Office Hours Special: Algebra of Masculinity Part 2

Today is the second episode of our special 3-part series covering all things masculinity. Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a critically acclaimed author and professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, joins Scott to discuss the contradictions in human behavior, as well as the common misconceptions surrounding testosterone and estrogen, specifically how these hormones relate to aggressive behavior. They also get into the concept of free will, including how the understanding of limited free will can influence one’s approach to parenting. Music: https://www.davidcuttermusic.com / @dcuttermusic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:37Scott Galloway?

  Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com/profgfree. Welcome to the second episode of a special series of the Prop G Pod. As a reminder, we're covering all things masculinity over the next few weeks on Office Hours, or as I like to say, "Uhhhh." Thought that'd be funnier. Anyway, something we've been wanting to learn more about is the physiological and biological differences between men and women, specifically the role of testosterone. Not what happens to me when I shoot 80 cc's into my ass every week. Little stronger in the gym, little hornier, which means not that strong and not that horny, quite frankly, but still, still trying to hold on to those last vestiges of youth because

• 1:20Scott Galloway?

  I'm a narcissist and, yeah, let's just end it there. Anyways, we sought out Dr. Robert Sapolsky, who is a critically acclaimed author and professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University. If you've ever wondered what it might be like for one professor with much less domain expertise and credibility to speak to a highly credible academic, well, then you're in for a treat. It's coming up. I found this stuff fascinating. He spent, I guess, decades with baboons. I don't know if he was hanging out with Jane Goodall or what he was doing, but he has observed primate behavior and the role of testosterone and community effects. I think this stuff is just fascinating. We discussed with Dr. Sapolsky the contradictions in human behavior, as well as the common

• 2:05Scott Galloway?

  misconceptions surrounding testosterone and estrogen, specifically how these hormones relate to aggressive behavior. We also get into the concept of free will, including how the understanding of limited free will can influence one's approach to parenting. I really struggle with this because I like to think that we have agency and I think decisions matter and your characters... You know, making the right decisions when no one's looking. So this notion of you don't have free will, which is getting a lot of traction right now, kind of doesn't make sense to me until you hear them explain it. And I think what they're saying is a lot of, a lot of your chemistry and your DNA and your instincts are sort of cooked already. And that's not to say that as parents, I think the best example is parents. And that is as parents, we like to think that we're engineers, that we get to kind

• 2:50Scott Galloway?

  of design the sheep. And the reality is we're shepherds. We get to decide where they graze and point them in the right direction, decide what they eat, but they kind of come to you. You don't get to engineer the sheep. Anyways, I found this conversation fascinating. Remember, remember, we're shepherds, not engineers. Dr. Sapolsky, where does this podcast find you?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Well, sitting here at home where it appears to be kind of sunny out there. So that's nice.

• 3:23Scott Galloway?

  Where's home?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  San Francisco.

• 3:26Scott Galloway?

  Oh, nice. So let's bust right into it. Can you share more about the way our physiology influences our behavior specifically as it relates to men in contrast to women?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  I would say quite relevant are, of course, testosterone levels and the changing levels of it. What one needs to emphasize right off the bat when you're thinking about testosterone, male behavior, human male behavior as such, is that everybody knows what testosterone does and virtually everybody is wrong. The general theme is testosterone makes you aggressive. And on first pass, that certainly seems that way. Males of virtually every species out there are, on the average, more aggressive than females. A couple of really interesting exceptions.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Time of year when males have highest T levels, most aggressive. To you, look closely and testosterone does not cause aggression. It is something much more subtle. Say, take five races. Monkey males and put them together and they form a dominance hierarchy. And number one trashes two through five, number two trashes three through five and so on. And take number three in the hierarchy and shoot them up with testosterone with like just massive quantities of it. And does he get involved in more aggressive interactions? Yeah, absolutely. Whoa, there you go again, testosterone causing aggression. But then look at the pattern of it.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Number three, who up until that moment was completely brown nosing to numbers one and two. Number three now, is he now challenging one and two? Is he taking them on with just ceaseless, self-confident aggressiveness? No, number three steers clear of numbers two and one exactly as he's always done. What does he do instead? He becomes a complete nightmare to poor numbers four and five. In other words, testosterone has not created a new pattern of aggression going after two and one. All it's done is up the volume on patterns of aggression that were already there, thanks to social learning. So we have a hormone driving aggression.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  It's not driving it, it's not inventing it, it's just amplifying what's there already.

• 5:57Scott Galloway?

  I almost think that if the aggression was aimed up, you'd have churn, which in some ways is healthy. But if you're just ramping the aggression around dominance that where there's already a social hierarchy, isn't that just as bad?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's just an interesting reframing. This is not a hormone causing you to do something. This is not biological destiny on that level at all. It's where has your social conditioning brought you to in that moment? And that counts for a lot. But then there's an even more interesting elaboration on it. Cause it turns out this is, this is what's known in the business as the challenge hypothesis. A guy named John Wingfield, University of California, who pointed out, it's not so much that testosterone amplifies pre-existing aggression. What it does is when your status is being challenged,

• 6:56Speaker 01

  it amplifies whatever you need to do to hold on to status.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Okay, that does not sound like a very interesting distinction. If you're a baboon and somebody is challenging your status, what you do is you get into a fight. It's all about aggression and all that. But you get to humans and we do all sorts of weird things to gain status. Like go to some like fancy fundraiser for some charitable something filled with nothing but wealthy people. And what you'll see is like these wealthy guys who've had too much to drink usually because they've been plied with it by the hosts are there and they're competing for dominance by who can give away the most money, who can make the largest contributions.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  And like what an incredibly nutty way in which like a baboon would go about showing dominance. And some studies extraordinarily have shown you take people, you take subjects and you give them testosterone and a ton of it and all of that. And if it's the right sort of economic game where you gain credibility and power by giving more generous offers in terms of reputational stuff, testosterone makes you more generous because that's the ways by which you are strutting your stuff in that game. In other words, when you look at it, not only does not, does testosterone not cause aggression,

• 8:27Speaker 01

  it doesn't really amplify pre-existing aggression. It only does it in a circumstance where that's what's being rewarded. And if you've got problems on your planet with too much male testosterone amplifying aggression, don't blame this hormone. Blame the fact that we hand out high status for aggression so much of the time. And that's a remarkably different picture.

• 8:54Scott Galloway?

  Let's go to the base or the origin story of testosterone. What is the anthropological use of testosterone? And I would think that the most violent and aggressive among us throughout history have been the conquerors. And so, high testosterone individuals tend to have more propagation opportunities resulting in increasing levels of testosterone. So take us back to where at a very kind of root biological level, the role that testosterone plays and why it's important. And what has happened to testosterone levels throughout history?

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Well, first what I'm going to come back with is the notion that high testosterone equals social dominance is kind of a myth. Because what you see, great example of this is baboons. Baboons, why do I keep coming back to baboons? Because I spent 33 summers in the Serengeti studying what hormones have to do with behavior in these populations of wild baboons. Okay, so baboons, male-dominated, hierarchical, incredible levels of aggression. And that generates this simple prediction, higher rank, higher testosterone go hand in hand. And it turned out, that's not the case in the slightest. It's independent, it's not correlated with rank.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Hmm. So who has the high testosterone? Some jerky, high-ranking guy who starts a lot of fights? But the much more typical profile is, it's some idiot adolescent male who recently joined the troop. And what is his testosterone elevated doing to him? He's picking fights with all sorts of guys he has no business going anywhere near and getting trounced. And what you see instead is a high-ranking male, an alpha male, very often, yeah, it's taken a lot of aggression and a lot of muscle and some big canines to attain your high rank. But at that point, in order to maintain your high rank, if you're getting into a lot of

• 10:56Speaker 01

  fights, you're going to go down in a hail of bullets pretty quickly. What makes for an alpha male who maintains dominance for a long time? He wants to go months, seasons, years on end without being in a fight. Because if he's doing it right, all he has to do is look at somebody, stare at them for a couple of seconds, and they back off. It's all by psychological bluff at that point, if you're going to be one of these successful ones. And they hang on for a long time that way, often well into their, like, physical decline after their prime years, holding on just by psychological bluff.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  And in a case like that, testosterone actually has nothing to do with it. Social intelligence, what coalitions you're forming, who you know how to threaten and which way, which provocations you ignore and just walk away from. And that's a very different picture. So it's all about testosterone and well timed socially, you know, calibrated aggression that gets you into high rank in the first place. But after that, the alpha males who last forever, they just become really cagey and socially intelligent. And it's the fights they avoid rather than the fights that they get into that have the biggest impact on their destiny.

• 12:21Scott Galloway?

  I'm trying to sort of summarize. Power can be acquired through deft use of testosterone, but power is maintained through more political or social intelligence.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that's the case with like a monkey with a quarter of the number of like brain volume that we have as humans. And what we show is far, far more complicated versions of the exact same theme. When you look at risen populations and who's on the top of the hierarchy there and you look at testosterone levels earlier on, those are not predictive. Those are predictive of idiot guys who are going to challenge someone and as a result, they're knifed in the shower there. What testosterone is mostly about is it gives you problems with impulse control.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  It gives you problems at looking at somebody's face and decide their facial expression is really not threatening as opposed to what's this guy glaring at me about? It gives you, you know, problems in all those ways. It makes you impulsive and it makes you disinhibited and it makes you a poor calculator of your odds and typically in the direction of deciding that you are way more likely to be successful in this interaction than you actually are. And most of the time, that's a prescription for a

• 13:49Speaker 01

  You know, complicated social primate who's not going to do very well. And everything we know about us is a species where, yeah, we got a lot of violence. We're the most violent primate on this planet, blah, blah. But we have a lot of alternative strategies. And if you're just running on testosterone, amping up your pre-existing tendencies towards aggression, that's not a human prescription for social success.

• 14:16Scott Galloway?

  So men are more violent towards other people and they're more violent towards themselves. Right. Three times as many men commit suicide in the U.S. I think, as women. When you look at nature versus nurture, when you look at the biology of it and then you look at the social context, where do you think we should be focused? Are we focused too much on the nature end of it? Should we be thinking more about early intervention in terms of giving people better social context?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  My personal bias is, you know, people in my business, I think, getting paid salaries for thousands of years arguing about nature versus nurture. And, you know, what the answer is, is everything about our nature only makes sense in the context of nurture and environment. They are inseparable. A great sort of way of framing it from a colleague of mine saying, so which contributes more to the area of a rectangle? The width or the height? And they're inseparable. It winds up being virtually irrelevant to ask, what does a gene do?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Only to ask, what does it do in this particular context? It's meaningless to say what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment. And likewise, it's meaningless to say what a particular environment does, just what it does to an individual with this particular genetic profile. Now, those pieces put together, the fact that we're the most violent species on this planet, all of this, most of us have not murdered anyone. Most of us males, if we've been in relationships, have not been abusive partners. All of that is actually a rare subset. The percentage of men who actively have violence, interaction to some point in their lifetime is very low.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  What that mostly is telling us, the similarities among all of us biologically.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Are a whole lot more similar than the similarities in how we're raised and our values and our experiences, all of that. So if, you know, I was given a gazillion dollars to go solve male violence and I could only spend it on nurture sort of things or nature sort of things, recognizing that's totally silly and false, piecing them apart, but I only have the energy to target one of them, environment much more. And this is from someone where, you know, what I do is I study neurons and hormones and all this nuts and bolts biology. But in that realm, when you get to somebody like us, you want to understand why one gecko is being miserable to another gecko.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  You know, biology is on its own, is good to do a lot of explaining. You get to us and I think it's much more social issues, socialization and such.

• 17:10Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I just, you inspired a thought that eventually nurture becomes nature, right? I mean, we adapt to our surroundings and start developing different hormones and different instinctual responses, no?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:24Scott Galloway?

  So if testosterone has been unfairly assigned, or there's too much attribution between certain activities and behaviors and testosterone, and while testosterone does create aggression, it creates in inordinate amounts, creates sort of what I call reckless or unproductive aggression. What, compare and contrast, if you can, testosterone and what are the similar effects of estrogen?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Interesting, estrogen really does have a different profile. And it should be noted that, you know, all of this that we're talking about in terms of testosterone or androgens, the more general term for testosterone-like hormones, androgens in males, androgens in males, females secrete androgens as well. Doesn't come out of the ovaries, it comes out of the adrenal gland, adrenal androgens. Not a ton of the stuff, maybe, I don't know, one tenth the level as in males, but it serves a similar role. People used to think that adrenal androgens in females caused aggression, then they figured

• 18:30Speaker 01

  out, no, it amplifies pre-existing, that whole song and dance, just on a less dramatic scale. So with estrogen, what you find is estrogen can be extremely, extremely enhancing of aggression. In the right setting. Because you're a mama cat and you've got all those kittens there. And the, you know, the eight year old kid from the neighbor's house who knows nothing about this makes a mistake of coming right up to the kittens. And mom is going to go after him with tremendous aggression, driven by estrogen, oxytocin, a hormone that has a lot to do with maternal behavior.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  So in a context like that, oh, females aren't aggressive, blah, blah. Females can be incredibly aggressive in defense of their young. Females in some species, the primates, are incredibly aggressive at trying to kill their competitors. Or as Jane Goodall first documented with chimps, try to kill the kids of their competitive females and that sort of thing. But in other settings, estrogen is very facilitating of pro-social behaviors. It's the context, it's the context, over and over and over.

• 19:51Scott Galloway?

  We typically assign physical aggression, or we assign, I would say, and tell me if you agree with this, we assign aggression predominantly to men. Because physical aggression gets more media attention and it's more shocking. But there's physical aggression and non-physical aggression. Have you thought about the difference? Are certain, are women more prone to non-physical aggression than men? Or are they just, generally speaking, their aggression just manifests in different, less harmful ways?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think absolutely less harmful ways than a automatic weapon kind of thing. But on the average, again, women are far, far less likely to have physical violence. And just look at what people wind up in prison for and you can see that demonstrated there. Women do a whole lot more verbal aggression, social aggression, exclusion, ostracizing, things of that sort. I mean, we're a species where, like, this is how subtle we could be, like, aggressive. It's, it's January each year and we're looking at all the applications for new grad students who are there.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  And you go in there and you read a letter from somebody's advisor. And they're saying, yeah, so I, I heard he's interested in your grad program. And he like worked in my lab and he did some stuff with this. And He's young, he's pretty good. Wow, he hates the guy. He said, he's pretty good rather than amazing and all of that. Whoa, that was an incredibly aggressive act. Or looking the other way can be. Or pressing a button and like you drop a bomb from 30,000 feet up in the air. So in those cases, it is very, very different in the versions it could take.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  And what you see is if there's less options for effective physical aggression, which is generally the case with women against men, the alternatives are far more the case. And, you know, clearly like this epidemic we're having of adolescent girl depression and suicidality and anxiety disorders and how much of a role social media is playing in it. Nobody is stabbing you literally in the stomach with social media. All they're doing is being really socially intelligent and dissing you. And this is a driving force and all sorts of adolescent girl malaise and misery and all.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty awful. Nonetheless, I think at the end of the day, that still counts as better than going showing up with an automatic weapon.

• 22:37Scott Galloway?

  The statement I'm thinking of is that boys bully physically and verbally and girls bully relationally. Do you think that's true? And do you see that manifest in continuous adults?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely, except I keep sticking in this phrase here, which sounds like it's some sort of like reflex or covering my ass, but is incredibly informative when I say on the average, on the average statistically across populations. Could you pick out the average male or two of them? Pick them out and find out their testosterone levels and see who's got higher levels than the other? And say with any confidence, aha, he's the one who's more likely to be physically aggressive. Does that give you any predictive power? It takes you from the chance level of 50% to, I don't know, about 50%. Five percent predictability because there's tremendous individual differences.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Because the guy who seemingly has higher testosterone levels just happens to be, you know, a Buddhist monk. And that's not what's going to happen. And then you do the same thing. You tag, take your average male and average female. And what you know by studies of huge numbers of test subjects is on the average, if you have to bet money, the male is going to be more aggressive than the female and is going to more likely take the physical form. But on the average, isn't the confidence with each you could predict from any given individual or pair, tremendous individual variation. And I don't know, I guess I know nothing about this world, but there's, you know, auxiliary gangs

• 24:16Speaker 01

  of some of the most violent ones out there that are all women or all girls. And they are plenty violent. Individual differences on the average, on the average. But one of the things we've learned about making sense of like really the worst of human behaviors is if you're just going with on the average, that's not a very good predictor. And you can make some horrendous mistakes.

• 24:47Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 24:52Scott Galloway?

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• 25:37Scott Galloway?

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• 25:55Scott Galloway?

  In your latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, you dispense with the notion that humans operate with any free will. One particular area you explore is how the United States has really a misguided emphasis on meritocracy, and as a result, it spews out false promises of equal economic potential. Say more about this?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a pretty grim picture. First off, just to show where I'm coming from, like, you talk to--I'm showing my biases. You talk to any sensible neurobiologist, and they're going to believe in free will a lot less than your typical person on the street. My particular stance is, when you look closely at all the biological nuts and bolts, and how each of us turned out to be who we are, there's no free will whatsoever. And I can argue that until the cows come home, as long as you have a broader picture of, like, what made me me? Is it the fact that, like, this guy is pissing me off right now?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it also has something to do with what your hormone levels were yesterday, and if you went through some sort of trauma in the last year, or found love in the last year, if what your adolescence was like, childhood, what your fetal life was like, because that has something to do with the propensity of your brain towards all sorts of actions, what your genetic makeup is like, not your genes determining anything, but your genes interacting with what kind of culture your ancestors came up with 400 years ago, and because of what kind of ecosystem, because that was going to influence how your mother was, like, raising you within minutes of birth.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  And you put all the pieces together, and free will is a myth, and one of the implications, which get people to immediately assign me to being just, like, way out there, off the charts, this guy is impossible, is punishment, in and of itself, never makes any sense. Blame never makes any sense. It doesn't because nobody ever does something damaging because they have turned into the person who they are. Thanks to a great deal of control on their part over their biological attributes and their environmental experiences. So now we can, you know, argue for hours about what does that do to criminal

• 28:26Speaker 01

  justice system and what do we do with dangerous people and that sort of thing. And if you really follow through the implications of this intellectually, where it takes you is punishment is okay as a tool. Like every now and then you bop somebody over the head instrumentally. That could bring about like a shaping effect on their behavior. You could do the same thing by like bopping some sea slug over one part of its body and it becomes less aggressive or it could learn or things like that. So that's wonderful, but the whole premise that people should be blamed and punished for things they had no control over makes no sense at all.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  But then you flip things 180 degrees as you did. And what also becomes completely ridiculous and unsupportable is a meritocracy. The notion that people who've come out with the better college degrees, the notion that people who've come out with the higher salaries, even the notion that people who've wound up that way because they worked harder and studied harder and while their roommate was out partying, they were like getting their work done and all of that. That whoa, that's a virtue in and of itself. The notion that we praise and reward people for things they had no control over is just as clear.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  And this is where people readily fall into a false dichotomy. Okay, okay, nature, biology, yeah, you had no control over.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  You're by nature a good athlete, or you by nature have a great memory, and digit span memory, or by nature, you're an introvert. These are things you had no control over. This is what like life gave you. And where people then fall for free will, like temptation every time, is saying, yeah, that's biology. But what do you do with your attributes? What do you do? Do you get tougher when the going gets tough? Do you show backbone? Do you have self-discipline? Do you have gumption? Are you somebody who is gifted with every like talent and attribute on earth? And you go and squander it out of self-intelligence?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Whoa, the things, your attributes, those are biological. But what you do with them, that's the measure of your soul. And it turns out, what you do in moments of temptation? What you do when you know what the right thing is? But are you going to be able to keep yourself under control enough to do the right thing? All those circumstances, that's made of the exact same biology as is whether, you know, biology has made you a good sprinter or not, or a good marathoner. It's made of the same stuff. So in principle, criminal justice and meritocracies both make no sense scientifically. And we need something very different from that.

• 31:34Scott Galloway?

  So I loved, I remember watching a TED Talk from Alain de Bataille, who said that the dangerous part of a meritocracy is that if you believe anybody can achieve greatness in the US, then you're naturally saying, if you don't achieve greatness, it's your fault and you lack moral character. And it opened my eyes to the danger of meritocracy, that, that no, not everybody has those same opportunities. And to believe that we're meritocratic. I mean, I would say my success is a function of being born in California in 1964. That that was the most, that had more, more impact on the outputs in my life than anything, specifically anything I decided. At the same time, this notion that we don't have free will,

• 32:18Scott Galloway?

  are you worried that it creates a lack of accountability? That as a father, I'm trying to train my kids.

• 32:27Scott Galloway?

  To make better decisions in the moment, to to read the tea leaves, to read the context, to read the situation and be more empathetic, be smarter, don't give in to temptation, don't move to violence, handle situations well. I think of that as free will. Where do I have that wrong?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  That's as biological as your kid's eye color. So what you see, wow, let's get rid of punishment and blame and all of that. And people immediately freak out at that point and says, everybody's just gonna run amok. Because if people decide, I cannot be held responsible for my actions, whoa, go do whatever you want. And the science seems to support this, because these very interesting studies where you take a subject and you psychologically prime them to believe less in free will. And 30 minutes later, you put them in some sort of economic game, and they cheat more. They're more backstabbing.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  They're less generous, all of that. Well, look at this. You believe less in free will and, you know, antisocial behaviors at the zoo, and what a disaster this is gonna be for our world. But now you do something different. Don't get a test subject in there who believes in free will and manipulate them in some way so that they have less sense of it. Get somebody who hasn't believed in free will for a year, for a decade, whatever, they're already of that mindset. And look at their behaviors and ask, what's their level of ethical, like, standards or whatever? And you see, they are, on the average, once again,

• 34:15Speaker 01

  they are exactly as ethical as are the people who most subscribe to a notion of free will and we should be held responsible. Whoa, what's that about? You see an interesting parallel in the other realm in which people say, we're gonna run amok if people stop believing in God. It's the same exact thing. Either, you know, Scientifically can't be held responsible because there's no free will, so run amok. Or nobody is going to hold me in an ultimately responsible way, so run amok. And are atheists like immoral people? And it's the exact same thing. You take people who are absolutely strident in their atheism and all of that,

• 34:59Speaker 01

  and they're exactly as ethical as are the most religious people out there and who see their religiosity as sort of like a moral imperative. And exactly the same, on the average, what the studies show is that. It's having done the hard work to think about these subjects. Those are the ones who wind up showing the highest levels of ethical behavior. And it doesn't matter which end of the spectrum they're on. Amid all of that, we're going to have some people who are dangerous. And it's because the parts of their brain that rein in their like strongest worst impulses didn't develop very well because of all sorts of early childhood adversity, blah, blah.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  There's going to be some people who are dangerous, who are damaging. So are we all just let them run around on the streets? Is that what you people are saying who don't believe in free will? No, absolutely not. We have a means by which we subtract responsibility completely out of how we make sense of like what people are doing in that case. And the roof doesn't fall in. So in actuality, I think a world in which where we see the most damaging behaviors. Yeah, keep people whose brakes are broken off the street. But not one smidgen more than you need to contain them. And then we get back to our meritocracy and the exact same thing there.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, make sure there's not dangerous people on the street. And make sure the person who's doing surgery on your brain tomorrow to take out the tumor is actually competent, but don't have them believe afterward that they're a better person than the rest of us, that they were entitled to something that they earned it. But it's also in passing a more humane place. Because people are not being blamed and they're not being rewarded for things over which they had no control.

• 36:53Scott Galloway?

  If you don't have. Some degree of punishment around people who are incarcerated. Are you worried that the deterrent effect, if it's not there and it's not severe, that it doesn't lead to an increase in crime? And on the opposite end, if you don't give the neurosurgeon a lot of reward and access to a bigger home and a broader selection set of mates, that not as many people are going to work as hard to try and be outstanding surgeons?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Well, that's part of the problem. One solution is, yeah, punishment could be a very good interventive weapon at times, but it's used in a purely instrumental way. Certain types of bad behaviors are lessened by punishment. Certain types of bad behaviors are made less likely to happen if you read in the newspaper that somebody was punished for it. Most of the time where we think punishment accomplishes that, it really doesn't. But yeah, there's little outposts where it's a useful thing to do, but use it as a tool rather than telling you something about this person's imaginary soul. And in the same way with the neurosurgeons, yeah, at various points when they haven't

• 38:05Speaker 01

  slept for three days because they're on call or something, like, that's kind of a good time to give them a pep talk about how they're like amazing, the self-discipline they showed. And, you know, that could get a better outcome, but don't make that their general worldview that they deserve to get in line in front of everybody else. Yeah, these are good tools to use and use them prudently.

• 38:30Scott Galloway?

  Robert, do you have kids?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  I do.

• 38:33Scott Galloway?

  Boys, girls?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  We have a 27-year-old son and a 24-year-old daughter. And what I proved from the moment that they were born, that after my years of study of human behavior and after my years and years and years of looking at primate social behavior and behavior of primate infants and baboons and all of that, that it did not prepare me in the slightest for having any intuition.

• 39:00Scott Galloway?

  Nothing does.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  A competent parent.

• 39:02Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, nothing does.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Whoa, nothing about my training has made me particularly competent at that. Thank God my wife has been there throughout and.

• 39:12Scott Galloway?

  But having said that, I'm not going to let you have the hook here. So what has your research, at least theoretically, if not practically, changed or informed the way you parent your children?

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Oh, we would have my, my wife, uh, before she decided she was sick of it was a clinical neuropsychologist. So we actually do that kind of stuff at home. So like our four-year-old son does something rotten to his little sister and she's crying and we swoop in there. And of course we don't say, you're a rotten kid. We say, you're a wonderful child and we love you, but you just did a rotten thing. And we do that distinction, all of that. And we're wailing on him. And at some point, one of us, my wife or I is going to say, you know, maybe we're being unfair here. He's got like no frontal cortex. And we, you know, we actually talk that way at home.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And the only logical answer to that is, yeah, but how else is he going to develop a good one? And some of the time you get a good frontal cortex. We're regulating your behaviors, reining them in with some well-placed instrumental punishment. You get it much better by teaching somebody, other people can have different feelings than you do. And they can be sad at a time that you're not. And that's a bad thing and you should do something. And yeah, so that's kind of where they came from. So like our kids turned out to be wonderful humans. And my input was it to that they know what the frontal cortex is. And my wife did the rest of it.

• 40:49Scott Galloway?

  I've got to ask what, and this will be our last question. If you could sit everybody down and say, this is the one thing you're missing about human behavior and how we should reframe it. What would that be?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Um, oh, hell, I'm going to take two things, even though you didn't offer it. The first one is nothing we do makes sense outside of context. The other one is when you look at like our plumbing, what makes us like? A vertebrate, a mammal, a primate, an ape, and all of that. We're just like every other species out there in terms of our basic blueprint. And we are utterly unlike them in that we go and use it in ways that nobody could ever dream of if you're like have a tail and are running around the savannah. The neurobiology of aggression is exactly the same in us as in like a vole running around

• 41:46Speaker 01

  the prairies or something. And they use it to savage the other male right in front of them at that point. And we can kill someone whose face we never even see because we're operating a drone from the other side of the planet. Or we could be aggressive by writing somebody a crappy recommendation for a job and read between the lines. And so we're just like every other animal out there in terms of the basic wiring of what we have. And then we use it in ways that nobody else in the animal kingdom would even dream of.

• 42:21Scott Galloway?

  So I lied, I said I wouldn't ask you any more questions. I do have one more question though. So if you were going to recommend two or three books so someone could get just sort of up to speed on biology, neurology, human behavior, what do you think are sort of the pillars of what someone could could read to get sort of up to speed, if you will?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Oh, because I'm a jerk and insecure and all of that, I have to like mention two books of mine because why not? The first one you mentioned, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, which is coming out this October. The other is a book I published five years ago called Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. And so like they're written for non-scientists. I remember most people I know hated biology in middle school or whatever. So it's like hopefully accessible. But another book to look at is by this wonderful scientist, physician, both an anthropologist

• 43:23Speaker 01

  and a doctor, a man named Melvin Connor at Emory University, who wrote a book a number of years ago, looking at some of these same issues called The Tangled Wing. Biological constraints on the human spirit. And it's the most poetically beautiful, scientifically informed book out there for making sense of us as like a screwed up, troubled, complicated species with all sorts of foibles and wonderful potentials and teaches you a lot of science and it's beautifully written. He's a published poet. I go figure all of that. So that's a great book also.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  That was published first in the eighties and he came out with an updated edition a few years ago. So Melvin Conner with a K, Melvin Conner's The Tangled Wing. And what that teaches you is whoa, be really nuanced before you think you understand why somebody just did what they did.

• 44:26Scott Galloway?

  Dr. Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University. Having spent more than 30 years as both a field primatologist and a laboratory neuroscientist, Dr. Sapolsky has written a number of critically acclaimed books, including Behave, The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, A Primates Memoir, and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. His latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, is out now. He joins us from his home in San Francisco with his golden Labrador. Dr. Sapolsky, I really enjoyed this. This is just fascinating. We appreciate your appreciate your good work and your time.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on.

• 45:07Scott Galloway?

  That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to [email protected]. Again, that's [email protected].

• 45:33Speaker 01

  They have a large dog coming over here right now, getting on the camera. There he is.

• 45:39Scott Galloway?

  Is that a beagle?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  No, it's a it's a golden retriever.

• 45:43Scott Galloway?

  That's a golden?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  He is as sweet and simple minded as they all are. And he's wonderful. I love him to pieces, but he's not great at calculus or like philosophizing and stuff.

• 45:59Speaker 02

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