Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a primatologist, neuroendocrinologist, and author of multiple books, including the upcoming Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. In this episode, we discuss Game Theory and how it applies to human behavior, the unexpected success of the tit-for-tat negotiating principle, the role of the neurochemical dopamine in reward, reinforcement and the anticipation of the future, and the potentially objective reality of transcendent ethical structures operating within the biological domain. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.B. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Today's guest: Dr. Robert Sapolsky, author of the new book, Determined, A Science Of Life Without A Free Will: The New Science of Free Will, joins us to talk about Game Theory, Tik-Tat, and why it's so important to understand the nature of morality in the animal world, primatology, neuroscience, and neuroscience. in this episode of The Daily Wire Plus. Subscribe to DailyWire Plus to get immediate access to all the latest news and access to the latest episodes of Dailywire plus. To find a list of our newest episodes, go to dr. dr. Jordan Peterson's newest series on Dailywireplus.ca/Dailywireplus and get notified when new episodes go live! Subscribe today! Learn more about your ad-free version of the podcast, subscribe to our newest episode of the show, "Dailywire Plus! Subscribe to our new podcast, "The Mindful Minds Guide" Subscribe to the Daily Wire Podcast! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes or wherever else is listening to the podcast? Subscribe on the App Store or wherever you get your favorite podcast? Subscribe on Podcasts? Learn about the latest episode? Become a supporter of the series? Leave us a review on iTunes?
00:00:00.940Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone watching and listening.
00:01:11.240Today I'm speaking with primatologist, neuroendocrinology researcher, and author of multiple books, including the upcoming Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will, Dr. Robert Sapolsky.
00:01:26.240We discuss game theory and how it applies to human behavior, the unexpected success of the tit-for-tat negotiating principle, the role of the neurochemical dopamine in reward, reinforcement, and the anticipation of the future, and the potentially objective reality of transcendent ethical structures operating within the biological domain.
00:01:51.400So I was reading Behave in some detail.
00:01:55.400I've read a number of your other books. I've followed your career for a long time.
00:01:58.880I'm very interested in primatology and in neuroscience, so that makes for interesting reading as far as I'm concerned.
00:02:05.800The thing that really struck me in Behave are the sections on game theory, and I wanted to start talking about game theory because, first of all, the terminology is strange because game theory, I mean, you could hardly imagine something that might sound more trivial than that.
00:02:25.820I mean, first of all, I mean, first of all, 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.
00:02:33.900It's unbelievably important, you know, and I kind of stumbled across it sideways.
00:02:37.820I was reading work by Jack Panksepp, who did a lot of work with rats, and Panksepp showed that if you paired rats repeatedly together, juvenile males, and you allowed them to play, the little rat who had to invite to play once dominance had been established, he would stop inviting to play if the big rat didn't let him win 30% of the time in repeated bouts, say.
00:03:03.460And I thought, oh my God, that's so cool, because what you see there is something like an emergent morality of play in rats merely as a consequence of the repeated pairing of the same individuals, you know, across an indeterminate landscape.
00:03:19.160And that's an unbelievably compelling and stunning discovery, because it indicates something like the emergence of a spontaneous morality.
00:03:30.100Now, 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?
00:03:40.200We can talk about tit for tat and the variations, but please let everybody know what game theory is and why it's so important.
00:03:47.260Sure. Maybe, well, just emphasize the point you made right from the start that this is not fun in games.
00:03:53.560But game theory was mostly the purview of war strategists and diplomats and people planning, you know, mutually assured destruction.
00:04:08.200At some point, the biologists got a hold of it, and especially zoologists.
00:04:13.840And 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, whatever, you're going to have to have a heart with its walls that are this thick or this, like, vascular properties.
00:04:40.460And then the scientists go and study it, and that's exactly what you see.
00:04:48.260Or, like, you look at desert rats, and you do all this theoretical modeling stuff and figure out if they're going to survive in the desert, their kidneys have to retain water at this unbelievable rate.
00:05:00.580And then people would go and study it, and that's exactly how the kidneys work.
00:05:05.240And it's not so amazing, because, like, if you're going to have giraffes shaped like giraffes, the heart has to be that way.
00:05:12.360There is an intrinsic logic to how it had to evolve.
00:05:16.340And if you're going to be a desert rodent, there's an intrinsic logic to how your kidneys go about living in the desert.
00:05:22.840And the whole notion of game theory, as applied to evolution, animal behavior, human behavior, et cetera, is there's an intrinsic logic.
00:05:33.380The 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.
00:05:46.380And 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?
00:05:55.760So, you talk about, all right, so let's review that for a minute.
00:06:03.000So, your point, as I understand it, is that there's going to be necessary constraints on the physiology of an organism.
00:06:14.960And those constraints are going to be reflective of its environment and the peculiarities of its morphology.
00:06:21.920And you can predict that a priori, and then when you match your predictions against observation, at least some of the times they match,
00:06:30.120there's an analogy between that and behavior in that you can analyze the context in which behavior occurs and the physiology of the organism.
00:06:41.780You do that in particular and behave as you map out the nervous system from the hypothalamus upward toward the prefrontal cortex.
00:06:51.500There's going to be an interaction between context and physiology that's necessary.
00:06:59.760The context of behavior isn't the mere requiting of primordial and immediate needs.
00:07:08.960The 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.
00:07:20.900And there's something about repeated interactions that's absolutely crucial.
00:07:25.140So, one of the things you point out, for example, is that, and this was also true of Panksepp's rat studies.
00:07:34.060If you just put two rats together once, geez, the big rat might as well just eat the little rat because what the hell?
00:07:42.340You know, maybe he's hungry and the little rat can be a meal.
00:07:45.560And there are circumstances under which that occurs.
00:07:47.900But 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.
00:08:03.360Because you don't just have the requirement of satisfying the immediate need of the single individual right now.
00:08:11.820You have the problem of iterated needs across vast spans of time in a complex social environment.
00:08:18.240And a wonderful jargon for it is the shadow of the future.
00:08:25.040Let's talk about that, which is a wonderful, poetic way of, yeah, exactly that notion.
00:08:29.920Yeah, well, and the future has a shape too, right?
00:08:33.460Because the farther out you go into the future, the more unpredictable it is.
00:08:37.600But it doesn't ever deteriorate exactly to zero predictability.
00:08:41.140And I know there's a future discounting literature that's associated with time preference that also calculates the degree to which people regulate their behavior in the present in accordance with likely future contingencies.
00:08:54.880One of the things you point out, and this is one of the ways your book is integrated, I believe, is that as you move upward in the hierarchy of the nervous system towards the more recently evolved brain areas, let's say, towards the prefrontal cortex,
00:09:12.300the more you get the constraint of immediate behavior by future, what would you say, future contingencies, right?
00:09:22.500And you describe that in behave as difficult.
00:09:25.880It's very easy to fall prey to an immediate impulse.
00:09:29.020Anger is a good example of that, or maybe fear, right?
00:09:31.660That grips you and forces you to act in the moment.
00:09:34.560But you want to constrain your impulses, which would be manifestations of brain circuits that are much more evolutionarily ancient.
00:09:43.520You want to constrain those with increased knowledge of multiple future possibilities in a complex social landscape.
00:09:51.040And those are also somewhat specific to the circumstance.
00:09:53.880So 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.
00:10:06.560But the fundamental point is that in game theory is that the consequences of your immediate action have to be bounded by the future and by the social context.
00:10:17.000So I was thinking about something here recently.
00:10:19.020You tell me what you think about this.
00:10:20.300Because you write a little bit about religious issues in your book, too, although not a lot, but some.
00:10:25.660So I was thinking about this notion that you should love your enemy as yourself and that you should treat your neighbor as if he's yourself.
00:10:33.520I mean, one of those is an extension of the other.
00:10:36.380And I think there's actually a technical reason for that.
00:10:41.880So the first question might be, what is yourself, the self you're trying to protect?
00:10:48.120And one answer to that is it's what you want right now and what would protect you right now.
00:10:53.880But another answer is, yeah, fair enough, you know, now matters.
00:10:58.060But there's going to be you tomorrow and you next week and you in a month and you in a year and five years.
00:11:03.040And what that implies is that you yourself are a community that stretches across time.
00:11:10.400And as that community, you're also going to be very varied in your manifestation.
00:11:15.380Sometimes you're going to be like top lobster and dominant as hell.
00:11:18.620And sometimes you're going to be sick and in the hospital.
00:11:20.960And there's going to be a lot of variation in who you are across time.
00:11:24.660And so if you're treating yourself properly in the highest sense, you're going to treat yourself as that community that extends across time.
00:11:34.420And then I would say there's actually no difference technically.
00:11:37.500And maybe this is a game theory proposition.
00:11:39.280There's no difference between that technically and treating other people well.
00:11:43.960Is that you're a community across time, just like the community is a community.
00:11:49.600And the ethical obligation to yourself as an extended creature is identical with the obligation that you have all things considered to other people.
00:12:02.160So I'm wondering what you think about that proposition, if that makes sense to you, if you think there might be exceptions to that.
00:12:07.380That makes perfect sense because that immediately dumps you into the, are there any real altruists out there?
00:12:15.380Scratch an altruist and a narcissist lead sort of thing.
00:12:19.840That anything within the realm of self-constraints and forward-looking pro-sociality and all of that, what's somewhere in there is running in between the lines is the golden rule.
00:12:35.020And in the long run, this will be better if I do this.
00:12:40.380And what defines the species is, you know, two lobsters can do game theory dominance displays.
00:12:48.200But we are the species that is dominated by the concept of in the long run.
00:12:54.660Or the more frontally regulated among us.
00:12:58.780But that's absolutely the heart of it.
00:13:02.260And which has always struck me, it's very easy to, like, dump on utilitarian thinking.
00:13:10.080And 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?
00:13:18.640And would you convict an innocent person if that's going to make society better in all of those scenarios where utilitarian thinking just sticks in your throat?
00:13:31.860And where the resolution always is, is utilitarian thinking in the long run.
00:13:37.740If it's okay to do this, what are we going to decide is okay to do tomorrow?
00:13:42.620And what's the slope where we're going to be heading down?
00:13:46.380And it requires a sort of deep, distal, not just proximal, utilitarian mindset.
00:13:55.100And when you work in shadow of the future and in the long run, suddenly what winds up being, you know, the easiest possible solution to maximizing everyone's good looks a whole lot more palatable.
00:14:09.240Yeah, well, those strange questions that come up when people, they pick these contexts where utilitarian thinking seems to involve a paradox.
00:14:21.660I mean, those are paradoxes of duty and they do come up.
00:14:24.520But 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.
00:14:35.660And sometimes those conflicts are going to be intense.
00:14:38.880And, of course, those are the ones that we have a very difficult time calculating, and no wonder.
00:14:43.400But I would also say those are also the times when intense negotiation is necessary.
00:14:48.180You 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.
00:15:04.680And the fact that there's going to be conflicts doesn't invalidate the general necessity of having to consider iteration.
00:15:11.020Now, you talk a lot in the book about tit for tat.
00:15:14.500And so why do you outline that for people, too?
00:15:16.520Because lots of people listening, again, this is one of these things that just sounds, it sounds trivial when you first encounter it, especially the computer simulations.
00:15:24.040But it's absolutely, it's of stunning importance once again.
00:15:27.960So 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?
00:15:40.200Well, first off, just to sort of build on one of your points there, that repeated rounds, repeated rounds, repeated rounds of an unpredictable number.
00:15:51.380If you're going to have an interactive interaction with someone, do you stab them in the back or do you cooperate?
00:15:57.200And 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.
00:16:05.120The only real politic thing that anyone could ever do is don't cooperate, stab them in the back if you have only one round that you're going to interact with.
00:16:15.420And 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?
00:16:29.980You already know the second round is a given, so you might as well stab them in the back on the first one.
00:16:34.520And if there's three rounds, you go backwards.
00:16:37.140And 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.
00:16:53.580Where the breakthrough comes in is when you don't know how many rounds there are in the future.
00:16:59.840And that's where you get selection for cooperation.
00:17:04.520And that's where you see a world of differences in social species who are migratory versus ones who are not.
00:17:11.640If I do something nice to this guy, is he going to be around next Tuesday to help me out?
00:17:16.200Not if he's like a Syrian golden hamster.
00:17:21.060On the other hand, if he's a human living in a sedentary settlement, yeah, maybe if I could trust him or not.
00:17:28.460So, yeah, key point of an unknown number of rounds in the future, because you never know, you know, putting it most cynically, how much of a chance they're going to have in the future to get back at you if you were a jerk right now in the present.
00:17:43.400So, that emphasis on unknown number of rounds, what you allude to is like the poster child, the fruit fly of people who do game theory studies, the prisoner's dilemma.
00:17:56.180Where 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?
00:18:06.720And the way it works is, if you both cooperate, you both get a decent reward.
00:18:12.820If you both stab each other in the back, you both get punished to a certain extent.
00:18:17.620But if you manage to get them to cooperate with you, but you stab them in the back, they get a tremendous loss and you get a huge number of brownie points.
00:18:28.020And conversely, if they've suckered you into being cooperative and then they stab you in the back, you're way bigger.
00:18:34.500So, this whole world of when do you cooperate and when do you do anything other than that, always within this realm of multiple rounds, but under a number.
00:18:45.520So, this guy, Robert Axelrod, who's like this senior major figure in sort of political science, teamed up with this evolutionary biologist, W.D. Hamilton, one of the gods in that field.
00:19:00.800And they said, well, let's talk to a whole bunch of our friends, a whole bunch of our friends who think seriously about this stuff and tell them about the prisoner's dilemma and have each one of them tell us what would their strategy be when playing the prisoner's dilemma?
00:19:15.900How would you do an unknown number of rounds and maximize your wins at the end?
00:19:20.860And they asked, like, Nobel Peace Prize winners and Mother Teresa and prize fighters and warlords and mathematicians.
00:19:32.060And they collected just a zillion people's different strategies.
00:19:35.940And 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 rounds, to see which one worked best, which one won.
00:19:51.640Or in the terms that evolutionary biologists quickly started using, which strategy drove all the others into extinction?
00:19:58.700Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:20:05.260Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:20:07.240But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:20:12.940In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:20:18.060Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:20:22.320you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:20:27.260And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:20:30.580With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:20:37.960Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:21:34.880And the thing that flattened everybody was you had these people putting in these algorithms and probabilities and fuzzy logic and God knows what.
00:21:48.420And the one that beat all the others was the simplest one out there, tit for tat.
00:22:09.720If he keeps on being a jerk, you keep on being a jerk.
00:22:13.020And even though what you see is by the person being a jerk, they're always one round ahead of you.
00:22:20.380And that seems pretty disadvantageous.
00:22:22.620You're always going to be one step behind the individual who stab you in the back.
00:22:26.440When you get two jerky cheaters together, all they do is constantly stab each other in the back and make it the worst possible outcome.
00:22:36.420And 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.
00:23:16.100And if the other player who had, like, sinned against them, corrected their ways, it was forgiven.
00:23:25.600And it was a simple, and this outcompeted all of the other ones.
00:23:31.020And what everyone sort of in the zoology world went about saying at that point is, oh my God, do animals go about tit for tat strategies when they're in competitive circumstances where they've got to decide, am I going to cooperate or am I going to cheat?
00:23:47.100And that sort of thing, has evolution sculpted optimal competitive cooperative behavior in all sorts of species to solve the prisoner's dilemma problem?
00:23:59.400And people went and looked, and it turned out, like, what do you know?
00:24:04.280Evolution had sculpted exactly that in all sorts of species.
00:24:07.620It was, like, phenomenal, interesting findings where if you, like, experimentally manipulate one animal to make it look like they're not reciprocating in something that somebody else just did for them, and everybody punishes them one round afterward, and they go back to cooperating again, and everyone forgives them.
00:24:38.980Bats, some bat species, they do communal nesting stuff.
00:24:44.400All the female bats have all their nests together, and they're communal in this literal sense.
00:24:49.420They're vampire bats, which means they fly out at night, and they, like, get blood from some cow or some victim.
00:24:57.340And they're not actually drinking the blood.
00:25:00.940They're storing it in their throat sacks.
00:25:03.480And they come back to their nest, and what they do is they disgorge the blood then to feed their babies.
00:25:08.580And the hugely cooperative cool thing about the species is it's cooperative feeding, not just among, like, sisters, but through the everybody feeds each other's kids.
00:25:20.460So they've got this whole collaborative system, and it buffers you against one animal's failure to find food one night, and, like, everyone scratches each other's back, and it works wonderfully.
00:25:30.900Now make the bats think that one of them is cheating.
00:25:35.340One of them has violated feeding all each other's kids social contract.
00:25:40.180When 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.
00:25:48.580And 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.
00:26:42.760We're going to drop an atomic bomb on Moscow by accident, and the only way to prove to them it was an accident, they get to drop one on New York and tit-for-tat and all of that.
00:26:53.220And what that introduced was the possibility of a signal error.
00:26:59.260You're cooperating, but there's a glitch in the system, and the other individual believes you just stabbed them in the back.
00:27:06.360Yeah, I think virtualization probably increases signal error, by the way.
00:27:12.180You know, I've noticed that, well, I've noticed that when I've put together business enterprises that you can virtualize the cooperation, but if any misunderstanding emerges, it tends to cascade very rapidly.
00:27:25.960And you don't have, you know, one of the things you also point out in Behave is that it isn't only that you're playing a sequence of iterated games with people, it's you're playing multiple sequences of multiple different iterated games.
00:27:37.880And so one of the things that happens if you're face-to-face with people, as opposed to virtual, is that when you're face-to-face with them, this is probably the key importance of the issue of hospitality, which is very much stressed, for example.
00:27:52.300And, well, it's stressed in the Old Testament, but it's stressed in traditional communities, is that if you're actually in an embodied space with people, you can play multiple games with them.
00:28:03.160Games of humor, games of food exchange, games of music, dance, celebration.
00:28:08.340And so you can test out their capacity for reciprocity in multiple situations.
00:28:13.380And so then if there's a signal error, you can mitigate against it because you know that you've tested the person out in all sorts of different circumstances.
00:28:21.120But when you virtualize things, it's very narrow.
00:28:26.260And so I'm very concerned about a lot of virtualization, too, because the other thing I think that virtualization is doing is enabling the psychopaths.
00:28:34.260Because you can do a lot of one-off exchanges online with no reputation tracking.
00:28:39.420And that seems to me that that enables the people who use, what did you call that in your book?
00:28:45.700There's a particular kind of strategy.
00:28:47.420Well, it's the stab you in the back strategy, essentially.
00:28:50.300And if you can't track people's reputations across time, then you enable the people who are essentially the psychopathic manipulators.
00:28:57.940And there's actually an emergent literature on online trolling and dark tetrad traits.
00:29:05.420So I'm afraid we're enabling the psychopaths with the virtualization of the world.
00:29:09.180And that's a terrifying possibility because they can take everybody out.
00:30:38.360It should be based on your prior history.
00:30:40.420And all these algorithms of the more rounds in the game you've gone in the past with cooperation without the person doing something jerky, the faster you were willing to forgive them for what seems to have been a betrayal on their part and possibly a signal error instead.
00:31:01.120And building up of trust, building up of social capital.
00:31:04.500And, 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.
00:31:22.880At that point, when you have a reciprocal system, that's a wolf in sheep's clothing.
00:31:37.040You know, a shared culture might actually be the abstracted equivalent of a multi-situational, like an abstracted multi-situational game.
00:31:46.820Because, 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.
00:31:59.040Then 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.
00:32:09.380And so, you know, you also talk in your book about the fact that we have a proclivity to demonize the foreign, let's say.
00:32:15.420To fail to differentiate the foreign into the individual, which is a better way of thinking about it.
00:32:20.180But 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.
00:32:31.520And 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.
00:32:39.440We can extend to them the a priori luxury of being individuated instead of being treated like the barbarian mob, right?
00:32:47.780And so that's not prejudice precisely.
00:32:50.620It's just the extension of the inclusion of a game into everybody who shares our culture.
00:32:56.620And it would make sense that the thing is, the less someone is part of your culture, let's say, the less abstracted evidence you have that they're direct participants in a reciprocal game rather than stab you in the back psychopaths, which they could be, right?
00:33:15.260Because that's about 3% of the population and maybe higher under some circumstances.
00:33:19.660So you also talk in 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 toehold, right?
00:33:32.720Because as you point out that, first of all, there's some evidence that the default response of very immature individuals, 2-year-olds, let's say, isn't cooperative.
00:33:56.880But then as the brain matures, then the capacity for shared games starts to emerge, right?
00:34:02.280But the fundamental question is, and you do point to this and behave, is, well, if you have a whole society of cheaters and backstabbers, which is maybe the default Hobbesian situation,
00:34:13.520how the hell do you ever get a cooperative landscape started, much less a landscape where the default response between strangers is honest and trusting?
00:34:24.860Now, you point out a little bit, I think maybe what you were pointing to in Behave is the initiation of low-risk trading games.
00:34:33.620Like, 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.
00:34:44.460They knew where the territorial boundaries were, just like wolves know, just like chimpanzees know.
00:34:49.580You know, there's a rough fringe and boundary that's sort of no man's land.
00:34:53.180They used to go there and leave some of their arts and crafts or their tools.
00:34:58.500They'd just leave them on the ground, and then they'd retreat, knowing that the other people were watching them.
00:35:04.660And then the other people would go and grab some of these cool things.
00:35:07.980And then the other people, being not completely dim, would leave some of their trinkets and tools lying on the ground.
00:35:15.380And that's, you know, kind of low-cost.
00:35:17.720They weren't going to leave their most treasured possession to begin with.
00:35:21.560They'd leave something that's sort of interesting, but they'd leave something that's sort of interesting.
00:35:28.220So, but what's cool is that that requires, and you pointed this out, that requires that initial movement of faith, right?
00:35:35.980You have to presume the possibility of humanity on the other side.
00:35:40.820Then you have to take a sacrificial risk.
00:35:43.420And it can be small, you know, not a stupid sacrificial risk, but a reasonable one.
00:35:47.840And that can get the ball rolling in an upward spiraling cooperative direction.
00:35:52.260That's kind of what kids do, by the way, when they come together to start to initiate play when they're about three years old.
00:35:58.200They'll play a real simple game to begin with, you know, one that you could maybe play with a one-year-old.
00:36:03.040And then they ratchet up the complexity of the game right to the level where it's, what would you call, maximizing their adaptive progress.
00:36:10.520And if they find a kid that they can do that with, then that kid becomes a friend.
00:36:14.520And that friend is reciprocal, iterative interactions.
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00:37:29.320I mean, you've honed in on the central question, which is, in a world in which there's nothing but backstabbers, how do you jumpstart it?
00:37:39.960Because if somebody suddenly, like, stands up and, like, recites the sermon for the mount and say,
00:37:45.340I am going to start cooperation, everybody else is going to say, you know, what a schmuck, and stab him in the back after that,
00:37:52.460and he will forever be one step, how do you jumpstart it?
00:37:55.780One of the ways that you point out is the, like, tiny, tiny incremental uppings of the investment and the chance you're taking.
00:38:07.420Another one, like evolutionary biology, people love this, founder populations.
00:38:13.800Founder populations, this is old population ecology term.
00:38:17.160A land bridge disappears, something where you get a population that gets isolated.
00:38:24.940They get cut off from the main population.
00:38:27.900And what happens over time is they get kind of inbred.
00:38:31.480And thus, you get a lot of, like, cooperative stuff built around all being relatives and such.
00:38:36.840And they establish a high degree of cooperation.
00:38:39.740And then, I don't know, whatever the land bridge comes back, they go back and they join the general population.
00:38:45.780And 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,
00:38:56.420which means they're a cluster of optimized tit-for-tatters, meaning they're going to out-compete everybody else.
00:39:04.060And so, everybody else signs up on now becoming good guys.
00:39:09.300So, I've got a proposition for you, and this is relevant to your speculations on the religious front.
00:39:14.520And I want to bring Sam Harris into this, too.
00:39:17.800So, I was reading, for example, I was reading the book of Abraham, because I'm writing a book on biblical stories.
00:39:23.940And God promises Abraham that if he abides by the central covenant, that his descendants will outnumber everyone else's descendants.
00:39:33.420And I have a sneaking suspicion that that's a narrativization, that's a terrible word.
00:39:41.520It's a translation into story of the tit-for-tat reciprocal altruistic motif, which is that if you abide by this higher order sacrificial principle,
00:39:52.600and I'll return to that sacrifice idea, if you abide by this higher order sacrificial principle,
00:39:58.060all things considered across the longest possible span of time, your descendants will out-compete all other descendants.
00:40:06.400And one of the things that's very cool about that story, so when God reveals this truth to Abraham,
00:40:12.080who's decided to act in a proper sacrificial manner, right?
00:40:17.640He's sacrificing the present to the future in the optimized manner.
00:40:22.600Then God says, look, don't be thinking that this is going to be straightforward,
00:40:26.480because your descendants are actually going to struggle for a number of generations.
00:40:30.900But if you can hold out for the long run, and it's four generations in this particular story,
00:40:36.460then you can be certain that the pattern of adaptation that you've chosen is going to work well for you,
00:40:42.260but also very, very well for your descendants.
00:40:45.260And so, you know, I know that Sam Harris, who's very concerned about the problem of evil,
00:40:50.340has been trying to ground a transcendent morality in objective fact.
00:40:55.220And I think I can admire Sam's motivation and his concern with great evils,
00:41:04.180like the evils of the Holocaust, for example.
00:41:06.180I think his attempt to ground morality in objective fact is misdirected,
00:41:14.100partly because I think a much more fruitful place for an endeavor like that is actually in game theory,
00:41:21.620because there is something there, right?
00:41:23.740I mean, what we're basically pointing out is that the structure of iterated interact,
00:41:29.240there is a structure of iterated interactions, right?
00:41:32.560There's an emergent reality, and as you said, you could model that with tit-for-tat competitions
00:41:37.460in a computer landscape, and that turns out to be ecologically generalizable.
00:41:42.560So there's an actually underlying ethos in iterated interactions.
00:41:48.160Now, you can imagine that as the human imagination observed interactions over vast stretches of time,
00:41:55.620it started to aggregate imaginative representations of that ethos and to extract it upward.
00:42:03.040And it seems to me that that would dovetail with the maturation and domination of the prefrontal cortex,
00:42:09.340because what's starting to happen is that you're using long-term strategies to govern short-term exigencies.
00:42:17.660And that's a very difficult thing to do, because, of course, the short-term sometimes screeches and yells extraordinarily loudly.
00:42:23.160But part of what the religious enterprise seems to be doing, as far as I can tell,
00:42:28.120is mapping this pattern of sacrifice of the present to the future,
00:42:31.640and making the proposition that that is the, all things considered, that is the optimal adaptive strategy.
00:42:37.820So I don't know what you think about those sorts of suppositions.
00:46:02.160So it's reinforcing, what it's doing is actually reinforcing the potency and integrity of a predictive system that's actually predicting positively.
00:47:00.720Because sacrifice and work are the same thing.
00:47:03.500When you work, you're not doing what you want to in the moment.
00:47:06.100And 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?
00:47:19.920And then the idea is that if you work properly, whatever that means, and that's what Abel does, then your sacrifices are going to be rewarded by God.
00:47:26.900Whereas if you hold back and you take the psychopath route and you pretend, then you're going to be deeply punished.
00:47:34.240But the fundamental issue there, and this is the question that I have for you, is that it seems to me that there's a very tight relationship between the insistence that sacrifice is necessary and maturation and the emergence of the prefrontal cortex as a predictor of deferred future reward out of the landscape established by, say, the limbic system that's much more concerned with immediate gratification.
00:48:03.560So it's sacrifice compared to immediate gratification.
00:48:07.340And then there's a discussion of what constitutes proper sacrifice.
00:48:12.460And that's where, like, you study dopamine neurochemistry and this receptor subtype of the dopamine receptor, blah, blah, all of that.
00:48:23.140And 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.
00:48:33.760And we have a totally unrecognizably different one because we mobilize the same damn molecule and the same, like, mesolimbic cortical pathways.
00:48:46.040And we do it so that our great-grandkids will have a better planet.
00:48:54.180Well, do you think there's any difference between that and the idea of an afterlife?
00:48:57.480Like, I mean, if I'm thinking six generations into the future, why wouldn't that be represented symbolically as something like an afterlife?
00:49:08.360And 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, and my conception that my behavior should be governed by something like infinite regard for the potential future.
00:49:28.640I mean, it's tricky, right, because you have to discount the future to some degree to survive.
00:49:33.800But 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.
00:49:43.780And as soon as you allow for the possibility of, like, your footprints lasting longer than your lifespan, this is a whole new ballgame, either in the form of there's an afterlife or in the form of I want to leave a planet for my great-great-grandchildren.
00:50:04.060That's going to be a more peaceful, wonderful one.
00:50:06.860Or even in the form of, like, every time you sit at, like, a typical funeral where everybody's going through the usual eulogies of, like, distortively amplifying the good traits of someone and ignoring the bad, what's going through your head is, how do I want to be remembered?
00:50:26.260Whoa, that's a whole other world of, like, what you're doing now.
00:50:33.020The footprints you leave after you are going to matter.
00:50:36.500And like all the versions we have, we would like to thank the students we train.
00:50:41.020We would like to thank people 300 years from now.
00:50:44.180We're going to think we've composed the most amazing, like, mass and B minor, and that's satisfying.
00:50:49.820Yeah, 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.
00:51:00.300And in some ways, you could be like Paul Ehrlich and think about what's going to happen to the planet in a century from populations.
00:51:08.320Or you could think about the afterlife.
00:51:10.600But any of these are, like, radically human domains.
00:51:14.900Mm-hmm, that's that extension of knowledge out indefinitely into the future, right, which is something that seems to characterize human beings.
00:51:24.680And that might also be a consequence of cortical expansion, right, the discovery of that infinite future.
00:52:11.220That feels good, which is sort of the generalized element.
00:52:15.180But the dopamine also preferentially encourages the neural structures that were active in the sequencing of that behavior to grow and flourish.
00:52:25.080And that's the distinction between reward and reinforcement.
00:52:30.900And I know I'm missing something there.
00:52:32.400So, will you walk me through in a little bit more detail how the dopamine system works in relationship specifically to anticipation of the future rather than just responding, say, to successful behavior?
00:52:43.800So, 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.
00:53:00.420And you can show that there's activation of dopaminergic reward pathways in the limbic system.
00:53:09.620And you can do that with functional imaging.
00:53:12.140You could do that with something invasive with your lab animal, whatever.
00:55:26.940Like, well, we've been talking about our circumstances, the light comes on, you do the work, you get the reward.
00:55:32.700You do the work, you get the reward, 100% predictability, and you have a complete sense of mastery and agency over the game.
00:55:38.760Now 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.
00:55:51.800And beautiful work, Wolfram Schultz, 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.
00:56:04.860Again, you get a much bigger rise of dopamine than you got before.
00:56:10.580Now, let me ask you about, okay, so let me ask you about that.
00:56:13.980So 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.
00:56:22.680And 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.
00:56:38.500Right, because it's good to have a good thing, but it's even better to have a potentially better thing.
00:56:43.980And novelty does contain, is that what's happening?
00:56:48.380The most proximal thing that's going on in your head when suddenly dopamine goes 10 times higher is you've just introduced this word into the neurochemistry.
00:57:23.460I'll be the new master of a new territory then.
00:57:25.840Exactly, 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 a one-tenth of a thousandth percent chance, but they understand you're signaling sufficiently.
00:57:43.940So that's intermittent partial reinforcement, and that's why it grips you, because it falsely signals novelty treasure, and you can manipulate that.
00:57:56.200Now, you pointed out something extremely dangerous in your book, right, because I had thought about this in terms of building the ultimately addictive slot machine.
00:58:04.680You showed that if you're playing a slot machine and the tumblers line up, almost line up, two out of three or four out of five, then you're much more likely to get a dopamine kick.
00:58:16.720So you could imagine a digital slot machine where you have multiple tumblers, where you code it to the player so that the machine knows that it's the same player playing, and that the proportion of almost lined up tumblers increases with gameplay.
00:58:33.100So then you'd have intermittent partial reinforcement combined with a novelty indicator that indicated that you were obtaining false mastery over the damn game.
00:58:43.540God, you'd have old people glued to that nonstop.
00:58:46.460Because as soon as you switch from just going with maybe, incredibly powerful though that is, you switch over to almost.
00:58:56.740And yeah, do that, like, asymptotically, and people will press or lever press till, like, they die of starvation at their slot machine in Las Vegas.
00:59:14.780Okay, and so as far as you're concerned, so that's so cool.
00:59:18.240So 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?
00:59:30.100And the hero is a broad symbol, character, because the hero isn't just the person who goes into unknown territory and masters it, but also gains what's there and then distributes it reciprocally.
00:59:42.480That's the whole hero mythology, essentially.
00:59:45.560And so your point is that the dopamine system kicks in, in part, as a consequence of predictability.
00:59:54.140So that shows that you know what you're doing when you're in a place that's going to give you reward.
00:59:59.480So you're in a garden that's fruitful.
01:00:01.440But 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.
01:00:09.780And if you go down that pathway, you're going to be hyper-motivated to go down that pathway.
01:00:15.100So 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.
01:00:28.620Now, I would say that that pattern, if a female is observing that pattern of interaction in a male, that male is going to be maximally reproductively attractive.
01:00:37.480Well, I think that probably depends on what species we're talking about, just to become as...
01:01:15.880I'm going to wear my lucky socks and underwear.
01:01:18.320I'm going to chant, you know, ritualistic whatever, orthodoxy, because I'm willing to come back and try even harder.
01:01:26.200And then you surmount your setback, and that's your path of the hero, and, you know, that's what dopamine is doing there.
01:01:37.080That'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...
01:01:52.280Yeah, well, it shows you that there's nothing left to discover, eh?
01:01:55.880So that's interesting, because you imagine if the optimal garden is one that's fruitful, but where the possibility of more future fruit also lurks,
01:02:08.240then when it's reduced to merely being fruitful, there's an element of it that's dull, right?
01:02:15.820Because there's no more future possibility.
01:02:18.100There is predictability, and that's fine.
01:03:42.360And he says, what the hell do you mean?
01:03:44.580I'm clearly the best player on the team.
01:03:46.620If people send me the ball, I score, we win.
01:03:50.240I'm not passing the ball to these losers because then we lose.
01:03:53.160What the hell are you talking about, dad?
01:03:56.520And you don't know what to say, but what you should say is, look, kid, the reason it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, but how you play the game is because life is a sequence of never-ending multiple games.
01:04:06.900And you're a winner if people want to play with you, and if you're a little prick when you win any given game, and if you whine and complain because you've lost, even if you're an expert at that game, no one's going to want to play with you, and you're a loser, right?
01:04:20.320And I think that's analogous to, I think it's analogous in a very profound sense to that prefrontal maturation that puts the future above the present.
01:04:29.700But 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.
01:04:47.720You know, those things are going to stack.
01:04:49.200They have to stack on top of each other, right?
01:04:51.620Because otherwise there's going to be an intrinsic contradiction in the ethic.
01:04:54.920So there has to be a concordance between that fair play ethos and that exploratory ethos.
01:05:03.580Maybe it is, maybe that's in play, right?
01:05:05.520If you're a good player and you're out there on the field, you're not just trying to score the goal.
01:05:10.460You're also trying to play with various ways of scoring the goal.
01:05:24.500And maybe that's signaled by the system of play.
01:05:27.100You know, Jack Panksepp, the other thing he did that's so damn cool is Panksepp outlined the neurocircuitry of play.
01:05:33.380He was the first scientist to do that, to show that there's actually a separate circuit in mammals for play.
01:05:38.460And so, and it's not exploration exactly, right?
01:05:43.540It's not exactly the same circuit that mediates exploration, but it's allied with it.
01:05:48.740So I don't know how that fits into dopaminergic reinforcement, but I know that play is intrinsically reinforcing.
01:05:54.560So, well, sort of two threads from obviously completely different universes of showing the power of this, exactly the point you bring up, which is in multiple games and multiple players and formal game theory, like you choose, you foster cooperation.
01:06:14.860If there's third party punishment, if you can be for being third party punters, all these different layers.
01:06:21.380But 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.
01:06:37.900And every mother is a good game theorist in that regard when she's saying, if you do that, you won't have any friends.
01:06:44.520Like, that's incredibly, like, that's one of the best lessons your dopamine system can get, either from the game theory and or from your mother, that the long-term goals look very different when you're simultaneously involved in umpteen different games at once with very different time courses.
01:07:04.720Well, that's also relevant to that bat story you told, Abe, because one of the things I've been thinking about, too, so there's a gospel phrase that says that you should store up your treasure in heaven.
01:07:14.000And not where rust and moths and so forth can corrupt it on earth.
01:07:18.920And 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.
01:07:24.660So, the bat that has the pouch full of blood has that blood right then and there, and that's a form of treasure.
01:07:34.040Now, the problem with that blood is that it's a finite resource, and hunting, which is what the bats are doing, is sporadically successful.
01:07:44.820So, 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.
01:07:54.140Hunting is collective, and your success is erratic.
01:07:57.200So, 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?
01:08:05.800And that wouldn't be your skill at hunting.
01:08:07.820It would be your skill at distributing the fruits of your hunting among the other hunters.
01:08:13.300So, they're so goddamn thrilled with what a wonderful guy you are, that every time they hunt, you get some food for your family.
01:08:20.880And so, what you do is you store your treasure in your reputation.
01:08:25.440And your reputation is actually the open book record of your reciprocal interactions across hunts.
01:08:38.620If 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.
01:08:47.860People are going to be talking about it over the fire.
01:09:31.840Well, then you use, well, so then you use other people's bodies as your bank of future food.
01:09:38.380But even more abstractly, it isn't even their bodies.
01:09:41.180It's their mental representation of you as a reciprocal player.
01:09:45.360And so if that's associated with, imagine that's a reputation.
01:09:49.240So that's actually associated with your ethos and with the tracking of that ethos.
01:09:54.080And if that ethos is something like generous, long-term-oriented, sacrificial player of multiple reciprocal games,
01:10:02.880then all of a sudden you're protected against the exigencies of fate.
01:10:07.220Because 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.
01:10:18.780So, you know, those economic exchange games where you identify two people, you say, look, you're going to give this person some of $100, but they can reject the offer if they don't believe it's fair.
01:10:32.800You play those cross-culturally, and the typical offer is $50, right?
01:10:39.160But, you know, I've wondered, too, if the best offer isn't $60, especially if you're doing it in front of a crowd.
01:10:47.080Because if you, imagine you err, and the best graduate supervisors do this, by the way.
01:10:52.800If you err continuously slightly on the side of generosity, then my suspicions are is that accruing long-term reciprocal reward of that would pay off better than just a 50-50 arrangement, right?
01:11:07.940And you can maybe see that with your, yeah, yeah, exactly that.
01:11:11.160Well, I think you see that with your wife, too, right?
01:11:13.920Is maybe you want to treat the people around you slightly better on average than they treat you.
01:11:22.160You're making the whole pie expand, including your own reputation.
01:11:26.840Then you get some interesting cultural stuff comes in, because they've done all sorts of cross-cultural studies of, like, ultimatum gameplay and all of that.
01:11:36.080And see tremendous cultural differences in whether it's 50-50, 51-40, 90-10.
01:11:41.980Then you see there's a handful of cultures out there where you get punishment of generosity.
01:11:53.220Somebody makes this viewed as an overly generous offer, and you punish them for it.
01:12:16.680I see that in families that are pathological all the time.
01:12:19.800If someone makes a positive gesture, they'll get punished to death because of what that implies for the potential future behavior of all the other miscreants.
01:12:27.640And what are those cultures, like, some of the ones where, like, God help you if you wind up being part of one of those ex-Eastern bloc countries, have the highest rates of this paradoxical punishment for generosity.
01:12:44.160Oh, this guy's just going to make us look good.
01:12:46.580And then everybody's, whoa, that is a troubled society.
01:13:26.760Hell is the place where people are punished for doing what's truly virtuous.
01:13:30.940Yeah, and like you said, you don't want to be in a society like that.
01:13:34.080Maybe that's not as bad as it gets, because things could get pretty bad, but it's pretty bad.
01:13:40.860Well, 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.
01:13:53.120And that's what those cultures are like.
01:13:57.980Yeah, that's a pretty bad world in which generosity is explicitly and enthusiastically punished by the crowd of Yahoo peasants who arrived to get to forks at that point.
01:14:12.400Yeah, you know, one of the things that I've talked to my clinical clients about and my family members, too, and a little bit more broadly lecturing, maybe it has to do with this initiation of an expanding and abundant tit-for-tat reciprocity, is that if you're really alert in your local environment, you can see people around you playing with the edge of additional generosity.
01:14:38.560So 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.
01:14:49.880It'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,
01:15:08.560you 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.
01:15:25.220So even if you're not in a society that punishes that, you can actually act as an individual to differentially reward it.
01:15:44.900One of the most fascinating wrinkles in terms of like accounting for like the world's miseries and stuff is when you think about like dopamine, what are the things we anticipate?
01:16:00.960Well, if you're a baboon, and I spent like 33 years of my life studying baboons in a while during summers, if you're a baboon, your world of pleasures and anticipation are pretty narrow.
01:16:15.060Like you get something to eat that you want, you get to mate with someone that you want, or you're in a bad mood and there's somebody smaller and weaker who you can like take out on with impunity.
01:16:26.780Like that's basically the realm of pleasures for a baboon.
01:16:30.960And 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 Fermat's last theorem.
01:16:43.680And we also have, you know, we've got this ridiculously wide range of pleasures.
01:16:52.040Like we can, we're the species that can both secrete dopamine in response to cocaine or winning the lottery or multiple orgasms, and also secrete dopamine in response to smelling the first great flower in spring.
01:17:07.360And it's the same dopamine neurons in all those cases.
01:17:12.020And what that means is, we have to have a dopamine system that can reset incredibly quickly.
01:17:19.920Because 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.
01:17:30.320And 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.
01:17:40.360We have to constantly be able to reset the gain on our dopamine system.
01:17:45.920Well, 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.
01:17:57.780But 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.
01:18:08.900Is they offer people a differentiated taste.
01:18:12.320So, you know, if you think of a landscape painting, it's like there are certain visual scenes now that we regard as canonically beautiful.
01:18:20.720But it's virtually certain, I mean, I know there's an evolutionary basis to that to some degree, but it's virtually certain that our taste for beauty is at least in part informed by the brilliant geniuses of the past,
01:18:34.000who are able to differentiate the world more and more carefully and say, look, here's actually a new source of reward, right?
01:18:42.020People do that when they invent a new musical genre or a new form of dance, right?
01:18:47.200So not only can we multiply the rewards indefinitely if we're pursuing the proper pathway,
01:18:52.380but we can differentiate the landscape of potential rewards, I would say, virtually indefinitely.
01:18:59.360Now, that would be part of that prefrontal flexibility that can modify our underlying limbic responses, too.
01:19:05.040Even though we're, you know, running down the same dopaminergic trackways, let's say, that the poor baboons run down.
01:19:10.740Which is totally cool and so human and all, but has like this massive tragic implication,
01:19:19.500which is the only way you could use the same dopamine neurons and same dopamine range from zero to maxing out
01:19:27.220for like both haikus and like lottery is the system resets.
01:19:33.980It's got to keep resetting as to what the scale is and what the gain is on the system.
01:19:38.640What that means is it constantly resets.
01:30:38.460Who's got the immune system that isn't working?
01:30:40.280What does it have to do with their rank and patterns of social stress and patterns of affiliation and basically health cycle if you're in baboons?
01:31:15.240Infant mortality is lower than among the neighboring humans.
01:31:20.340And you only spend three, four hours a day doing your day's foraging.
01:31:23.960And what that means is you've got like eight, nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress for everybody else.
01:32:37.300So you did point out in your book that you studied a baboon troop where because of a historical accident, there was a plethora of females.
01:32:52.420And then that took a lot of the competition stress away from the males and they actually started to become more civilized.
01:33:00.240And so I have two questions about that.
01:33:02.200It's like, why did the baboons take the psychopathic prick route on the evolutionary highway?
01:33:08.400And 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.
01:33:19.120What does that have to say, let's say about free choice in the baboon world, about whether or not it's necessary to organize your whole society on the grounds of, you know, tit for tat psychopathy?
01:33:30.460It tells you it takes some pretty special, unique circumstances to jumpstart all the barriers to cooperation.
01:33:45.220Looking at, okay, you can have one person who's willing to gamble and see a bit of vulnerability to see if somebody reciprocates, or you can have a founder effect of an inbred cooperating group,
01:33:56.060or you can have, you know, a whole bunch of ways of jumpstarting it, but then you get a totally quirky, unpredictable event, which was the thing that happened with my baboon troop.
01:34:12.620This was a troop my wife and I studied for years, and they had an ecological, unprecedented disaster thing that happened at one point.
01:34:23.500There was an outbreak of tuberculosis, not among my baboons, but among the neighboring baboons.
01:34:30.760One troop over, a troop that was living off of the garbage dump at a tourist lodge, and which is where the tubercular, it was tubercular meat coming from the tourist lodge.
01:34:42.480And tuberculosis, you know, it takes, Thomas Mann would have enough time to write hundreds of pages of a novel before TB kills somebody.
01:34:51.700TB kills a non-human primate in a couple of weeks.
01:34:55.040It's like, it's a wildfire in terms of how destructive it is.
01:34:58.860So you had this neighboring troop that had, you know, pig heaven.
01:35:05.720They had this garbage dump from a tourist lodge, and every day a tractor came and dumped all the, like, leftover desserts and stuff from the tourist dinners and banquets.
01:35:17.120I actually did some studies on that troop and showed they got to start to metabolic syndrome.
01:35:21.540They got elevated troops, they got borderline diabetes, like, yeah, like us, the same, but they had better infant survival.
01:35:32.660The same pluses and minuses of, like, a westernized, overly indulgent diet.
01:35:37.320But they had the greatest spot on earth, and every morning a subset of my guys would go over there to try to eat the food, would go over there and have to fight their way in, in this, like, twice as many resident males there who were pissed at who's this outsider coming in here.
01:35:57.440These 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.
01:36:35.320It 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.
01:36:53.220You lost the 50% with the aggressive, unsocialized personalities, and that left, like, a completely different cohort of males.
01:37:06.220It left you twice as many females as males, for one thing, which you don't normally see in a baboon troop.
01:37:12.020So all these females who suddenly had a whole lot to gain from not having male baboons be the jerky, displacing aggression that characterizes them where they're in a bad mood, and if you're a smaller female, watch out.
01:37:27.420But most of all, the guys who were left were nice guys.
01:37:34.760They didn't take it out on someone smaller.
01:37:38.260They still competed for rank, but they weren't displacing aggression on innocent bystanders at anywhere near the rate.
01:37:44.580And this brought in an entire new culture into the troop, which was great and totally amazing, and isn't that cool?
01:37:54.500And what was also cool was stress hormone levels, which is what I was able to study, and these guys were way down in them, and their immune systems were working better.
01:38:27.300So that's another example in principle of how cooperation could initiate, right, is that you could have a circumstance at one point where the real pricks get wiped out for somewhat random reasons, and then you get a cooperative community starting.
01:38:43.000You know, I've also read, and I don't remember who wrote about this, who suggested that over time, human beings, we really domesticated ourselves by using third-party enforcers to wipe out most of the psychopathic males.
01:38:59.240And that also might have been a contributor to the initiation of something like a cooperative tit-for-tat reciprocating community.
01:39:06.720Exactly, 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.
01:39:19.240And grievously, that's the payoff for it.
01:39:22.820But the thing that was most remarkable there is baboons, male baboons, grow up, obviously, in their home troop, and around puberty, they get totally itchy, and they get ants in the pants, and they pick up.
01:39:36.540And they transfer to their adult troop, which could be next door, could be 60 miles away.
01:39:42.600They wind up being this, like, snivelly little parasite-riddled kid who shows up at five years of working their way up the ranks and all of that.
01:39:54.060A 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.
01:40:08.200All of the adult males were ones who had joined the troop since then as adolescents.
01:40:27.260And what became, like, so damn interesting to look at is, how were they doing it?
01:40:34.940How were they transmitting this culture?
01:40:37.200And the best we were able to figure out, it wasn't observational.
01:40:45.080It wasn't that, like, these new horrible kids show up and they just watch all these other, like, male baboons being nice because there's zero evidence for observational learning of any sort of cultural transmission and stuff like that.
01:40:58.200Whoever discovers that is going to be, like, the king of non-human culture stuff.