There's levers and gears and buttons underneath the surface that you have no idea.
Whatever somebody does, it's a function or how do they become who they are.
Every time we figure out, oh, there really wasn't free will in this domain.
It had nothing to do with it.
This person had no control over that.
Every time we do that, the world becomes a much better place.
So we all like to believe that we have free will.
Like we have control over our choices and actions and lives like we're the sole author of
our decisions able to detect and avoid being controlled or influenced or manipulated
by either external or internal influences.
And sometimes we can own the fact that we'll share certain life circumstances or histories
that we have little control over.
They play into our choices.
But still, it's mostly us at the wheel, right?
Well my guest today, Robert Sapolsky, has a perspective that may just shatter that
notion entirely.
They kind of melted my brain to be honest.
And while I didn't want it to be true in the beginning, by the end of this conversation,
I looked at myself and the world and the whole notion of free will and how it plays into
our ability to live good lives just entirely differently.
Robert is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford.
In the recipient of many different honors, including MacArthur Genius Grant, he's the
author of numerous acclaimed books like Wise Ebers Don't Get All Ser's Behave and his
latest groundbreaking work that sparked this conversation determined a science of life
without free will.
Now in that book and in this conversation, he argues that free will is not just largely
but completely an illusion that our choices and behaviors are shaped by factors beyond our
control.
Things like our genes are neurowiring, our life experiences, cultural conditioning and
more.
It's a mind-bending premise that pulls the rug out from under deeply held beliefs about
everything from personal responsibility to justice and even the idea of meritocracy itself.
It will both rattle you but also open your mind to so many new ways at looking at your
life and how to understand and respond to yourself and to those around you.
In our conversation, Sapolsky deconstructs the idea of free will through this invigorating
tour of neurobiology, anthropology, psychology and more and he doesn't shy away from exploring
the profound implications that this perspective has for how we view criminal justice, achievement,
personal growth and the essence of what it means to be human.
You may want to brace yourself for a pretty fascinating dialogue that may forever alter
your perception of reality.
You may also want to share this episode with a friend or colleague because you are going
to want to talk about it with others.
I have literally been waiting for us to air this because of the conversations I want to
have around Robert's ideas.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
And one last thing, before we dive into today's conversation, I want to share a fun new project
that I have created for you.
It's a way to feel more alive and less alone.
So after taking a year's long hiatus from public writing, I'm back and with a new weekly newsletter
and community called Awake at the Wheel.
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And just on a personal level, I am just so excited to get back to writing in a more personal
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So go check out the latest stories and insights and see what this week's writing and conversation
prompt is now.
I think you'll really like it.
I'll see you over at Awake at the Wheel.
Just click the link in the show notes now.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
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The number of years back, you sharing a lecture about deconstructing the best and the worst parts of human behavior, which really seems like it ties into the argument behind this in a strong way.
Exactly what I was about to go into the one second before a thousand years before song and dance.
Somebody does something that behavior occurs and we ask that you pick with a human question, why did they do that?
Where you begin to see there's no free will, this first recognizing embedded in that is a gazillion different questions.
First off, what was going on in that person's brain a second ago?
Activation of this part, inhibition of this other part, all of that.
So, hooray, that supposedly explains it, if what happened in the last five seconds is all you need to know.
But that's not the case, because those neurons did what they just did in part because of what was happening in your sensory environment in the previous minutes.
What was happening in your internal sensory environment? Are you tired? Are you scared? Are you stressed? Are you hungry?
All of those will change the intense we form and what we do with them, all of that dramatically in some cases.
Okay, that by itself we haven't proven free will doesn't exist.
But now you got to say, well, what about this morning's hormone levels because they were making your brain more or less sensitive to this sort of sensory information and that could modulate things enormously.
And then you're having to say, well, what went on in previous months or years or decades? Did you undergo trauma where you stimulated environmentally?
Did you find God? Did you find love? Did you undergo sensory deprivation?
And like the sexiest field in neuroscience these days is neural plasticity.
Your brain is going to have changed in response to that and I don't even mean something subtle like, ooh, you make three and a half more copies of this neurotransmitter.
The total volume of areas of your brain change with stimulation, with stress, with depression, with trauma, with anxiety, where like you could see it on a brain scan.
It's not subtle. And thus the brain you have right at this moment deciding what you're going to do is in part sculpted by what's been happening in those recent months to years.
And now naturally you're back to adolescence and childhood and have a great surprise, lots of people fetal life because your fetal environment has a ton to do with the main thing you're doing is a fetus.
If you use a word through my brain lens, which is you're wiring up your brain, you're constructing it.
And then you got a three genes into it. And I don't mean genes in this. Oh my God, eugenics, Neanderthal sense of genes running us.
But instead, genes play a role. They modulate, they generate perclivities, vulnerabilities, all of that. And they interact with environment and what genes you have are going to be relevant.
And then weirdest of all is you got to say, well, what sort of culture were my ancestors inventing 400 years ago?
And so, you know, parenthesis and what sorts of ecosystems, because different ecosystems produce different cultures. And why is that possibly relevant because those ancestors 400 years ago, raised their kids to raise their kids to raise their kids to raise your mother to carry on those cultural values and within minutes of birth.
And what you're doing with you is already beginning to wire your brain in a way that's going to replicate the culture you're raised in. So you look at that.
And you think initially, you've got a simple version of why free will is ruled out. Okay, you can't rule it out with just neurobiology or just genetics or just cross cultural anthropology, but you put all these different fields together and collectively do that.
And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that.
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And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that.
And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, you're not going to be able to do that.
That's very uncomfortable. Two ways to sort of tackle that. The first one is like kind of a dirty trick on my part in the sense, you know, influences most people were willing to say, OK, your child had had influence. And what happened to you last month had influence influence influences. And maybe it's just influences on top of this core. Me thing existing inside there that somehow a separate of your brain.
And sort of the unfair trick that I do at this point is turn around to the people who believe in free will and say, Oh, it's proved there's no free will that is not just influences. And say to them instead, given what we know about one second ago, one year ago, and century ago, all of that, given what we know free will has to be defined as you've just produced a behavior that is free from your brain's history.
That is independent of it. And it's at this point that you say, OK, you're saying just influences. In other words, there's still some freedom show me a mechanism show me a brain that does something where if you had changed its last 10 hours and it's jeans and like what you had for breakfast and what your environment was like and etc, etc, etc.
You still would have done the exact same thing with the exact same moment. You would have just proven free will for my money and you can't. And there's no mechanisms by which the brain operates independent of its history not only is the past relevant, the past isn't even passed.
So that would be one response. The other is sort of a realm in which we're still thinking, ah, OK, nonetheless, there's free will that's massaged by influences because we can sit there and we can look back at events in our life.
We can look back and say, wow, that's so interesting. I was by age 20 mugging old ladies every single night in my neighborhood and I've been doing that for 37 years and then there was this one evening where I suddenly said, this isn't OK. And I'm going to start reading moral philosophers and I'm going to never do that. And you're transformed.
And you decided, I need to change. You didn't decide you need to change. You were changed by some sort of circumstance because you look at that person. You look at me in that example and say, how did I turn out to be this sort of person who valued reflection, who would sit there and say, you know what, this isn't really like a life's purpose or how did I turn out to be this sort of person when reflecting on something.
Would come up had been exposed to ideas like, oh, I'll become a Buddhist. I'll become a ethnic cleanser. How did you get those possibilities in your mind? How did you become the sort of person who would then have the discipline to say, OK, New Year's resolution.
Stop mugging people starting tomorrow. OK, the day after day, how did you become someone who would actually run through it. It is not by chance you got a brain that could stick with that decision.
And the point is, we don't change. We are changed by circumstance as a function of turned into going into that circumstance.
I'm wondering also if part of the knee jerk reaction can be to how we're actually defining the phrase free will.
Because I think part of it is people who look at that. And it sounds like your definition is, and tell me if I have this right, is for you free will would be the ability to make a choice that is completely and utterly dissociated with any historical context,
any biological genetic and environmental context. Is that about right?
Perfect. How have you got there? Doesn't matter.
Right. And I wonder if the common understanding of free will is a little different. I wonder if there's a semantic issue here where the more common understanding is.
I actually kind of agree with what you're saying, but I still call that free will because in the moment I feel like yes, I'm being influenced by all of these things.
But in the moment that I'm making the choice, I'm still choosing and that changes what you know it is it becomes the cause that leads to an effect.
Yeah, and here we're like, get ourselves married even further in semantics in this one second ago one century ago scenario as you sit there and you pick what flavor of ice cream.
You know, the labeling I would use you're not acting on free will at that point, but you are being a causal agent.
Yeah, you're causing something to happen. I mean, watch this. I just decided to lift my hands up. And as a result, I caused a gazillion quarks in this finger to move from here up to here.
Whoa, I just caused that causality. How do I turn out to be the sort of person with this moment would say, okay, I'm going to lift my hand and talk about quarks.
Yeah, in the moment there is this proximal agency and it's one that allows you to cause things to form intent to make a decision to choose among options and cause something to happen in the universe.
But that's not getting at the question of how you got to be that sort of person. And that would seem like, okay, we can all happily agree at this point. Okay, we can say there's free will as long as we're talking about this stuff you just decided to do five seconds ago.
And if we're defining free will in the context of all of history, then there's not free will. But okay, just in this little picture though, the trouble is somebody does something during that little picture like pull a trigger.
And we're willing to judge very harshly based on that somebody does something wonderfully kind. And we're willing to say something about praise and reward and something about their moral worth.
And the trouble is even if you are being a causal agent who is making the decision in that moment, that moment can't be separated from them. What we're mostly doing in society is judging people based on something they just did.
Oh my god, that jerk that cut me off in traffic. Oh my god, that person who just smiled very warmly at me. Oh my god, this person who just like open fire in a crowded mall or whatever. And that's where the, okay, let's agree on a truce here.
You got free will up to like 37 and a half seconds ago, but beyond that, now we're getting into that like biology stuff. No, it's one and the same. And we are willing to make our harshest to judgments when considering behavior that three seconds ago was the output of the entire universe that came before three seconds ago.
Yeah, I mean, yes, I'm nodding along. And it's still uncomfortable. Yes. Because we have this mythology that we want to buy into that says we have agency that when we make a choice, there's a certain quote purity to it.
You know, that that's mine. I can own that and that you know, it's not based on 1000 different influences potential manipulations that were intentional that led us to feel and see and be a particular way that then led to this choice.
We want to believe that in that moment, we have the ability to sus out what's really happening here and and be quote objective about this and you know, we love those words intentionality and agency because that's what you know, that's where the marrow of life lies when you can step into that zone.
And you're not entirely saying you're not saying we don't make choices. You're not saying we don't like exhibit behaviors and have.
Um, you know, and can direct those in particular ways. What you're saying is that the the underlying impulse to make those choices, which will then lead to something happening is is never as pure as we wish it would be.
Exactly. And probably a good rule of thumb is if you understand why somebody just did something, especially if you think you understand why you just did something, you're almost certainly wrong because there's all this subterranean.
Okay, here's like the no free will one or one example. This is like a classic thing in social psychology. You take somebody into a room of volunteer and there's like posters up on the wall of Hawaii.
And you take them and you ask them, what's your favorite detergent? And in this classic study, if up on the wall is a picture of the ocean.
And people become more likely to say their favorite detergent is tied. Oh my god, that's all you'd ask them, oh, well, why tell me I'll tell you about like how great it is or smells or how great a shirt that's been washed and tied feels on their armpits or who knows what and like you've just had the most baby step version of there's levers and gears and buttons underneath the surface.
Thank you have no idea. Okay, something much more consequential within the team. Same time span. Take somebody has sit them down and haven't fill out some questionnaire about their political views.
Their social politics, their economic, their geopolitical, all of that. And as shown now and replicated put them in a room that happens to smell of disgusting garbage and you can buy a little vile from a chemical supply company of disgusting garbage smell,
they're all vile as a put somebody in there and have them fill out the same questionnaire they filled out two weeks ago and there's no effect on their economic views and there's no effect on their geopolitical views and what our trade and balance with whose back is to and should be or whatever.
The average person will now become more socially conservative in their views. They are more likely to say, oh, when those people do that, it's wrong. It's not just different. It's wrong.
That shouldn't be allowed. That should be illegal. Know that you become more likely to confuse sensory disgust with what you perceive to be moral disgust. Oh my God, the smell of a room that you're in could make you as shown in the original study more or less likely to support gay marriage.
That was the original finding in those studies. That's pretty amazing. Another version of it back when you were fetus, how much stress hormones were you exposed to from your mother, how much was she secreting them because she was going to like glamas classes or because she was homeless or a refugee or whatever and whatever version of that.
That will have had epigenetic wiring instructions on your brain. So that is a result as an adult, you were more likely to see threat than other people do in a circumstances perfectly neutral. You're more likely to decide that person looks menacing this situation is dangerous.
And that influences how likely you are to act aggressively third example. So we've now just gone from smelling the room to what was happening when you were fetus studies now showing go back 400 years and look at your ancestors.
And you know who they were and it was just like one population and asked what was the infectious disease load your ancestors were dealing with and what that is sort of asking between the lines is how scary would it be if a stranger showed up because who knows what infectious thing they're carrying in here and infectious disease load 400 years ago is a predictor of to some degree somebody xenophobia.
And the culture they were raised in are you kidding the bubonic plague past that village never came there and that's where much more open to immigration or some.
Yeah is the smelly room effect gigantic know is the prenatal effect not gigantic know is the no all of these are small effects but put them together and you will see the
the strange people bringing infectious diseases is going to cause you to see threat where there isn't and is going to cause you to be more sensitive to this or that's it all the pieces merge together.
And in every case like sit somebody down and say wow you just went to a Trump rally and said immigrants are not people you know why that has something to do with the fact that your ancestors dealt with a lot of bubonic plague give me a break yet all those pieces are going in there and in the moment when you ask somebody to explain how they had that opinion they're going to come up with an explanation almost certainly has nothing to do they're not going to do.
They're not going to say oh because my second trimester fetal life was very stressful we're going to come up with attributions that have nothing to do with what actually went on.
Yeah I mean that last part I think is really interesting as well because what it speaks to is our lack of awareness of what's actually leading us to make a certain decision in any given moment in time and we will attribute to you know it to something that kind of seems obvious maybe there's a
recency bias like that's most recent thing that happened the most the last hour the last week the last month or a year well sure I can look back at that and point to that and say like this is why I did what I did.
And what you're saying is well yes and yes and and even yes and be suspicious of the recent things you think are relevant because it wouldn't come to mind that you like tied because of the poster up on the ball that you just looked at very recently.
Yeah is all this stuff going on underneath and when you look at where that stuff came from how much you didn't get to choose your ancestors were choose your jeans or choose which will you hung out for nine months and choosing choosing
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I mean I wonder if part of what is so uncomfortable about this idea also is this notion that two things one a sense of a lack of historical control over all the different things that have shaped us and that lead us to make a decision to see the world of particular way and make a call in this moment in time.
And I think that's always uncomfortable for us like we love to lock down the past in the future absolutely but then there's this other thing that you keep referencing which is that this sense of not fallibility but manipulability if that's even a word like this sense that even doesn't matter how smart you are doesn't matter how study you are how accomplished you are doesn't matter what status you have.
That there is something that we are all mildly to wildly manipulated by all of these different things on a perpetual basis and building on what you're saying we would like to think of if we're being manipulated or somebody is trying to convince us or quote con us or like get us to do a particular thing we can pick that out we're smart enough we're just
learning enough we're aware enough to think like I see what's happening here no no no it's not going to quote work on me. And what you're saying is well maybe there are circumstances where we do pick that up and and we can respond to it in a particular way but there are probably any number of other things that have manipulated us and shaped us in the past and probably right in this very moment that we are completely and utterly unaware of and that makes us feel kind of like we're more victims and I feel like that's probably the most important thing to do is to make sure that we are not going to be able to do something that we are not going to do.
And I feel like that's part of this desire to not want what you're saying to be true.
We're in products here's a great way of framing I'm not going to be manipulated that way you know you can raise your parents and all of their tastes and values and perks and the super season whatever and you turn out to be exactly like them.
Okay, so you could say there was not a whole lot of free will going on there. So now you're raised by your parents et cetera et cetera and you say oh I understand how they're trying to inculcate me with their values and I'm not going to fall to be manipulated that way and I'm going to do the opposite of them in every possible way.
You've just shown us little free will or if you do some of what they do and there was that influential teacher and as a result you changed doing this stuff that wasn't that's where that came from that's where the in all of those cases yeah rather than saying we are captives to our past we're nothing more than our past our past starting one millisecond ago all the way back.
Let's talk a bit about some of the implications of this in particular domains of life you referenced earlier and on conversation actually the notion of criminality and justice responsibility walk me through how these ideas influence that on individual and then at scale on a societal level how we think about responsibility and justice and punishment.
Yeah here's for people like fling down their their headphones and say this guy is completely off the other side but there's some very important implications there if you truly truly truly believe we are nothing more or less than the outcome of everything that came before over which we had no control blah blah blah if you really believe that it is never justifiable intellectually or ethically to blame someone for something to punish them for some of the things that are happening.
And then you can punish them for something to believe there's anything they could have done that makes them deserve a particular type of treatment especially one that turns blame and punishment into virtues is absolutely no room for that it makes no sense at all.
And as long as we're in the neighborhood of that hold up the mirror and you get the exact same conclusion with even tougher implications that it makes no sense to ever praise or reward anyone and meritocracies make no sense but we can get to that criminal justice realm what you're left with is it is never okay to work with retribution it is okay sometimes to use punishment as an instrumental sort of tool recognizing.
That it doesn't work anywhere near as much as we think and that we all have this implicit pleasure that we get from punishing right justly and there's actually a whole neurobiology that shows that and it's wild people love to punish right justly they will work they will press a lever they will give up little plastic coins that they've been given in this psych experiment to get the chance to light was a mild shock for this person who just is a jerk and some economic game.
Yeah there's room for that but nonetheless overall the criminal justice system makes no sense at all and any version of blame or negative judgment makes no sense at all.
Oh my god what kind of world are we going to have we do that and this is where people always freak out at this point saying everybody's going to run a mock everybody's not going to run a mock and there's a whole literature that shows if you raise people the right way
if they have reflected on the difficult questions of who am I and what's my place in the world where the roots of human goodness and why are we here and all of that if their conclusion is we are responsible for our actions or if their conclusion is we are nothing more than machines of fate if their conclusion is there is a god who is watching and judging us or if their conclusion is there is no such as is a deity if you get the people who thought long and hard and hard and we are not going to be able to do that.
But if you thought long and hard about it it almost doesn't matter which of those conclusions they're going to be high ethical compared to everybody else.
Okay so in other words if you do things right people won't run a mock and there's studies that show in facts it down the test subject and manipulate them saying scientists believe there's no free will or would and the average subject is more likely to cheat in an economic game immediately afterward.
Get somebody who shows up who already does not believe in free will and hasn't believed in it for years or years and they are as ethical from the first drop of moment there as a person who's highly believes human should be held responsible for their actions so people in general and not going to run a mock.
Oh my god though what are we going to do with the subset of people who are nonetheless dangerous we just have murderers run around the street and absolutely not you know saying you can't blame people you can't punish people as virtue and of itself doesn't mean we're going to have murderers around you got to protect people from them but you protect them in a way that has only constraint.
Do what's needed to keep them from being dangerous and don't do an inch more than that and don't preach to them about their crappy soul and what's an effort into finding out the root causes how do people like that become like that and what changes we can make and that's basically taking the public health model for infectious disease you quarantine the person you quarantine them the absolute minimum needed so that they're not infectious.
And you don't tell them that Satan has invaded their immune system and you go and you study like where devices come from how do we like get people clean or water or things like that and that seems like absurdly utopian but we do that all the time we do that so regularly we don't even see that we're doing it you got an airline pilot and they've got hay fever and they're taking some anti-histamines and as a result the rule is they can't fly for a while.
They can't fly for about three days afterward because it makes you drowsy you realize through no fault of their own they are dangerous to society they sure should not be flying an airplane right now and you can strain them you quarantine them but you don't tell them that they're a bad soul sleeping with Satan because they get hay fever and like you contribute three dollars to the people who are trying to get the next version of anti-histamines that won't make you drowsy or something we do that all the time and.
And things work just fine and we do that all the time even in realms where like our most you know for all the visceral adivistic stuff comes pouring out we figured out about 400 years ago old women with no teeth do not have the powers to control weather they can't do witchcraft they're not responsible for the lightning storm last night that took out your crops so don't burn them at the stake there's no free will in.
The weather we figured that out and it became a much better world when we stopped burning old ladies at the stake it became a much better world about 150 years ago when wet most of Western culture figured out that epilepsy is not a marker of demonic possession it's a marker you got like screwed up potassium channels in this party your brain and we've got rules if someone is having uncontrolled seizures they can't drive a car and we're protecting society.
Protecting society from them but you don't get a whole band of like gorgeous peasants showing up with their pitch forks to burn the driver's licenses of the epileptics no we have been able to detach the behavior from anything resembling judgment and you know not only has the roof not falling and the world becomes a more humane place and over and over historically with mental illnesses with learning differences with people who are totally disciplined.
And yet somehow they are still overweight every time we figure out oh there really wasn't free will in this domain it had nothing to do with it this person had no control over that every time we do that the world becomes a much better place so this is a great thing to strive for and it is great as you look there and you want to judge somebody for something awful they've done remember if you were sitting around 400 years ago you knew that you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were sitting around and you were
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It's interesting as you're walking through the different examples. My sense is that most people could wrap their head around the fat that if somebody was diagnosed with a mental illness, if somebody if you could look at somebody's brain and see a physiological anomaly, a dementia tumor or something like that, that you could sort of readily point to and this would affect their perception, their choice, their behavior in the identifiable way that led to a particular type of outcome that was not desirable and maybe harmed
by the physical, you know, when there's something that we can point to that's in a DSM or in a physiology manual or something like that that exists largely in a brain or within a person's body that we're more comfortable looking at that, you know, whatever the outcome is and saying, oh, I can track it back to this so I can quote, forgive that or I can understand it or I can see how the appropriate response to this is not retribution but is let's understand what's happening here and see what is the best possible therapeutic modality that is not retribution but is let's understand what's happening here and see what is the best possible therapeutic modality that is not retribution but is let's understand what's happening here and see what is the best possible therapeutic modality that is not retribution but is let's understand what's happening here and see what is the best possible therapeutic modality that is not retribution but is let's understand what's happening here and see what is the best possible modality that is not retribution but is let's understand
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and I went back and I'm incredibly embarrassed the word meritocracy appears once in the book. I don't mind just saying, obviously, the supplies through meritocracy as well and like just as someone who had every bit of bad luck shouldn't feel like there are rotten failure of the human whatever whoever wound up having the corner office is not intrinsically of more moral worth and the rest of the sets of the thing but one word and because when I think about it it was probably only meant
to mention points because it's a much harder problem. Okay, there's no free will and some people want to be damaging constrained them don't preach to them can strain them the absolute minimum and otherwise they go about their life and that sort of thing. Oh, there's some people who turn out to be absolutely essential to society. You know, you want to protect society from dangerous murderous people on the street. Similarly, with the mirror up there like you get a brain
tumor, they don't want you don't want them to pick a random person off the street who's going to operate on you to you need like qualified people who are capable and have done the hard work and at the criminal justice and just figure out how to constrain people at the end of you want capable people.
You got to motivate people. How are you going to get somebody to every single Saturday night throughout college their roommate is out partying and falling down drunk and they're still working they're still studying they're still how do you motivate people to do the incredible amounts of hard work needed to wind up being capable enough to do some of the things in society without telling them they earned it.
They're special. They are of more value and more worth and deserve better health care and deserve a better selling off.
And that one's a huge problem. I mean, thank God you've got the total weirdo outliers. You got the people who like, you know, you hardly pay them anything and they're working 80 hour weeks and still they would try to pay you to study get go physiology because that's all they've been thinking about since they were eight years old.
Okay, they're the they're the weirdo outliers. There's some sort of mirror version of sociopaths where it doesn't matter what you do with them. There's still going to be sociopathically remorseless.
It doesn't matter how hard you make these people work to get grant funding. They're still going to want to understand this little organelle and this type of cell or whatever and like give up anything to do. Okay, so they're the weird outliers.
It's how you do the motivating for everybody else to do the hard work needed to become a good architect, a good artist, a good surgeon, a good any of those things a good those take a lot of work and we want to protect society from people doing difficult important jobs who are not capable of it.
But how do you do it without telling these people, wow, you're so great. You're so great with your SAT scores. You're so great with your prestigious university degree.
And that's a really tough one. Maybe it is asking way too much for people to feel gratitude for how they happen to turn out.
Like you've got like some concert pianist and this is someone who is not going to say, damn, I did 10,000 hours of practice and I like had no social life and all that for somebody to just sit there and say, wow, how cool is that that my fingers can produce emotions and audiences.
Like that's asking for a lot for that sort of detachment. Maybe the way to start is insofar as most of our self worth is built around how people view us.
Maybe it's asking people to do this transition from wow, I am so grateful that you're this kind person you just help me to wow, I am so grateful that you turned out to be the sort of person who could help me in that circumstance and show that kindness.
That sounds like superficial like some that's not semantics. It's yeah, you turned out this way and I'm glad you're here is maybe a prerequisite for being easier for us to then say, yeah, I feel grateful that I turned out to be the sort of person who could be kind and empathic or smart or motivated or self-discipline or anything.
But yeah, that one is going to be uphill haul because yes, it's complicated. Yeah, that one. If you think it's like stupid, you told me to say, oh, we'll get rid of prisons and just don't preach to people and just like make sure they can't harm people and don't tell them they're like that's trivial compared to the job that's going to go into getting somebody to do 15 years of training to become a cardio thoracic surgeon or something.
Or become mother Teresa or whatever. Yeah, and I mean, if you just rely on as you described earlier, there's some people are just wired to yeah, yeah, a friend when I was a kid who picked up a guitar and basically never went to class after that because there was just something about it that he just ended on the rare occasions when he went to class, he went straight home afterwards and he would practice until he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore.
And he fell asleep and he turned out to be a phenomenal musician, you know, nobody's making him do that. There was something that was about the way that he was wired, his conditioning that when he started with this thing, all he wanted to do was more of this.
And on the one hand, you could say, well, let's help everybody figure out like how to like identify that intrinsic impulse and then align it with some form of thing that they can contribute to the world.
And maybe we get like a little bit of salvation happening there and like we get the, you know, the societal impact we want.
But then what about all of those jobs where we don't have enough people who have that impulse. And yet we really, really need those cardio thoracic surgeon and those, you know, these people like that, like for the trash collectors.
Right, exactly like the fundamental services that we all just so often take for granted, but it is absolutely necessary for us to be okay.
Yep, that's a tough one. And I think a sort of your friend with the guitar and other such people. All we can do is look at them as like these magnificent weird outliers and like you spend your time around research scientists.
And there's an awful lot of them. And that's how we became who we are. But okay, yeah, they're like some flipped version of sociopath.
You couldn't stop them from wanting to play the guitar or study the life of the obscure historical figure, whatever it is that's gotten them.
Or to want to do like the most beautiful rose selective, the natural artificial selection to produce the perfect prize rose or and like wherever these like obsessions come from.
Yeah, we're lucky to have those people, but they're few and far between the much bigger one is, you know, I'm tired. I'm tired. I can't concentrate.
I'm having trouble remembering why I'm doing all of this. I'm having trouble dealing with the fact that I've chose a path where 95% of the time is not going to work because I'm trying to do something really, really hard.
All these versions of those. And yeah, that's going to be a very tough one. If you're not coming to somehow, you know, brainwash that person to thinking that they have a moral worth that stands on its own because they turned out to have the ability to do this.
And yeah, that one's really hard.
Yeah. And maybe part of what you were talking to and you described it as like a pretty subtle distinction, but actually think it's substantial is acknowledging the potential social context, you know, the social currency, the connection to the need to belong and be seen or status, like, you have a certain position within a community.
And if we know that we're influenced by everything anyway, yes. And we know that we're definitely influenced by a lot of sort of, you know, like, in this of a social context, what if we actually try to massage those?
Yeah.
In a way that, you know, inspired people to say yes to certain things that we all could really benefit from.
Not acknowledging that we're not looking to make somebody miserable in the name of making everybody else better, but like something that they'd be fine with. But we need more of this in culture and society.
And this is a way to help us feel like, you know, we're getting the benefit of not just doing the thing, but also that the glow of being held in a certain esteem.
And that blend is like, I'm okay with that.
And even if it's this detached esteem of it's not me, it's how I turned out this way and I had no control over it.
We're social primates. We're conformist. And if we create a world in which people no longer say, I'm so grateful for you.
I'm so grateful for how you turned out to be you instead.
No, that's going to be very reinforcing, even if you just do something wonderful for someone and they say a version of that second one, they say when you see your mother next tell her she did a good job.
So even that feels good.
Or when you do something and I say, I have no idea how and how you're able to do that athletic thing, that intellectual thing, whatever.
How you turned out that way is what is being said between the lines. We feel good at that also.
You know, if we raise our kids that that's where goodness comes from and what you do when there's badness is stop and think how did that person become who they are.
And it was for reasons. I have no idea of because I've been so much luckier than them.
You know, you get a whole world growing up where they now say, I am so glad you turned out to be this sort of person.
That's good and feel good. We don't say rulers are divinely picked by God anymore. We say, oh, you're a very effective campaigner on the campaign trail and have charisma.
We're like getting more plausible versions of what we give people feedback about.
So I go spend a couple of generations raising kids with that mindset and we will feel motivated to work that hard to become a competent cardio thoracic surgeon because you were going to feel grateful that you turned out to be someone who could save people.
And they're going to tell you that they're grateful that you turned out to be that person.
So maybe that's the 50 year plan for doing this.
Well, I'm on board with that 50 year plan. So it feels like good place for us to come full circle in this conversation to Robert. So in this container.
Good life project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes out?
Well, to be one where you can do good and feel pleasure as a result of that and understand how you wound up where you are and to put that in context and do the same thing for everyone else.
And I would say even if all this like science, neurobiology, et cetera stuff lead to the conclusion that we're just biological machines just like everything else that's alive.
We're the only biological machines that can know we are biological machines and know where the buttons are and the levers that make us more patient or more and any of these versions of.
You know, no, the neurobiological self in a sense. And remember, even if it seems ridiculous to think that it's ever possible for something good to happen to a machine, it's a good thing when good things happen to us.
Even if we are machines, somehow you got to live with that contradiction and derive meaning from that.
Hmm, thank you. Okay, before you leave if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Milton Glazer about how different people and experiences influence your path.
You'll find a link to Milton's episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me Jonathan Fields,
editing helped by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on this episode.
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Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.
