Behave The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

I'm friends with Robert Sapolsky and he's got a great book coming out about this I'm called Determine so he obviously doesn't believe in free will but he's far smarter than I ever could be and it just feels like I don't know that there's an end point with that one but if anyone could find it, it would be Robert.

One was Behave by Robert Sapolsky.

And if you've never read it, I can't recommend this book enough. The book Behave by Robert Sapolsky, maybe one of the most extraordinary books I think has been written in the last 10 years.

And about five years ago I wrote this book called behave the biology of humans that are best and worst and it's basically why do we do what we do and the answer is because of what happened one second ago and one minute ago and an hour ago and back to childhood and fetal life and genes and what culture your ancestors invented because that's how your mother treated you in evolution and all that and you got to take all of that into account and literally 790 pages agonizingly later you know this is this is what we're about

So I was reading "Behave" in some detail, I've read a number of your other books, I've followed your career for a long time.

The thing that really struck me in "Behave" is the are the sections on game theory and I wanted to start talking about game theory

And you describe that in "Behave" as difficult it's very easy to fall prey to an immediate impulse anger is a good example of that or maybe fear right that grips you and forces you to act in the moment but you want to constrain your impulses which would be manifestations of brain circuits that are much more evolutionarily ancient you want to constrain those with increased knowledge of multiple future possibilities in a complex social landscape.

You do that in particular in behavior with the as you map out the nervous system from the hypothalamus upward toward the prefrontal cortex. There's going to be an interaction between context and physiology that's necessary.

So you talk a lot in the book about tit for tat and so what do you outline that for people too because 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 but it's absolutely it's of stunning importance once again so do you want to outline the science behind these iterative game competitions and the fact that tit for tat emerged as a solution and then the variations around that too let's get into those