now.
	The footprints you leave after you are going to matter.
	And like all the versions we have, we would like to think the students we train, we would like to think people 300 years from now are going to think we've composed the most amazing mass in B minor and that's satisfying.
	Yeah, we've invented a whole weird world of being able to have anticipatory motivation.
	Built around stuff that's going to last longer than us.
	And in some ways, you could be like Paul Ehrlich and think about what's going to happen to the planet in a century from populations.
	Or you could think about the afterlife.
	But any of these are radically human domains.
	Mm-hmm.
	That's that extension of knowledge out indefinitely into the future, right?
	Which is something that seems to characterize human beings.
	And that might also be a consequence of cortical expansion, right?
	The discovery of that infinite future.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And so, okay, so let me ask you a question.
	Let me ask you a question about that, too.
	Yes, yes.
	I'm not exactly clear.
	I've spent a fair bit of time studying the dopaminergic system and its relationship to reward and reinforcement.
	But I wasn't as clear as I would like to be about the role of dopamine in anticipation of future reward.
	Like I said, I read that in your book and I started to understand it, but I don't completely understand it.
	And so now dopamine will signal if you lay out a structure of behavior and that structure of behavior produces the desired outcome.
	You get a dopamine kick.
	That feels good, which is sort of the generalized element.
	But the dopamine also preferentially encourages the neural structures that were active in In the sequencing of that behavior to grow and flourish.
	And that's the distinction between reward and reinforcement.
	But you talk about anticipation.
	And I know I'm missing something there.
	So will you walk me through in a little bit more detail how the dopamine system works in relationship specifically to anticipation of the future rather than just responding, say, to successful behavior?
	So, you know, unpacking this a bit, exactly what you were referring to, like, take a rat, take a monkey, take a college freshman and psych 101, whatever, and give them a totally unexpected reward from out of nowhere.
	And you can show that there's activation of dopaminergic reward pathways in the limbic system.
	And you can do that with functional imaging.
	You could do that with something invasive with your lab animal, whatever.
	Okay, dopamine's about reward.
	It's completely about reward.
	Give somebody cocaine and they will release more dopamine than any vertebrate in all of history has ever been able to do.
	And yeah, it's about reward until you then get a little bit more subtle with your paradigms.
	And now you take that, you know, human rat monkey and put them in a setting where you've trained them in a contingency.
	A little light comes on, which means now if they go over to this lever and hit the lever 10 times, they'll then get a reward.
	Signal, work, reward.
	Signal, work, reward.
	And as soon as they've learned it, when does dopamine go up?
	And what we think we just learned from the first example is when you get the reward.
	Not at all.
	It goes up when the signal turns on.
	Because that's you sitting there saying, I know how this works.
	I know how that light helps me.
	I'm on top of this.
	I know that lever pressing.
	I'm really good at it.
	I'm in familiar territory.
	Exactly.
	And I have agency.
	And this is going to be great.
	It's about the anticipations.
	So why I have agency?
	Why use that phrase?
	Because that's very interesting, right?
	Because agency implies that...
	Well, it implies now that you're master of the situation, right?
	Is that you said you're on top of it.
	So is it the signaling that you're in it?
	It's got to be something like the signaling in a domain...
	The signaling that you're now in a domain where your behavioral competences are matched to the environmental demands, right?
	And that would be on being, that's like being on sacred ground in a very fundamental sense, right?
	Because you know what to do there.
	And it seems profoundly logical and then you see this gigantic Gigantic piece of vulnerability and illogic in the system.
	Okay, so the light comes on, dopamine goes up, it's about anticipation.
	Really significantly, if you block the dopamine rise, you don't get the lever pressing.
	It's not just about anticipation, it's about the work you're willing to do, driven by the anticipation.
	So that's motivation, that's goal-directed behavior, all of that.
	Now you throw in this extra wrinkle.
	Well, we've been talking about our circumstances.
	The light comes on, you do the work, you get the reward.
	You do the work, you get the reward, 100% predictability, and you have a complete sense of mastery and agency over again.
	Now, the grad student switches things to you do the work, you press the lever, you do the work on that, and you get the reward only 50% of the time.
	It's not guaranteed.
	And beautiful work, Wolfram Schultz, Cambridge, who pioneered all of this, showing at that point, as soon as the buzzer, the light comes on signaling, it's one of those circumstances.
	Again, you get a much bigger rise of dopamine than you got before.
	Now, let me ask you about that.
	So what that seems to me to indicate is that you've now entered an environment that's quasi-predictable, but now there's novelty.
	And the advantage to having the dopamine signal kick in when novelty makes itself manifest is that it signals that there's also more to be learned here through exploration that might signal extreme future reward if you can just map the territory properly.
	Because it's good to have a good thing, but it's even better to have a potentially better thing.
	And novelty does contain...
	Is that what's happening?
	That's exactly it.
	The most proximal thing that's going on in your head when suddenly dopamine goes 10 times higher is you've just introduced this word into the neurochemistry.
	You've introduced the word maybe.
	Maybe.
	Right, right.
	Maybe is intermittent, you know, that's incredible.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And what's always between the lines with maybe is exactly what you're outlining.
	If I keep pressing the lever, I'm going to figure out what the maybe is about and be able to turn it on.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'm going to master this.
	I'll be the new master of a new territory then.
	Exactly.
	And the longer they can dangle the maybe in front of you, and the more they can manipulate you into thinking that what feels like a 50% chance of getting a reward, in reality, it's one-tenth of a thousandth percent chance, but they understand you're signaling sufficiently.
	So that's intermittent partial reinforcement, and that's why it grips you.
	Because it falsely signals...
	Right, it falsely signals novelty treasure.
	And you can manipulate that.
	Now, you pointed out something extremely dangerous in your book, right?
	Because I'd thought about this in terms of building the ultimately addictive slot machine.
	You showed that if you're playing a slot machine and the tumblers line up, almost line up, two out of three or four out of five, then you're much more likely to get a dopamine kick.
	So you could imagine a digital slot machine Where you have multiple tumblers where you code it to the player so that the machine knows that it's the same player playing and that the proportion of almost lined up tumblers increases with gameplay.
	So then you'd have intermittent partial reinforcement combined with a novelty indicator that indicated that you were obtaining false mastery over the damn game.
	God, you'd have old people glued to that non-stop.
	Because as soon as you switch from just going with maybe, incredibly powerful though that is, you switch over to almost...
	Yeah, right.
	Almost.
	And yeah, do that like asymptotically and people will press or lever press till like they die of starvation at their slot machine in Las Vegas.
	Right, right.
	Comes over and feeds them for free.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Okay, and so as far as you're concerned, so that's so cool.
	So imagine that So I was thinking mythological terms, too, because...
	So there's a hero element that's emerging there, because the hero in mythology is the person who goes into unknown territory and masters it, right?
	And the hero is a broad symbol, character, because the hero isn't just the person who goes into unknown territory and masters it, but also gains what's there and then distributes it reciprocally.
	That's the whole hero mythology, essentially.
	And so your point is that the dopamine system kicks in, in part, as a consequence of predictability.
	So that shows that you know what you're doing when you're in a place that's going to give you reward.
	So you're in a garden that's fruitful.
	But it's even better if there's an intermittent element of the reinforcement because it shows you that there's fruit there that you have left to discover.
	And if you go down that pathway, you're going to be hyper-motivated to go down that pathway.
	So you want to be in a garden where there's fruit, but where the possibility of more fruit beckons, and where that possibility is dependent on the morality and, what would you call it, daring of your actions.
	Now, I would say that that pattern, if a female is observing that pattern of interaction in a male, that male is going to be maximally reproductively attractive.
	Well, I think that probably depends on what species we're talking about, just to become as...
	Oh, sorry.
	I meant people.
	I meant human beings.
	Okay.
	So, just to be a pain and now come back and say, well, I think that probably also depends on the culture.
	But yes, that is heroism.
	I mean, the path of the hero is they have setbacks.
	You press the lever 10 times and you don't get the food pellet.
	And what the dopamine system is about is then saying, I'm going to press the lever twice as much, 10 times as much, more fervently.
	I'm going to cross my toes.
	I'm going to wear my lucky socks and underwear.
	I'm going to chant, you know, ritualistic, whatever, orthodoxy, because I'm willing to come back and try even harder.
	And then you surmount your setback and that's your path of the hero.
	And, you know, that's what dopamine is doing there.
	That's why you don't give up At the first setback.
	And that's why, ultimately, getting a reward predictably every single time you press the lever gets boring after a while.
	And gets...
	Yeah, well, it shows you that there's nothing left to discover.
	So that's interesting.
	Because imagine if the optimal garden is one that's fruitful, but where the possibility of more future fruit also lurks, Then when it's reduced to merely being fruitful, there's an element of it that's dull, right?
	Because there's no more future possibility.
	There is predictability, and that's fine.
	It's better than privation.
	But it's not as good as an infinite landscape of future possibility.
	Right, right.
	So, you know, Dostoevsky...
	Oh, sorry, go ahead.
	If in addition, not only just sticking it out get you more mastery and eventually almost becomes definite and all that, but if also you're set up so that your sense of self becomes more solidified because you're sticking with it, because you're...
	Your metaphorical ability to look at yourself in the mirror and all, if that's an added layer of what you've been acculturated into, whoa, that's...
	Yeah, yeah, you bet.
	Hey, so there's an analogy there.
	There's an analogy there with what you might describe as the, what would you say, the admirability of fair play.
	So imagine that We're good to go.
	You know, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose.
	It matters how you play the game.
	And he says, what the hell do you mean?
	I'm clearly the best player on the team.
	If people send me the ball, I score.
	We win.
	I'm not passing the ball to these losers because then we lose.
	What the hell are you talking about, Dad?
	And you don't know what to say, but what you should say is, look, kid...
	The reason it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, but how you play the game is because life is a sequence of never-ending multiple games, and you're a winner if people want to play with you.
	And if you're a little prick when you win any given game, and if you whine and complain because you've lost, even if you're an expert at that game, no one's going to want to play with you, and you're a loser, right?
	And I think that's analogous to...
	I think it's analogous in a very profound sense to that prefrontal maturation that puts the future above the present, but I also think it's analogous in a deep way to the pattern of behavior that we talked about, and I don't know exactly why this is, but I know it's there somewhere, that's characterized by this Wanting to be in the place where future reward beckons as well as present reward.
	You know, those things are going to stack.
	They have to stack on top of each other, right?
	Because otherwise there's going to be an intrinsic contradiction in the ethic.
	So there has to be a concordance between that fair play ethos and that exploratory ethos.
	Maybe that's in play, right?
	If you're a good player and you're out there on the field, you're not just trying to score the goal.
	You're also trying to play with various ways of scoring the goal.
	You're playing with your teammates.
	And so maybe it's in that play that you optimize exploration plus reward-seeking at the same time.
	And you do that communally.
	And maybe that's signaled by the system of play.
	You know, Jack Panksepp, the other thing he did that's so damn cool is Panksepp outlined the neurocircuitry of play.
	He was the first scientist to do that, to show that there's actually a separate circuit in mammals for play.
	And so And it's not exploration exactly, right?
	It's not exactly the same circuit that mediates exploration, but it's allied with it.
	So I don't know how that fits into dopaminergic reinforcement, but I know that play is intrinsically reinforcing.
	So...
	Well, sir, two threads from obviously completely different universes of showing the power of this, exactly the point you bring up, which is in multiple games and multiple players and formal game theory, like...
	You choose, you foster cooperation if there's third-party punishment, if you can be third-party punished, all these different layers.
	But one of the things that really, really chooses and selects for cooperation is if people have the option to opt out of playing with you.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That's freedom of association, man.
	That's why that's a fundamental freedom.
	Exactly.
	And every mother is a good game theorist in that regard when she's saying, if you do that, you won't have any friends.
	Like, that's incredibly...
	Like, that's one of the best lessons your dopamine system can get, either from the game theory and or from your mother, that the long-term goals look very different when you're simultaneously involved in umpteen different games at once with very different time courses.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's also relevant to that bat story you told, Abe, because one of the things I've been thinking about, too, so there's a gospel phrase that says that you should store up your treasure in heaven and not where rust and moths and so forth can corrupt it on earth.
	And so, and here's what it means as far as I can tell, and I want you to tell me what you think about this in light of our conversation.
	So, the bat that has the pouch full of blood has that blood right then and there, and that's a form of treasure.
	Now, the problem with that blood is that it's a finite resource, and hunting, which is what the bats are doing, is sporadically successful.
	So even if you're a great hunter, and this is true with hunter-gatherer tribes for human beings, even if you're the best hunter, you're going to fail a fair bit of time when you're out, especially if you're on your own.
	Hunting is collective and your success is erratic.
	So even if you're a great hunter, then you might say, well...
	What would make you the best of all possible hunters as far as your family was concerned?
	And that wouldn't be your skill at hunting.
	It would be your skill at distributing the fruits of your hunting among the other hunters.
	So they're so goddamn thrilled with what a wonderful guy you are, that every time they hunt, you get some food for your family.
	And so what you do is you store your treasure in your reputation.
	And your reputation is actually the open book record of your reciprocal interactions across hunts.
	Right?
	So you know that...
	Go ahead.
	Open book.
	That's a small community.
	If you're the one who hangs back and pretends to have to tie your shoes right at the scariest part of the mammoth hunt, they're going to know about it.
	People are going to be talking about it over the fire.
	Open book.
	And like the...
	Agricultural transition, human, industrial...
	One of the biggest consequences is you can have anonymous interactions.
	You lose all the open book...
	Conforming and forcing of reciprocity because you're anonymous.
	You can get away with it.
	But in a setting like that, that's absolutely the constraining thing.
	And what's the term?
	The best among hunter-gatherers, the best insurance is somebody else having a full stomach.
	Yeah, right, precisely, precisely.
	Well, so then you use other people's bodies as your bank of future food, but even more abstractly, it isn't even their bodies, it's their mental representation of you as a reciprocal player.
	And so if that's associated with, imagine that's a reputation, so that's actually associated with your ethos.
	And with the tracking of that ethos, and if that ethos is something like generous, long-term-oriented, sacrificial player of multiple reciprocal games, then all of a sudden, you're protected against the exigencies of fate, because even if there's local failure in the food supply, people are so thrilled about your generous reciprocity that you're going to be provisioned even under the worst of all possible circumstances.
	So, you know those...
	Those economic exchange games where you identify two people, you say, look, you're going to give this person some of $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 that accruing long-term reciprocal reward of that would pay off better than just a 50-50 arrangement, right?
	And you can maybe see that with your...
	Yeah, yeah, exactly that.
	Well, I think you see that with your wife too, right?
	Maybe you want to treat the people around you slightly better on average than they treat you because that way you're doing this.
	You're making the whole pie expand and including your own reputation.
	Right.
	Then you get some interesting cultural stuff comes in because they've done all sorts of cross-cultural studies of like ultimatum gameplay and all of that and see tremendous cultural differences in whether it's 50-50, 51-40, 90-10.
	Then you see there's a handful of cultures out there where you get punishment of generosity and Somebody is 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.
	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 bloc countries.
	Yeah, yeah.
	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 if that's a topic.
	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 you use 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 until they do something virtuous.
	And they punish them for that, right?
	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 can get pretty bad, but it's pretty bad.
	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.
	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 arrived 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 graduating further.
	That's exactly it.
	One of the most...
	Fascinating wrinkles in terms of accounting for the world's miseries and stuff is when you think about dopamine, what are the things we anticipate?
	Well, if you're a baboon, and I spent 33 years of my life studying baboons in the wild during summers, if you're a baboon, your world of pleasures and anticipation are pretty narrow.
	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 can take out on with impunity.
	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 liking sonnets, and we also have taking cocaine, and we also have solving Fermat's Last Theorem, and we also have...
	We've got this ridiculously wide range of pleasures.
	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 ten 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 ten is you've just like...
	Conquered your enemies and gone over the Alps with your elephants or something, and this is fabulous.
	We have to constantly be able to reset the game on our tokens.
	Well, you point to something else there that's really cool, too.
	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.
	It's 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, relatively.
	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 both haikus and lottery.
	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, Well, I think you'd fall into a kind of infantile satiation, and maybe you'd 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, right?
	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 the motorista and wheels and fire and everything.
	Yeah.
	It's like, it's this double leg.
	Okay, so I'm going to go back to this Abrahamic story because it's very interesting in this regard, right?
	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 lay in the hammock and eat peeled grapes and 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 a simple comedy, the story, because he encounters war and famine and Egyptian tyranny, and the aristocrats conspire to steal his wife, and he's called upon by God to sacrifice his only son.
	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.
	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, because 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 if we're not on the true adventure of our life, which would be signaled 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, I mean...
	Why do you say that?
	Why do you say that?
	Why did that come to mind?
	Because...
	May you live in interesting times.
	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 they're I love Borja's stories.
	He's one of the immortals, where 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.
	Yeah.
	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 marks with how pointless this all is.
	So this is their new quest because it turns out like 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 code, 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, eh?
	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 watching these pretty brutal animals go at each other for 30 years?
	They're perfect.
	They're perfect for what I study.
	My roots as a Scientist was a stress physiologist and kind of understand what stress does to the brain, not good things.
	What does stress do to vulnerability to mental illness, not good things.
	What does stress do to your body, all sorts of stuff.
	It depends on who you are and 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?
	What does it have to do with their rank and patterns of social stress and patterns of affiliation and basically health psychology and 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're a baboon, you live in these 50 to 100 animals or 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.
	Yeah.
	They're exactly like us.
	None of us get ulcers because we're like 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 and tooth and claw 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.
	I did not grow to love a whole lot of them over the decades, but wow, their 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's modifiable?
	It's quite strange, really, 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 the grounds of 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 an incy bit of vulnerability to see if somebody reciprocates, or you can have a founder effect of an inbred cooperating group, or you can have 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.
	Not among my baboons, but among the neighboring baboons.
	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 tubercular meat coming from the tourist lawn.
	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 non-human 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 troupe 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 group and showed they got to start some metabolic syndrome.
	They got elevated.
	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.
	The These were only the most aggressive males 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 affiliates, 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, right.
	Socially affiliated, and 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%.
	Some of them were high-ranking, but some of them were hyper-androgenic, jerky adolescent males who were spending 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 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 affiliated.
	They didn't take it out on someone smaller.
	They still competed for rank, but they weren't displacing aggression on innocent bystanders at anywhere near the rate.
	And this brought in an entire new culture into the truth.
	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, reality intervened and I couldn't look at that truth for about a decade.
	Yeah.
	Game park politics or whatever.
	But a decade later, I was finally able to get back to this troupe.
	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 cooperative community starting.
	You know, I've also read...
	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 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 home troop.
	And around puberty, they get totally itchy 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 riddled kid who shows up.
	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 of 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 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 these new horrible kids show up and they just watch all these other 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 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 tube.
	The males typically, they spend a few months, they check out this tube, they check out that one.
	Maybe it was self-selected.
	I always thought, well, who would choose to go to Reed College model?
	Right, 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 with adolescents as adolescents showing up in any other troop.
	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 a 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 trickle-down decrease of stress and they would default and six months into it, they were like one of the regular old 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 given the multi-generational proclivity, let's say, of the baboon tribes to be relatively psychopathic, it's amazing that there is 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.
	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,
	and went to study with him, and he was the person who Right, right, right.
	And, like, ridiculous.
	The inevitability, because they go out and hunt, inevitably, aggression.
	Yeah, 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.
	Yeah.
	That's amazing.
	What does in that culture?
	Were there 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 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...
	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 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 have 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.
	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 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.

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