Of Baboons and Men | Robert Sapolsky | EP 390

and as soon as you allow for the possibility of like your Footprints lasting longer than your lifespan this is a whole new ball game either in the form of there's an afterlife or in the form of I want to leave a planet for my great great grandchildren that's going to be a more peaceful wonderful one whoa that's a whole other world of like what you're doing now the footprints you leave after you are going to [Music] matter hello everyone watching and listening today I'm speaking with primatologist neuroendocrinology researcher an author of multiple books including the upcoming determined a science of life without without Free Will Dr Robert spolski we discuss Game Theory and how it applies to human behavior the unexpected success of the tit fortat 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 um 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 that makes her interesting reading reading as far as I'm concerned the thing that really struck me in behave is the are the sections on Game Theory and I I wanted to start talking about Game Theory because it first of all the terminology is strange because Game Theory I mean you could hardly imagine something that might sound more trivial than that I mean first of all it's games and second of all it's Theory but there's absolutely nothing whatsoever that's even minimally trivial about Game Theory it's unbelievably important you know and I kind of stumbled across it sideways I was reading work by Yak PP uh who did a lot of work with rats and PP showed that if you paired rats repeatedly together juvenile males and you allowed them to play the little rat who had to invite to play once dominance had been established he would stop inviting to play if the big rat didn't let him win 30% at the time in repeated bouts say 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 of of the same individuals you know across an indeterminate landscape and that's an unbelievably compelling and stunning Discovery because it it 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 fortat 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 game um game theory was mostly the the purview of War strategists and diplomats and people planning you know mutually assured destruction so uh this was rather serious stuff at some point uh the biologists got a hold of it and especially zoologists and the sort of rationale was like you look at a giraffe and you're some cardiovascular giraffe person and you do all these calculations about like if you're going to have a head that's that far above your heart and you're going to have this body weight and blah blah what you're gonna have to have a heart with its walls that are this thick or this like vascular properties and then the scientists go and study it and that's exactly what you see isn't that amazing isn't nature wonderful or like you look at Desert WFTS and you do all this theoretical modeling stuff and figure out if they're going to survive in the desert their kidneys have to retain water at this unbelievable rate and then people would go and study it and that's exactly how the kidneys work isn't that amazing and it's not so amazing because like if you're gonna have giraffes shaped like giraffe 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 so let's let's review that for a minute so your point as I understand it is that there's going to be necessary constraints on the physiology of a organism and those constraints are going to be reflective of its environment and the peculiarities of its morphology and you can predict that a prior and then when you match your predictions against observation at least some of the times they match there's an analogy between that and behavior in that you can analyze the context in which behavior occurs and the physiology of the organism you do that in particular and behave with the as you map out the nervous system from the hypothalamus upward toward the prefrontal cortex there's going to be an interaction between context and and 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 inter interactions that's absolutely crucial so one of the things you point out for example is that and this was also true of pp'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 wonderful jargon for it is the shadow of the future which right right talk about that which is wonderful poetic way of yeah exactly that notion yeah well in 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 what what do they that 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 and this is one of the ways your book is integrated I 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 uh what would you say future contingencies right and you describe that in behave as difficult it's very easy to fall prey to an immediate impulse anger is a good example of that or maybe fear right that grips you and forces you to act in the moment but you want to constrain your impulses which would be manifestations of brain circuits that are much more evolutionarily ancient you want to constrain those with increased knowledge of multiple future possibilities in a complex social landscape and those are also somewhat specific to the circumstance so the prefrontal cortex also is more programmable because the relationship between the future and the present varies quite substantially with the particularities of the environment but the fundamental point is that in the game in game theory is that your 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 book too although not a lot but some so I was thinking about this uh notion that you should love your enemy as yourself or that 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 you 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 you 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 Vari and 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 um that makes perfect sense because that immediately dumps you into the are there any real altruists out there uh scratch an altruist and a narcissist beled sort of thing that anything within the realm of self-c constraint and forward-looking pro-sociality and all of that what somewhere in there is running in between the lines is the Golden Rule and in the long run this will be better if I do this and what def species is you know two lobsters can do Game Theory dominance displays um but we are the species that is dominated by the concept of in the long run with the Lu or the more frontally regulated among us but that's absolutely the heart of it and which has always struck me sort it's very easy to like 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 uh 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 G to decide is okay to do tomorrow and what right slope are we G 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 uh what winds up being uh you know the easiest possible solution to maximizing everyone's good looks a whole lot more palatable yeah well those 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 that all that indicates and I think this is what you're pointing out all that indicates is that there are often conflicts between what seems morally appropriate immediately and what seems morally appropriate when it's iterated and sometimes those conflicts are going to be intense and of course those are the ones that we have a very difficult time calculating and no wonder but I would also say th 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 now you talk a lot in the book about Tit for Tat and so why don't you outline that for people too cuz lots of people listening again this is one of these things that just sounds it sounds trivial when you first encounter 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 um repeated rounds of an unpredictable number if you're going to have competive interaction with someone do you stab them in the back or do you cooperate or 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 Saab them in the back if you have only one round that you're going to interact with and then you get this horrible regressive thing that if you're going to interact with them for two rounds what's the logical thing to do on the second round stab them in the back so you've already defaulted into knowing that the second round is going to be non-cooperation so what do you do in the first round you already know the second round is a given so you might as well stab them in the back on the first one and if there's three rounds you go backwards and at every one of those points if you're hyper rational no matter how many rounds ahead of you there are if you know how many there are going to be the only like uber spocky and logical thing to do is to never ever cooperate where the Breakthrough comes in is when you don't know how many rounds there are in the future and that's where you get selection for cooperation that's where you see a world of differences in social species who were migratory versus ones who were 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 human living in a s sary 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 gonna 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 um what you allude to is like the poster child the fruit fly of people who do Game Theory studies the prisoners 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 you stab them in the back they get a tremendous loss and you get a huge number of brownie points and conversely if they've suckered you into being cooperative and then they stabbed you in the back you're way be so this whole world of when do you coopera and when do you do anything other than that always within this realm of multiple rounds but unknown number so this guy Robert Axel Rod who's like this senior major figure in sort of political science um teamed up with this evolutionary biologist um WG Hamilton one of 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 prisoners dilemma and have each one of them tell us what would their strategy be when playing the prisoners dilemma how would you do an unknown number of rounds and maximize your wins at the end and they asked like Nobel PR Peace Prize winners and Mother Teresa and prize Fighters and Warlords and mathematicians and they collected just a zillion people's different strategies and then they ran this round robin tournament on this like ancient 1970s computer of just running each strategy against all the other ones a gazillion round to see which one worked best which one won or in the terms that evolutionary biologists quickly started using which strategy drove all the others into Extinction and the thing that flattened everybody was you had these people putting in these algorithms and probabilities and fuzzy logic and God knows what and the one that beat all the others was the simplest one out there tit fortat 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 stabed you in the back when you get two jerky cheaters together all do is constantly stab each other in the back and they get 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 because right right Cooperators find each other and this strategy out competed everyone and everyone couldn't believe it because of how simplistic it was and that was exactly it was a 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 uh the other player who had like sinned against them corrected their ways it was forgiven and it was as simple and this out competed all of the other on and what everyone sort of in the zoology World went about saying at that point is oh my god do animals go about tit fortat 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 and all sorts of species to solve the prisoners 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 with like phenomenal interesting findings where if you like experimentally manipulate one animal to make it look like they're not reciprocating and something that somebody else just did for them and everybody punishes them one round afterward and they go back to cooperating again and everyone forgives them that's tit for Te all sorts of species out there were doing tit forat fabulous example of this um I am forgetting his name Wilkinson uh studies bats bats some bat species they all do communal nesting stuff all the female bats have all their nest together and they're communal in this literal sense they're vampire bats which means they fly out at night and they like get blood from some cow or some victim or whatever and they're not actually drinking the blood they're storing it in their throat sex and they come back to their nest and what they do is they discourage the blood then to feed their babies and the hugely Cooperative cool thing about the species is it's Cooperative feeding not just among like sisters but through that everybody feeds each other's kids that's great so they've got this whole collaborative system and it buffers you against one animals failure to find food one night and like everyone scratches each other's back and it works wonderful now make the bats think that one of them is cheating one of them has violated feeding all each other's kids social contract when the bat comes out of the cave or whatever you like net it and get a hold of the bat and you pump up the throat sack with air and you put her back there in the nest and she doesn't have any blood but everybody's looking at her saying oh my God look at how big her throat sack is look at all the blood she has and she's not feeding my kid she's reneging on our social contract here and the next round nobody feeds her kids for one round oh my God that has evolved the optimal prisoners dilemma strategy of Tit for Tat this was like phenomenal what people then began to see was out in the real world straight tiit for Tad is not quite enough but suppose you get a signal error and this is straight out of I don't know we're we're roughly the same age I don't know if you grew up reading all those like cold war terrifying novels if there's a glitch oh yeah what what was it fail safe or something we're we're gonna drop a atomic bomb on Moscow by accident and the only way to prove to them was an accident they get to drop on on New York and tit fortad and all of that and what that introduced was the possibility of a signal error your operating but there's a glitch in the system and the other individual believes you just stabbed them in the back according to a recent report 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deductible you will never regret saving a child's life that's pound 250 baby or visit preborn docomo yeah I think virtualization probably increases signal error by the way you know I've noticed that well I've noticed that when I've put together business enterprises that um you can virtualize the cooperation but if any misunderstanding emerges it tends to Cascade very rapidly and you don't have you know one of the things you also point out and 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 Toof 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 um traditional communities is that if you're actually in an embodied space with people you can play multiple games with them 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 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 is now very narrow yeah yeah and so I'm very concerned about a lot of virtualization too because the other thing I think the 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 uh in your book there's a particular kind of strategy well it's the stab you in the back strategy essentially and if you 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 T 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 fortat well the you you bring up sort of the the artificial in 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 like 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 with them out of the this game but what you outline is instead the horizontal one okay I haven't had a gazillion rounds of this game with them but we're also break bread together and we also did this together and we also have our cultural share instead latal 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 when 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 there that's possible in your game theory universe and what you have to bring in is this radical like upending notion of forgiveness for 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 jerky 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 and 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 and 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 a shared culture might actually be the abstracted equivalent of a multi- situational of like an abstracted multi- situational game because like if I live in your neighborhood let's say and 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 prior luxury of being individuated instead of being treated like the Barbarian mob right and so that's not that's not Prejudice precisely it's just the extension of the inclusion of a game into everybody who shares our culture and and it would make sense that thing the thing is the 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 you also talk in your your your book about something very interesting which is something that's really puzzled me is I've not been able to figure out how honest cultures get a Toe Hold 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 they are in some very bounded circumstances but they can't play shared games very well that doesn't mature to until the age of three and so it's sort of a Hoban landscape among 2-year-olds I know there's exceptions to that but then as the brain matures then the capacity for shared gam starts to emerge right but the 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 Hoban 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 you I think maybe what you were pointing to in behave is the initiation of lowrisk trading games like 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 leave something that's sort of interesting but they yeah exactly that exactly that yeah yeah yeah so but but what's cool is that that requires and you 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 a upward spoering 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 3 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 uh 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 recip Right reciprocal iterative interactions so the Great and that you you you've honed in on the central question which is in a world in which there's nothing but backstabbers um how you jump started because if somebody suddenly like stands up and like recites the sermon from the mountain and say I am going to start cooperation everybody else is going to say you know what a schmu and stab him in the back after that and he will forever be one step how do you jump start it one of the ways that you point out is the like tiny tiny incremental upping of the investment and the chance you're taking another one like evolutionary biology people love this founder populations founder pop this is old population ecology term a land bridge disappears a something where you get a population that gets isolated they get cut off from the main population and what happens over times they get kind of inbred and thus you get a lot of like 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 landbridge 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 optimize tit for tatters meaning they're going to out compete everybody else until everybody else signs up on now becoming good guys okay so let let me ask you let me ask you about that here so I got a proposition for you 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 forat 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 consider considered across the longest possible span of time your descendants will outcompete 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 sacri 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 I can admire Sam's Mo 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 Interest there is a structure of iterated interactions right there's an emergent reality and as you said you could model that with tit fortat competitions in a computer landscape and that turns out to be ecologically generalizable so there's a 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 rep represent 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 it 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 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 is the 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 the afterlife like that's on a scale that's very very human it has always struck me like I I could not possibly be on thinner ice getting into comparative religion stuff here but it has always struck me that the the sort of Abraham and the Covenant and the people of the sick 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 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 nomatic 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 this retention retention and there's a great reward coming and everything about the New Testament is something phenomenal happened 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 Y is much more a product of religions of retention rather than religions of recruitment yeah well that that that bridge that you're drawing between the Long View and dopaminergic function is extremely interesting I 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 right so it's reinforcing what it's doing is actually reinforcing the in 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 sure you are the more you are able to foro 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 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 C 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 so 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 able do then your sacrifices are going to be rewarded by God whereas if you hold back 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 a deferred as a predictor of deferred future reward out of the landscapist established by the say the lyic system that's much more concerned with immediate gratification so it's sacrific compared to immediate gratification and then there's a discussion of what constitutes proper sacrifice exactly and that's where like you you 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 like mesolimbic cortical Pathways and we do it so that our great grandkids will have a better planet and we do it for an after like we do it on a well do you think there's any difference between that and the idea of an afterlife like 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 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 lasing longer than your lifespan this is a whole new ball game either in the form of there's an afterlife or in the form of I want to leave a planet for my great great grandchildren that's going to be a more peaceful wonderful one or even in the form of like every time you sit at like a a typical funeral where everybody's going through the usual eulogies of like distortedly amplifying the 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 like 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 than the students we train we would like to think people 300 years from now we to think we've composed the most amazing like mass and 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 a Paul Erick and think about what's going to happen to the planet in the century from populations or you could think about the afterlife or you but any of these are like radically human domains that's that extension of knowledge of of of knowledge out indefinitely into the future right which is something that that seems to characterize human beings and that might also be a consequence of cortical expansion right the the discovery of that infinite future yeah yeah and so okay so so let me ask you a question let me ask you a question about that too 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 and I 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 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 relationships 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 lyic system and you can do that with functional Imaging you could do that with something invasive with your blab 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 Paradigm 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 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 lights me I'm I'm on top of this I know that lever pressing I'm really good at it I'm in I'm in familiar territory exactly and I have agency and this is going to be great it's about the anticipation so why I have agent why 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 you said you're on top of it 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 very fundamental sense right because you know what to do there and it seems L logical and then you see this 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 go directed behavior all of that now you throw in this extra wrinkle like well we've been talking about are 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 complete sense of Master and agency over it 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 this I wolf from Schultz at Cambridge who like 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 why now let me ask you about okay so let me ask you about that so what that seems to me to indicate is that you've now entered an environment where 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 right 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 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 word into the neurochemistry you've introduced the word maybe and right maybe is intermittent re you know that's incredible yeah yeah yeah and what's always between the lines with maybe is exactly what you're outlining um if I keep pressing the lever I'm gonna figure out what the maybe is about and be able to turn I'm G 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 reward in reality it's on tenth of a thousandth perc chance but they understand your Psy sufficiently so that's intermittent partial reinforcement and that's why it grips you because it falsely signals it right it falsely signals novelty treasure and you can manipulate that now you 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 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 that the proportion of almost lined up tumblers increases with game play so then you'd have intermittent partial reinforcement combined with a novelty indicator that indicated that you were obtaining ma false Mastery over the damn game God you'd have old people glued to that nonstop because as soon as you switch from just going with maybe incredibly powerful though that is you switch over to almost yeah right almost almost and yeah do that like asymptotically and people will press lever press till like they die of starvation at their slot machine in Las Vegas Right comes over and feeds them for free yeah right not okay and so and so 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 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 rewards 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 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 someone 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 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 and but but yes and that is heroism that's I mean 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 G to press the lever twice as much 10 times as much more fervently I'm gonna cross my toes I'm gonna wear my lucky socks and underwear I'm gonna CH you know ritualistic whatever of 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 that's what dopamine is doing there that's why 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 there's nothing left to discover it's that so that's interesting interesting so 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 Poss there is predictability and and that's fine it's it's better than privation but it's not as good as an infinite landscape of future possibility right right so so you know doeski oh so go ahead if in addition not only do 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 like acculturated into whoa that's that yeah yeah you bet that hey so there's an analogy there there's an analogy there with with what you might describe as the the what the what would you say the admirability of fair play so imagine that you have a son who's playing a hockey game or a soccer game and he's like he's the star but then when he scores a goal he celebrates a little too narciss statistically and he Hogs the ball on the field right and then if his players his fellow players make a mistake he gets pissed off and has a little tantrum and you take him off the field and you say look kid 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 um 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 NeverEnding 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 when you 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 that's I think that's analgous to I think it's analgous 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 a ordance between that fair play ethos and that exploratory ethos maybe it is 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 You Know Jack PP the other thing he did that's so damn cool is Pep outlined the neuros circuitry 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 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 s two two threads from obviously completely different universes of showing the power of this exactly the point you bring up um which is in multiple games and multiple players in formal Game Theory like you you choose you you Foster cooperation if there's thirdparty punishment if you can right for being third party punish 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 end or from your mother that the long-term goals look very different when you're simultaneously involved in um teen different games at once with very different time coures well that's also relevant to that bat story you told a 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 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 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 it's a finite resource and hunting which is what the bats are doing is um 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 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 godamn 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 the the go 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 far 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 uh conforming and and forcing of reciprocity because Anonymous you can get away with it but in like a setting like that that's absolutely the constraining thing and you know what what's what's the term the best among hunter gatherers the insurance is somebody else having a full stomach yeah right precisely precisely well then you use 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 that's a reputation so that's actually rep 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 uh those economic exchange games where you where you identify two people you say look you're going to give this person sum 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 it's about 5050 but you know I've wondered too if if the best offer isn't 60 especially if you're doing it in front of a crowd because if you imagine you Weir and the best graduate supervisors do this by the way if you air continuously slightly on the side of generosity then my suspicions are is the acre long-term reciprocal reward of that would pay off better than just a 5050 Arrangement right and you could maybe see that with your yeah yeah exactly that well I think you see that with your wife too right is maybe you want to treat the people around you slightly better on average than they treat you because that way you're you're doing this you're making the the whole pie expand and including your own reputation then you get some interesting cultural stuff comes in because they've done all sorts of crosscultural studies of like ultimatum game play and and all of that and see tremendous cultural differences in whether it's 5050 514 9010 then you see there's a handful of cultures out there where you get punishment of generosity somebody makes this viewed as an overly generous offer and you punish them for it oh my God what is that about and that's this like pathological sort of Retribution sort of thing you're punishing them because if they get away with being generous like that people are going to start expecting you to do this yeah yeah yeah I see that in families that are pathological all the time if someone makes a positive gesture they'll get punished to death because of what that implies for the potential future behavor of all the other miscreant and what are those cultures like some of the ones where like God help you if you wind up being part of one of those ex Eastern block countries have the high R of this this paradoxical punishment for generosity oh this guy's just G to make us look good and then everybody's whoa that is a troubled Society well that's that's a vision of hell that's for sure where you're punished for that's what n said about punishment it's so 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 a because when you're punished for breaking a rule that validates the entire rule system and that's what used to predict the world so there's a relief in being justly punished so what n pointed out was if you really want to punish someone you wait till 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 you like you said you don't want to be in a society like that that's that's as maybe that's not as bad as it gets because things can get pretty bad but it's pretty bad well that that's a pretty good predictor of societies with Incredible rates of child bullying and spousal abuse and substance abuse and Social Capital that's gone down the drain and that's what those cultures alike um yeah that's a pretty bad World in which generosity is is explicitly an enthusiastically punished by the like crowd of Yahoo peasants who arve to like 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 fortat reciprocity is that like if you're really Alert in your local environment you can see people around you playing with the edge of additional generosity so they'll 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 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 get 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 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 R things even further that that's exactly it one one of the most like fascinating wrinkles in it in terms of like accounting for like the world's miseries and stuff is when you think about like dopamine what are what are the things we anticipate well if you're a baboon and I spent like 33 years of my life studying baboons in the wild during Summers if you're a baboon your your world of of pleasures and anticipation are pretty narrow like you get something to eat that you want you get to mate with someone that you want or you're in a bad mood and there's somebody smaller and weaker who you could like take out on with the impunity like that's basically the realm of Pleasures for a baboon and then you get to us and we have all that but we also have like liking sonnets and we also have taking cocaine and we also have solving Fat's Last Theorem and we also have you know we've got this ridiculously wide range of Pleasures like we can we're the species that could both secrete dopa do amine in response to cocaine or winning the lottery or multiple orgasms and also secrete dopamine in response to smelling the first great flour in Spring and it's the same dopamine neurons in all those cases and what that means is we have to have a dopamine system that can reset incredibly quickly because some of the time going from zero to 10 on the dial is you've just gone from no nice flower smell to nice flower smell and some of the time going from zero to 10 is you've just like conquered your enemies and gone over the Alps with your Elephants or something and this is fabulous we have to constantly being able to reset the gain on our doem well you all you point to something else there that's really cool too is that so now you could imagine a garden that has fruit in it and then you could imagine a garden that could even have more fruit in it but then you could imagine refining your taste so that you can now learn to take pleasure in things that wouldn't have given you pleasure before that's what artists do e is they offer people a differentiated taste so you know if 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 agree 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 an act here's actually a new source of reward right people do that when they invent a new musical genre or a new form of dance is right so not only can we multiply the rewards indefinitely if we're pursuing the proper pathway but we can differentiate the landscape of potential rewards I would say virtually indefinitely now that would be part of that prefrontal flexibility that can modify our underlying lyic responses too even though we're you know running down the same dopaminergic trackways let's say that the poor baboons run down which is totally cool and so human and all but has like this massive tragic implication which is the only way you could use the same dopamine neurons and same dopamine range from zero to maxing out for like both H and like Lottery is 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 like thing about the human predicament whatever was a great unexpected reward yet yesterday is going to feel like what you're entitled to today and is going to feel insufficient tomorrow so dovi in in in Notes from Underground he wrote a one of the world's most compelling critiques of what would you call it satiating utopianism so dovi 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 condition for the impetus to discover new Landscapes of reward and new forms of reward right because if you didn't habituate to what you already had you'd well I think you'd fall into a kind of infantile satiation and maybe you'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 this is a huge like uh half full half empty thing um we're the species that's always hungry because yesterday's excitement is not enough tomorrow and that means it's never going to be enough and we're the species that yearns in that way and is never satisfied and thus among other things were the species that then invents you know technology and poetry and and the m and wheels and fire and everything yeah it's like it's this double leg okay so so but I'm going to go back to this abrahamic story because it's very interesting in this regard right we talked about it already in relationship to the possibility of a particular ethos coming to dominate an evolutionary landscape but something very interesting happens at the beginning of the abrahamic story and Abraham is the father of Nations so this is a good classic narrative example so Abraham is actually fully satiated at the beginning of that story because he's like 75 and he has Rich parents and all he's done his whole life is like laying the hammock and eat peeled grapes and like he has everything he he needs absolutely everything and then this voice comes to him and says this isn't what you're built for you should get the hell out there in the world right and Abraham hearkens to that voice so to speak he leaves his satiated surrounding and he goes out into the world and actually what happens is quite catastrophic it's certainly not it's not a simple comedy the story because he encounters War war and famine and the an Egyptian tyranny and The Aristocrats conspire to steal his wife and he has to SAC he's called upon by God to sacrifice his only son it's like it's quite the bloody catastrophe but the idea in the story is that the path of maximal Adventure is better than the path of infantile satiation and so you might say human beings are eternally dissatisfied I mean that's one way of looking at it or you could saywell 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 Blood Hound being on the trail it's the pleasure of the hunt it's the pleasure of the adventure it's the pleasure of that forward seeking right and I like to think about it like Copus you know except that what Copus 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 to Ward 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 I I suspect that's what that dopamine system is actually signaling when it's that would make sense with regards to anticipation it's it's the happiness of pursuit rather than the other way around and that's incredibly addictive in that regard um you know you 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 in 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 to your last book and maybe your next one is that cuz you're looking for a solution to something like the human propensity for violence you know you might say well if we're not on the true adventure of our life which would be signaled by Optimal dopaminergic function let's say then we're going to look for all sorts of false adventures and some of those false Adventures are going to be addictive and some of them are going to be downright pathological you know you talked about the baboons who take pleasure in Pounding the hell out of this you know the 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 dopam energic 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 why why do you say that why do you say that why did that come to mind because like may may may you live in interesting times like right but one of the greatest curses you can place on someone is to give them precisely what they've always thought they wanted and yeah things get a little more nuanced than that and they're I I I love Bor B stories um his won the Immortals where off going through this traveler journeyer going through the deserts and the jungles and all of that searching for this Mythic tribe of Immortals and he eventually finds them because they found this river that you drink from it and you're Immortal and they've been Immortal and how cool is that and they're perpetually on the move because what they're doing is they're now looking for the Fable river that will give them mortality immortality turned out to be a total drag and they're going out of their 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 cone it's like a Zen cone except it was the ancient Jews that came up with it um what does The God Who is omniscient omnipresent and omnipotent lack and the answer is limitation yeah and so one of the one of the the cories of that is God and manner 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 a 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 a there's a there's an archive online this is very funny there's an archive online of Hau that's donated devoted to nothing but the lunch and meet spam there's like 50,000 haikus written about spam I think the 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 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 they seem like a particularly dismal primate species so what what's it been like spending the time out there in the baking sun watching these like pretty brutal animals go at each other for 30 years there's they're perfect they're perfect for what I study my my sort of roots as a scientist was as a stress physiologist and yeah kind to 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 what do it depends on who you are in your society and social Rank and all of that um 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 very what does it have to do with their Rank and patterns of social stress and patterns of affiliation and basically health psych B um and why them they were the perfect species to study because they're out on the Serengeti which was my field site um which is an amazing ecosystem like if you're a baboon you live in these through 50 to 100 animals or so out in the savannah um Nobody messes with them once once a year a lion picks off someone most of the time you can't touch them with that um infant mortality is lower than among the neighboring humans and you only spend three four hours a day doing your day's foraging what that means is you've got like8 n hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress for everybody else they're exactly like us none of us get ulcers because we're like fighting for canned food items and bombed out souit netw works 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 n 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 like I I have I did not grow to love a whole lot of them over the decades but wow they're maavan backstabbing and all their their highest calling in life is to make some other baboon miserable right right so communal Psychopaths so so you did point out in in in in in your book that you studied a baboon troop where there where because of a a historical accident there was a plethora of females and then that took a lot of the competition stress away from the males and they actually started to become more civilized and so I have two questions about that it's like why did the baboons take the psychopathic prick route on The evolutionary Highway and what does the fact that that even what does the fact that that's modifiable it's quite strange really you know that it's modifiable what does that have to say let's say about free choice in the baboon world whether or not it's necessary to organize your whole society on on the grounds of you know tit fortat psychopathy it tells you it takes some pretty special unique circumstances to jumpstart all the barriers to cooperation um right right looking at okay you can have one person who's willing to gamble an iny bit of vulnerability to see if somebody reciprocates or you can have a Founder Effect of an inbred cooperating group or you can have you know a whole bunch of ways of of jump starting it um but then you get a totally quirky unpredictable event which was the thing that happened with my baboon troop this was a a troop my wife and I studied for years and they had an ecological unprecedented disaster thing that happened at one point there was outbreak of tuberculosis not among my baboons but among the neighboring baboons one one troop over a troop that was living off of the garbage dump at a tourist launch and which is where the tubercular it was tubercular meat coming from the tourist LA and tuberculosis you know it takes Thomas M 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 weeks it's like it's a wild fire in terms of how destructive it is um so you had this neighboring Troop that had you know Pig Heaven they had this garbage dump from a tourist launch 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 frop and showed they got the star and metabolic syndrome they got elevated tries they got borderline diabetes like yeah like us the same but they had better infant survival um 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 are pissed at who's this Outsider coming in here 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 baboom do most of their like affiliative socializing sitting there grooming each other these are guys who not only were willing to fight for food but it was a much higher priority to them when sitting around and grooming somebody and being nice right right right socially affiliate 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% which some of them were high ranking but some of them were like hyper androgenic jerky adolescent males who were like spending all day starting fights they couldn't finish it wasn't just a rank thing you didn't lose the dominant 50 right you lost the 50% with the aggressive unsocialized personalities and that left like a completely different cohort of males it left you twice as many females as males for one thing which you don't normally see in a baboon troop so all these females who suddenly had a whole lot to gain from not having baboons be male baboons be the jerky displacing aggression that characterizes them where they're in a bad mood and if you're small or 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 troop which was great and totally amazing and Isn't that cool and what was also cool with stress hormone levels which is what I was able to studying these guys way down in them and their immune systems were working better yay baboon Utopia all of that so at that point like sort of reality intervened and I couldn't look at that troop for about a decade um game Park politics or whatever but a decade later I was finally able to get back to this troop and it was the same culture the same wonderful culture wow wow wow not every one of those well so that's another that's another example in principle of how cooperation could initiate right is that you could have a a circumstance at one point where the real Pricks get wiped out for for some 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 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 fortat 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 in GRE conspicuously that's that's the payoff for it but the thing that was most remarkable there is uh 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 trop which could be next door her could be 60 miles away they wind up being this like sniffly little parasite riddle kid who shows up five years of working their way up the ranks and all of that and so it's this transfer business 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 adolescence they had joined in and and they were still civilized they had learned we don't do stuff here like that wow that's amazing that's really amazing cultural transmission and what became like so damn interesting to look at is how were they doing it how were they transmitting this culture and the best we were able to figure out it wasn't observational it wasn't that like these new horrible kids show up and they just watch all these other like male baboom being nice because there's zero evidence for observational learning of any sort of cultural transmission of stuff like that who whoever discovers that is going to be the like the king of non-human culture stuff so it wasn't that so then you wonder if there's self- selection um like it's only the nice guys who transfer into that troop the males typically they spend a few months they check out this troop they check out that one maybe it was self- selective I always call this the well who would choose to go to Reed College model right it's the hippie it's the hippie baboons yeah but as it turned out when these new guys joined the troop they were just as aggressive and displacing of like adolescence as adolescent showing up in any other troop they were it was not self- selection um and what it was was males males adult males were not dumping on females anywhere near as much as in the normal tro as a result female were much less dressed 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 fruit because the OD wow L and what you saw was in the 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 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 inev State them it was a default they defaulted they were not stressed and dumped on because the females weren't stressed and dumped on because the resident adult males were nicer guys this trickled down decrease of stress and they would default and six months into it they were like one of the regular old like commune hippies there it was transmission that's insanely cool that's an insanely cool story and so posit and optimistic that's it's amazing that you know given the multigenerational 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 single generation essentially I mean you you get a bit more than one generation there but that's transformation within a single generation it'sing anyone who says like humans don't have that much cultural malleability hidden in them um what baboons are more sophisticated and their their potential variety of of social systems anyone who says like humans are not capable of having a radical transformation blah blah like if baboom can do it and they were literally I I I studied at college with this guy Irv devor I think you overlapped with him when you were at Harvard who was like the king of B 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 literally wrote The Textbook about baboons and made them the textbook example of the inevitability of stratified male-dominated societies with high right right and like ridiculously inevitability because they go out and Hunt inevitably aggression patriarchy evil patriarchy exactly Dawn Of Man territorial 1960s Robert arrey stuff and like baboons were the textbook example and in one generation it could be transformed that's amazing then is uh what does in that culture were their vulnerabilities built into it right right right like are they as good at defending themsel against Lions for example probably though you know they probably are I doubt if I doubt if it's that simple it's that you get rid of the aggressive guys and they you know the hyper aggressive guys because they're not exactly heroic aggressive Defenders they're more like impulsive Psychopaths so I doubt very much that that would constitute a downside we have to stop we're 106 minutes in I don't want to stop because I didn't get to talk to you about stress which I really did want to talk to you about and we just barely touched on your fieldwork and so maybe we would have a chance to continue this discussion because there's lots of other avenues we could walk down especially on the stress front because there's like there's and there's more on the dopamine front too I talked to Carl friston about the fact for example that dopamine also signals incremental progress towards a valid goal and reduction in entropy so positive emotion signals reduction in entropy and negative emotion signal 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 spolsky 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 serengetti 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 and thank you very much I've been trying to get you on this podcast for a long time I'm a great admirer of your work I learned all sorts of things from you over the years that have been extremely useful to me so it's pleasure to talk to you and um 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 giddi with intellectual stimulation hey we got the dopamine circuits mutually entangled man we'll we'll we'll talk very soon and for everyone else bye and and we'll see you on another YouTube [Music] site

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 584,415

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: 3Pup-XSH98o

Length: 105min 36sec (6336 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023