YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Sapolsky

lines on the record: 57
first: 2024-02-12
most recent: 2024-02-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, thanks. Thanks for having me on, and I sure help my country heeds your advice because fascism is really going to suck here in the United States.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it would be probably not very productive to arm wrestlers who got better bragging rights over that. But yeah. Pretty crappy in either case.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nutrients in the blood vessel that went to that at birth already these vagaries of environment interacting with biology is already sending people hurtling into who they are. The best evidence at this point is you're more likely to have had certain sort of social stressors growing up than your brother. Your brother is more likely to have had some perinatal stressors around the time of his birth that set up for a vulnerability to schizophrenia. There's all these hints there, but two different versions of thoroughly crappy luck, but of different sorts that just sent you down different paths.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the two of you had different versions of shitty luck, most straightforwardly, there are genetic modifiers for risk of schizophrenia. There are genetic modifiers for risk of depression. In both those realms, these are not determinate versions of genes where you are guaranteed to get it. They are more or less consequential in different sorts of environments. And the sources of environmental influences that change the way biology plays out are incredibly subtle. You look at identical twins and at birth, they already have significant differences in their gene expression profile, in their brains. Already, they've had nine months of different luck and different experiences because this blood vessel that went to this one carried more new”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's operating on two levels. One is high fallutin and laudable, and the other is like totally human. The high fallutin one is a world in which some people are treated way better than average for reasons they had no control over and other people are treated way worse. And this is crappy and it's a much better world if we like all of that and social justice and hooray for that. So there's that. And at the same time, like, you know, if somebody says to me, like, oh, nice book that you wrote, or they say, oh, nice shirt for at least two and a half seconds, I will transiently believe I'm a better human than average as a result before I hopefully get that. Yeah, you know, all these levels going on.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say, you know, just to fall in line with my dogma, just the perfect combination of good and bad luck in my prior 66 years. I mean, my parents traumatized me to the perfect extent so that I didn't wind up as associations. I wound up with like a very driven sense of needing to excel. And I've got the same sort of just the perfect level of insecurity so that I'm not generally like a jerk out in public, but I have had to generate a CV that's long enough that I feel like I can beat people over the head with it who were mean to me when I was 12 years old. You know, it all makes sense to me without going into any gory details. Yeah, nothing is by chance.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who have had responsibility attributed to them that is not actually there have much better lives now not being burned at the stake. And the challenge is it's as hard for us right now in our place to imagine the people who seem intuitively obviously agent. Factor just accused a witchcraft.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Women with no teeth are able to control the weather, and thus you need to burn them at the stake when there's a hail storm. Witchcraft would have made perfect intuitive sense. And 400 years later, it doesn't anymore. The notion that some people are meant to be slaves because they can't take care of themselves. And in fact, it's a mercy to enslave them was once intuitively obvious. four-year-old kids being worked to death in textile factories seem perfectly fine in the industrial revolution and all of these things no longer seem intuitively obvious that that's okay instead we have different explanatory systems and one that could subtract blame out of it and still protect society from them. We've learned the like of the weather. I don't know you fly planes that seed clouds if there's a drought rather than deciding that there's witchcraft responsible we've gotten better and”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a get out of moral condemnation card, like everyone else. They're biological machines, and that's how they turned out. And they happen to turn out to be incredibly damaging ones. And people need to be protected from them. But nonetheless, none of this happens by chance. And I think something sort of, it's inconceivable to not be horrified by a Putin or to be horrified by anything that's been going on since October 7th or so. And that's intuitively obvious that these are terrible people who are deserving of some form of retribution. And the key thing is if it was 400 years ago, the three of us could have been the same reflective, introspective people that we are now. And it probably would have seemed intuitively obvious to us that some elderly”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And let's see how it looks. Yeah, they need to be stopped. It is a nightmare there, but they are all victims of the circumstances again, but that never ever means don't bother doing anything. And forgiveness is an irrelevant concept.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It To make me dispassionate about it, it is monstrous the crimes that are being carried out there against civilians. It is like disastrous what is being done. It is Old Testament biblical vengeance of the most like savage animalistic kind, but it's not by chance that that is a country that turned out that way and it is not by chance that Hamas turned out to be people who would sexually mutilate victims and things of that sort historical exigencies guaranteed that they were plunked down in a position in 1948 as sort of a last grand gesture of British colonialism to give away the Palestinians' land to somebody else and say there, two of you go out and spend the next 70 years turning your children into bloody savages because you hate each other so much.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I managed to function that way about three minutes every two months. It's incredibly difficult because we're people of our time and place. And we have been inculcated to see responsibility in all sorts of places where there isn't. And it's an uphill battle for us to work through this person is not worthy of blame. This person is not worthy of a better salary than 99% of the population. And hating somebody makes as little sense as hating an earthquake. It's hard.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you've already done the best thing possible, which is you changed your prior egregious profession. And I assume both you and those around you are thankful for that. Yeah, this brings us to, if there's no free will, if you really buy as extreme of the stats as this, blame and punishment make no sense. Praise and reward make no sense. A criminal justice system is not only intellectually but ethically unacceptable. Likewise, any sort of meritocracy is intellectually and morally unacceptable. And we are nothing more or less than came before and none of us are entitled to anything more than anyone else because we didn't earn it. We don't deserve it. Nobody is entitled to have their consideration be less than average because of damaging things they've done, et cetera, et cetera. How are you supposed to function that way?”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That made them who they were in that moment. They did not choose to change in watching that movie. They were changed by it as a function of who circumstances construct them into being.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Offensive it is that they even showed this movie. Whoa, two people's behaviors changed by this experience to in totally different ways and you know it's not by chance that each one of them went into that experience having”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's none at all. Okay, here's no, okay, none of this. Don't try to sneak into the back door there. Okay, here's an example. You get two people, they go to a movie, it's some inspiring movie about some everyday Joe who does something heroic from out of nowhere. One person comes out of the movie changed by the experience the person's behavior changes. They come out and say, wow, that was the most inspiring thing I've ever seen. I'm going to go over. There's a booth right over there for Amnesty International and I'm going to give them my life savings. The second person comes out of the movie changed by the experience. Their behavior changes. They come out and say that was the most manipulative, emotionally purile movie I've ever seen. I can't believe they tried to manipulate us that way. And I hated the cinematography as long as we're at it. And I'm going to go over to the ticket taker right now and punch the person because how.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Show how we're not going to all just run amok. The other is, oh my God, we just could have murderers running around in the streets. And it could be shown that we have endless societal mechanisms that we've been developing for centuries where we could subtract responsibility out if somebody's damaging actions and protect society from them and still not sermonized to them about their rotten soul. And you can deal with the existential void, but the one the people then come to is exactly the one you hit on, which is, oh, if the whole world is determined, nothing can ever change. Why bother? And that's completely wrong. All you have to do is look at amazing examples of people whose behaviors have changed, of societies that have changed. People change dramatically with the key thing is we do not change. We are changed by circumstance and we respond to that circumstance.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there is. There's every reason to do it because of people's wrong intuitions about what free will or lack thereof is about whole scientific song and dance about how we're nothing more than the sum of our biology over which we had no control and its interactions with environment over which we had no control. And all any of us are is the outcome of the luck that made us who we are at this moment. Okay, so suppose you buy into my conclusion and I'm sort of out on the lunatic fringe in that regard, even among neuroscientists who say there's so much less free will that we have to rethink basic institutions ourselves. I don't think there's any whatsoever. And people immediately panic and start kicking back along a number of lines. One is the fear that we're all just going to run amok and I can take you through the science that will show.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“there you show them somebody of a different race and for about 75 percent of white american subjects within a fraction of a second 70 to 80 milliseconds that is faster than conscious awareness part of the brain called the amygdala activates what's the amygdala about fear and anxiety and aggression it's activated before you were even consciously aware of what you're looking at and meanwhile there's another part of the brain a primate specialty called the fusiform cortex that you use for recognizing faces and show the face of somebody from a different race and it doesn't activate that part of the brain as much as if it was for an us their faces don't count as much you look at their finger being poked with a needle and a part of the brain having to do with empathy doesn't activate as much it's”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's depressing as hell. It's this whole literature, whether it's looking at juries and, you know, not just the race of the defendant has a dramatic impact on jury decisions and judges' rulings and what bail is required and all of that. But the hue of the person's skin, the more Afro-stereotypically Afro-American somebody looks here dark the skin, facial features, all of that, the more likely they are to be convicted than a light-skinned African-American. There's just a massive literature on this. But from my sort of neuroscience world, the most interesting version is you put somebody in a brain scanner and you're flashing up faces and faces of people who look just like you. And somewhere in there you put in a face of someone who looks way different. And if it's a white American subject.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Test of if it's different, it's kind of disgusting. And if it's disgusting, it's wrong, wrong, wrong, and that's all I need to decide on it. And that's an amazing measure of this sort of thing. Political conservatives get disgusted more readily than do political progressives.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If ambiguity makes you feel like you are overwhelmed and you look for patterns and you look for structure, you are going to love autocrats. You are going to have an orientation towards social dominance. You're going to find things, decide that things like social order is more important than social freedom. And things of that sort. And then you see it in the craziest sort of things. You look at at least in the US, political progressives versus conservatives. And conservatives are more freaked out by dirt, by getting soiled. They have more cleaning products in their home on the average than do progressives. You show somebody a picture of like some open gaping wound filled with maggots. And the more their stomach lurches, the more that's a predictor that they're a social conservative because they're running their opinions on a litmus.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stated in the way that political scientists pull their hair out over here. Why is it that the poor over and over and over vote against their best interests? They vote for people who favor the economics of the wealthy and decrease social services and less of a safety net. And they do it over and over. And it's sort of at the intersection of really interesting science that shows your temperament, your emotional makeup, et cetera, is a much better predictor of your political views than whatever it is you claim you've thought through carefully. People who are made anxious by ambiguity and novelty want to be political conservatives. If the future is an”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By plenty for the exact same income across countries, across states, across provinces, across city blocks in some cities in the United States, the more inequality you are surrounded by, the worse your health is going to be.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's about the psychological stress, the stress of subordination. What's the evidence for that? Wonderful studies where you look at somebody and what's their objective socioeconomic status? And it turns out, you know, that's a significant predictor of their health. Now look at their subjective socioeconomic status. Ask them, it's like the fanciest research equipment in the world. You give them a picture of a ladder with 10 rungs on it and you say, you know, when you compare yourself to other people, where do you put yourself on this ladder? A total measure of somebody's subjective socioeconomic status. And it turns out your subjective one is at least as good of a predictor of your health as your objective. It's not being poor. It's feeling poor. And then the question becomes, what is it that makes people feel poorer being surrounded?”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worst in the world, and it's been getting worse with every decade, but is not healthcare access. Okay, so then you say, well, it's obvious if you're poorer, you can't afford a health club membership. You're going to live next door to a toxic dump. You can't decide you're getting stressed out at work and take a six month sabbatical to learn how to play classical guitar or something. You have fewer protective factors and tons more risk factors. You're more likely to smoke, to drink in excess, the food you eat is, high fat, high carb because that's cheaper, all of that sort of thing. And you look carefully and about a third of the gradient is explained by that. What's the rest of it about?”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Further down you are, and what people have been trying to figure out for decades is really smart public health sort of people is what's the cause of this? How is it, and this is the jargon in the field, how is it that low socioeconomic status gets under your skin and winds up being terrible for your health? And the easy answer, if you're an American, is, oh unequal access to healthcare, you can't see a doctor. You wait four months, you go into a teaching hospital, you get incompetent 23-year-old med students, you take out your kidney, whatever, or you can't at all because you can't afford it. And, oh, it's healthcare access, but then you look at a country like yours where you do have universal healthcare and you look at the Scandinavian utopians and they've got a socioeconomic health gradient also. It's not as steep. The United States is the”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're horrible. I mean, just to show how bad things are your country sounds like a shining paradise up on the hill there because you actually institutionally believe that all of your citizens should get health insurance unlike us. So you're light years ahead of it. I know the National Health Services kind of having some challenges these days, but nonetheless you've got a national health service. You believe it's the duty of a government to watch out for the health of its citizens. But nonetheless, you look at every westernized culture out there. And what you see is what they call the socioeconomic health gradient. For every step down on the socioeconomic ladder that you see, health is worse, the sheer number of diseases, the incidence of them go up, their impact goes up, life expectancy is shorter.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eight hour workday, and four hours later he's still hypertensive and he's still a wreck from what was almost a close call, etc. And then you look at the guy who's going to last for 25 years and up till 30 seconds before he sits down in his chair, he might as well be a Buddhist meditator or something. His body is zero evidence of a stress response, low blood pressure, his autonomic nervous system look great. All of that. He's doing perfectly fine while he's still in the parking lot, gets into his chair, and 30 seconds later, his system is going at maximum. And 30 seconds after it ends, he's thinking about dinner. What do you see in sort of the optimal profiles, cybernetic people talk about that this is the system that optimizes signal to noise ratios? You activate the system when it's needed, like crazy. And not the rest of the time.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that's a world in which you make a mistake and 500 people are dead and constant demands and yes, incredibly stressful. And what you see in terms of careers of air traffic controllers is it tends to get this bimodal through the distribution. Half of them quit after six months or even three quarters of them quit after six months because they simply can't do it and it is too stressful and they're not sleeping. And the remainder have amazing 25 year careers. And what's the difference between them? And there actually have been studies done on this. You get somebody who's the burnout one and four hours before he goes on duty, he's already hypertensive, his stress hormone levels are through the roof. His stomach is already secreting acids that are wiping out the stomach walls. All of that, he finishes his...”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, absolutely, and I'm glad you survived, both of you survived your versions of that. There are certain occupations where levels of burnout, levels of job dissatisfaction, levels of mental illness, substance abuse, suicidality just goes.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way too much, i.e., a stressful one. We want the optimode, but it turns out the problem is not only does the optimum vary a whole lot between one person and another, one person is like really putting it out there with risk-taking is to get up really early for bird watching and for somebody else. They sign up to be a mercenary in Yemen or something. So there's tremendous individual differences. And the other is society is very good at manipulating us into thinking our optimal set point for stimulation is a lot different from what it actually is. All we hear is seize the day, go out and make every moment count. And that winds up being pretty maladaptive for a lot of folks.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And most of all, it's occurring in an overall setting that is benign. Like you get on a roller coaster and you know the worst that could happen is you're going to feel queasy afterward, not that you're going to get decapitated. And what happens is within a setting that you overall feel safe in, what we find great about the right amount of stress there is what we call stimulation. You feel safe enough to say surprise me. I'm willing to give away some of my control and predictability, surprise me with an unexpected plot turn. Surprise me with how the roller coaster suddenly dips this way or that. And that's exactly what stimulation is about and whether you do child development or you do gerontology or anything in between an environment with too little stimulation is just as bad for you as one that”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And what this speaks to is amid a long laundry list of illnesses that are caused by or be made worse by stress. Amidst that, we don't hate stress. We just hate the wrong kind of stress. If it's the right kind, we love it. We pay money for it. We pay money to get on a terrifying roller coaster ride or watch a horror film or some such thing when it's the right one, we thrive in it. And thus you say, okay, what makes for good stress? And it has certain parameters. One is it's like moderately stressful rather than massively so. The second is it doesn't go on for long. It's very temporary. It's not by chance that roller coaster rides are not three hours long.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having a bad day and without any control and any warning, you get your rear end slashed. You spend the morning and you manage to catch something good to eat and anybody can rip you off. You finally get somebody to groom you at a higher ranking guy comes along, boots you out. If you are subordinate baboon, you are a remarkably similar equivalent to a socioeconomically unprivileged human in that your life is filled with lack of control, lack of outlets, lack of predictability, and lack of social support. And this is the recipe for the toxicity of social subordination.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is exactly a model for it. I mean, as it turns out, you know, we're not getting ulcers because of locust infestations. We're getting because of chronic psychological stress. And what is it that makes psychological stress stressful for the same external unpleasantry, you are more likely to subjectively feel stressed. You are going to turn on more of a stress response and you're more risk-for-stress-related disease. If you feel like you have no control over what's going on, if you've got no predictive information, if you have no outlets for the frustration being caused by the stress, if it means things are getting worse rather than better, and most of all, if you got nobody shoulder to cry on, no social support. These are the building blocks of psychological stress. And this is exactly you're a low-ranking baboon and somebody else's having...”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it all depends on who you are in the hierarchy as to whether or not you're causing ulcers or being given ulcers. And you look at baboons and just something that just summarized there. They have the highest rates of aggression of any non human primate. The leading cause of death of male baboons is pretty much other male baboons. So they're doing that. And the majority of baboon aggression is displacement aggression. Number two loses a fight to number one. And as a result, chases number five, who as a result slashes the rear end of number 11, who as a result knocks over a female, who has a result like snarls and snaps at a kid, all in like 10 seconds.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All they do is sit around and generate social stress for each other. Overwhelmingly, if you're a baboon in the Serengeti and you're miserable, it's because another baboon has worked really hard to bring that state about. They're perfect models for Westernized stress because they have the luxury of just generating nonsensical psychosocial stress for each other around the clock. They're perfect models.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evidence that they have anticipatory stress, like what stress is about for them, is an acute crisis. And thus they have chronic psychosocial stress, the type that, among other things, can give you a certain type of ulcer and all sorts of other stress-related diseases. That's part of why baboons were my perfect study subjects. Because if you're a baboon, the serengeti is like the greatest place to live in. You live in these big troops, so the lions don't mess with you very often. There's a lower infant mortality rate among the baboons than among the neighboring Maasai. And most importantly, this is a fabulous ecosystem where you only have to spend about three hours a day foraging to get your calories. And what that means is you've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to making some other baboon miserable.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, well, this is just a slippery slope here, but thank God I was able to translate what it was you were saying. You know, you look at Zebra and it's out there. And a lion comes out and the zebra manages to spot it and runs like hell and the lion gets a little bit like off kilter of trying to get somebody else and then try to get somebody else and comes up empty because it's just this dumb adolescent male lion who really doesn't know how to do discipline hunting yet. And our zebra guy gets away with it. And if it was you or me, we would be hypertensive for three weeks afterward having nightmares or whatever. And you look at the zebra and 30 seconds later, he's back to his entire universe consists of, am I going to eat this blade of grass or that blade of grass? The speed with which they re-equilibrate, there's no evidence.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of turning on the exact same vertebrae stress responses that dinosaur did, but we turn it on chronically for purely psychological reasons. And the punchline of the entire field is, you know, run for your life and have very elevated blood pressure. This is a good thing. Sit in traffic every day and have very elevated blood pressure year after year, and you're going to get any of the diseases of chronic stress, cardiovascular disease, adult onset diabetes, immune dysfunction, infertility problems, clinical depression, so on and so on, where this weird species where we activate a system that is designed to save your life for the next two minutes, and we turn it on with like existential malaise. And that's why we get sick with stress-related diseases.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Running after a meal, and everything you do with a stress response then makes perfect sense. You mobilize energy for your exercising muscles. You increase blood pressure to deliver it. You turn off all the stuff in your body that you don't need to be wasting energy on at the time. growth and tissue repair and reproduction and do that stuff tonight if there is a tonight everything that goes on there is just triaging to the essentials of surviving the next few minutes And sort of the secret to why humans are so prone towards stress-related disease is we get there and we activate the exact same stress response hours and hours every day for an entire career of being stuck in traffic every day. We see a more expensive car than ours zoom past us and we feel socially subordinated. We are capable”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, me to appreciate that when we're stressed by taxes, by whatever, we secrete stress hormones. The most famous one is from the adrenal gland, cortisol hydrocortisol. Their name, a class of these stress hormones. And the amazing thing is a hundred million years ago, some like little chirpy dinosaur was being chased by a predator dinosaur. And without question, that dinosaur's adrenals were secreting the exact same hormone that we do when we think about taxes. It's an incredibly ancient piece of wiring. It's the same thing and reptiles and fish and birds and it's incredibly conserved. And for 99% of beasts out there, for 99% of history, what it's about is there's a physical crisis. You're running for your life or you”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That time, I assume the biggest threat at that point would be like, you know, some guy is sitting there and suddenly he's wobbling around and not making a whole lot of sense. And then he falls over. And then I get out of a vehicle and pick him up and put him in the back. I assume the big problem was going to be that, you know. The work that I did was on the mails if I darted a female when she went down, her mother and her two sisters and her nieces and her kids are like trying to rip apart the Jeep at that point. They function in family units. The males have none of that solidarity. So I was perfectly fine darting males. It was protecting the males from each other. That was the problem”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know you kind of learn the rules of stuff. You learn, you don't get in between a mother and her kid. You learn who's in a bad mood today. You know who when in a bad mood looks for somebody weaker to take it out on, you're super conscious constantly of these are the bushes where the two buffalo hang out, you know, that sort of thing in many ways it becomes like you could cross a highway if you had to and someone who was a hunter-gatherer would get flattened by a truck within minutes yet you grow up in an urban westernized setting and you learn this is a dangerous setting but here's how you go about functioning it um when i first went there i assumed that when i would dart about boon it would take about eight or nine minutes until they passed out um and you were watching them closely during”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Palatable to hang out with, but once my wife showed up suddenly, the cap was like a much more active social site. So it's clear she made a whole lot more sense to those folks as well as to the baboons than I ever did.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blood, classic nomadic pastoralists. And I think as they sort of figured out, I was taking blood from the baboons. I'd followed the baboons for hours each day. I think they kind of decided that I was such a poor man that I couldn't afford any cows and thus I was herding baboons and living off of their blood and milk. And that seemed to be the view among a lot of them. And that certainly did not make me seem that much more”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point, and they're coming through with their cows in the morning and passing through camps and you sort of see what everyone's up to. And it was only once my wife showed up that suddenly the camp was inundated with school kids and my wife like her first season got invited to a clitorectomy ceremony which I had never been. And unfortunately we were out of town on that one. And it was so apparent to me that sort of all the years of myself out there, I was just some sort of off-putting weirdo. And something about my wife coming out there, I suddenly made a lot more sense. And like kids were no longer sort of creeped out to hang out about camp as far as I could tell. Yo, the Messiah, they heard their cows. They live off of cow milk and cow.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of darting one of these guys in a way where you could actually get usable data and not wreak havoc sort of behaviorally in the rest of the troop. And something that was apparent like almost immediately was my wife could get a lot closer to the baboons for dartings than I could. She was far less unsettling to them. And she was a relative, a newcomer, and I'd been hanging out there for a decade. The way she walked, her pheromones, I don't know what, but she could immediately get much closer to the baboons for darting than I normally could. So that was striking. The other interesting thing was, okay, we lived in a couple of tents on the edge of this park, the Serengeti, and across the river was the start of human settlements, Maasai people there. And I had sort of been hanging out with the Maasai on and off for years at that time.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in interesting ways. The first was, you know, we could sit there and gossip in the evening about what the baboons were up to. And that sort of in my more solitary years was not an option. But one of the things I noted very quickly, part of what I did in addition to watching the animals behaviorally trying to get a sense of what's the hierarchy this year, who's not getting along with who, who's messing with who in the bushes, that sort of thing is I would then dart the animals. I would use a blowgun anesthetic system to dart somebody, keep them in camp for a day, and run a whole bunch of clinical tests to get a sense of, okay, what's the relationship between your rank, your personality, your social affiliation, and your blood pressure, your stress hormone levels, your cholesterol levels, how well your immune system is working and all of that. And it was a very constrained process.”
2024-02-12 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 59. Robert Sapolsky: The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source