Here it is. Instructions to fit in, have everybody like you, and always be happy. Step 1. Where are we going? We know because we're being spontaneous. Somebody help me. We're being spontaneous. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Okay. So what if I'm not real? So what? Even if I'm not real, this moment is right here, right now. Imagine you're at your favorite coffee shop. You're ready to order.
The barista asks, do you want a latte or black coffee? You pause, consider your options, and you confidently choose that latte. Now ask yourself, was that choice truly yours? We like to believe we're in control of our decisions, that we make choices freely. But what if I told you that my guest today believes that most of the decisions you've ever made, from what you ate this morning to your career path, were predetermined? What if the idea of free
will was in fact an illusion? This is the belief of doctor Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University, where he holds positions in biology, neurology, and neurosurgery. He's also known for his work in primate behavior. He's the author of the book Determine, A Science of Life Without Free Will. By this point, we know enough about the science of how you came to be who you are that the owners of proof has
switched. Sapolsky argues that all our actions are governed by biological and environmental factors, which leaves no room for true free will. Proof to us show us a mechanism by which a neuron, a brain, a person has done something, and it is completely freed from their biological history. And he has many fans. Bill Gates called Sapolsky's book, Behave, one of the best books he read in 2017, outlining how Sapolsky masterfully explains
biology behind human behavior. Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and philosopher, refers to Sapolsky as one of the most interesting and eloquent scientists in the world. And Steve Pinker, who's been on my show, commended Sapolsky for his ability to merge biology and psychology, praising his work for offering deep insights into human behavior and decision making. Today, we'll unpack the question, do we really have free will? Are we really in the driver's seat?
Is that steering wheel, our ability to accelerate or brake, even get out of the way just an illusion? Are you in fact meant to be? Hi. It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented by RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're always appreciated. Doctor Robert Sapolsky, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me on. I'll begin by just talking about your journey
into human behavior and the idea of free will. From what I understand, it really happened at an early age. It was kind of 14 where you started questioning what we're in charge of. So I'm I'm curious how somebody that young, instead of being out in a baseball field or or, you know, dealing with the hormones of puberty, had started having such big thinking. Well, first off, I was a horrendous athlete. I was brought up extremely religiously and believed all of it and was
highly ritualistic. And circumstances were such, that I was having a religious crisis. It turned out to have transiently an illness for a few years, which turned out to be condemned in the old testament. Hey. Wait a second. God decrees that I have this medical problem, and yet my having this medical problem is viewed as some sort of insult, to god? What what's up with that? And this was causing a great deal of distress. One night, I woke up at 2 in the morning, and it suddenly all made sense.
There's no God. And as long as I was at it, just as an addendum, I added on that, oh, and there's no free will. And the universe is this huge empty, indifferent place with no meaning. How did that play at the dining room table with these? Not very well. And, just as a measure of it, my father went to his grave 20 years later having no idea that I had changed anything in my thinking. So
And how did the whole animal fascination come in? Because the other thing that was really interesting is this, that you started really understanding that within the primate community, there was a lot of answers to that empty universe of yours. It, took the form oh, it was sort of the normal evolution in some ways. I I went from the predictable every play everyday obsession with dinosaurs to the
mummies and that whole arc. And somehow, by the time I was about 10 or 11 and had settled down into primatology, the notion of hanging out with mountain gorillas, which I never got to do, unfortunately, but the notion of doing that seemed much preferable to any other option in life. And your the diversity of your academic background, maybe it made a lot of sense to you, but I read biology, anthropology, psychology. As you started moving through life, did any
one triumph over the other? It's almost like rock, papers, and scissors, or was it just this fusion of all 3 that kinda just continued to lead you down this path? I was all set on primatology. I was writing fan letters to primatologists when I was in high school and stuff, and this one guy whose feet I was gonna study, I actually wound up being able to do that and was all set. I I studied Swahili in high school because I knew I was gonna do field work in East
Africa someday. And I went off to college. He had a a minor heart attack my freshman year. He was fine. He lasted decades afterward, but he canceled his classes. So suddenly having an open slot somewhat arbitrarily, I took an intro neuroscience class and was blown away by that, and that started this, like, great divide. So am I a lab scientist, or I'm supposed to be wearing hiking shoes every day for the rest
of my life? This lightning rod that you've attached to yourself, this concept of free will, and you've even described it as a lunatic fringe. How did that come about that you decided that you're gonna stand against a lot of people that would challenge you because you're just challenging the very essence of what humans think they are that we're in control? How did that come about, and how did you decide that you'd be, I mean, courageous enough to say, I'm gonna make this statement,
and I'm gonna continue to defend it? Thank you for using the word courageous. It was just self evident. You look at enough biology factoids, and I think maybe the fact that I was straddling a number of different fields, the field primatology. I was So also getting ecology and physiological ecology and evolution stuff, and ultimately, some of the baboon work I was doing had me talking a lot to biological psychiatrists. Whereas the lab work was like with molecular people
and eventually neurology types. And I think, sir, you collect enough factoids from enough different areas and your 14 year old intuition that there's no free will, you you suddenly feel like you could back it up. We're biological machines. We're made of the same stuff as, like, squid are. We're just a fancier version and you throw enough pieces of that stuff together and out emerges some human attributes.
So in your book Determine, one of the things I I really smiled at is you said focusing on intents, like reviewing a movie based on its final minutes. Why did you feel that one of the easiest ways for people to at least understand it is that they needed to consider the entire story versus just the, the happy ending? Because the ending, when you make one of those earth shattering choices as to whether or not you're gonna have tea or coffee or whether or not send your
army over the border into the neighboring country. Like, in that moment, it is so intuitively just palpable that you there's a you in there. There's a you in there that's somehow separate of that biology yuck, and that you has formed an intent and is acting on it. And the problem is that it ignores the 99% of the book that preceded that, which is so how do you turn out to be the sort of person who would form that intent at that moment?
How do you wind up being someone with your values, someone with your luxuries and privileges, someone with your attitude, someone with your traumas. So how do you wind up being that person? And when you look at the nuts and bolts of it, it's entirely made up of the biology that random luck handed you over which you had no control. And it's interactions with
environment that random luck handed you. These paths you followed, at least when I started researching it, there's some there's some randomness in it. Do you think it's just this was just meant to unfold like dominoes that way? Basically, yeah. And where one gets mistaken as to thinking they're seeing free will is at some point you could reach in and mess with the dominoes a bit and bias them in one direction or
another. And we confuse that with us just having had agency because that's much easier than seeing, oh, not only like have I become in effect in reality a biological machine, but a fancy one who has some insights into the buttons and the levers on the biological machine. Society seems to try to harness the masses by the give and take. You know, you go to a church and the sunshine's coming through the, the, the stained glass window, everything
looks beautiful. You go over the other side, it's hell, risk and reward. It's always trying to set up these boundaries to kind of herd people like cattle. Is that a factor that factors into this whole concept of determine that really society is just an algorithm that's kind of set this up to streamline how we're born, what's our biology and science tells us what we're gonna do. Basically, but in a way where much of the time that's only one of
the players and often a fairly minor one. Something that utterly fascinates me is the fact that different cultures developed into the being the cultures they are not by accident.
What have been some of the ecological factors that influenced who becomes polygamists and who becomes polytheists and who becomes warrior class driven societies and all that kind and that then immediately determines what mom was doing with you within minutes of birth as a mechanism for replicating those values in the next generation. So, yeah, that's part of it, but, you know, there's lots of other
levels of it. The reality is that when you're looking at when we carry out a behavior, one where we may mistakenly think that there was a me in there separate of of all the materialism and one that had just acted with free intent, you ask where that came from, and that came from whatever neurons hiccuped a millisecond ago, and it came from whatever environmental stimuli triggered those neurons in the previous minute.
And it came from this morning's hormone levels, and it came from what trauma or stimulation or whatever changed the structure of your brain in the previous months, which came from your adolescence and your childhood and your fetal life and your genes and then the culture that got handed to you and you put all those pieces together, where'd that behavior come from? And it's from everything that came
before. There's not a damn crack anywhere in that edifice that you could shoehorn in the notion that every now and then, your brain can do something completely free of its history. Talk to me about when you shuffle the deck. I mean, you talk about culture and how that certain cultures are wired a certain way. What happens now as a society as we start merging the tribes? Is that something that's gonna completely change the human race? Yeah. You have all sorts of residues of these mixtures.
And by now, you know, walk around downtown Manhattan or Tokyo or London or Lagos, and you may perhaps be seeing what's an admixture by now, but go to the more isolated places, and you still see the very, very heavy imprint of the singular culture. But if nothing else, 60, 70 percent of the humans on earth are believers in some version of a religion that emerged from the desert of the Middle East over the last
4000 years. How'd that turn out? Some illiterate shepherds came up with different views about, like, what the answers are to the unanswerable, and now most of Earth celebrates, like, Christmas. Do you see yourself as one of those shepherds, modern day shepherd that's just kinda trying to figure how things are? Yeah. You know, we're all trying to figure out how things work. And, my particular version I stumbled into is it looks undeniable to me that we work
like biological machines. We're really weird ones because we could know that we're biological machines, and that generates all sorts of ripples of neurosis and anxiety and heroism and being part of something bigger than yourself and all that stuff. But it's just spin offs from the fact that, you know, you look at the building blocks of a sea snail and you look at us and a sea snail
can learn how to do something. It could learn to retract its gill if you bop it on the head repeatedly, and it learns that that's like a scary thing so that each time you you couple the bopping with some random signal, it now retracts its gill. Oh, let's spend 30 years as probably the best living neuroscientist did, taking that apart down to the level of molecules. And it turns out it's the exact same molecules in us when we learn to be afraid of a type of people we never knew about
before. We use the same molecule. You can you can do genetic engineering and stick some of our genes into a sea slug, and it works in the same exact networks. We're made of the same stuff. All that we've got going for us is quantity. You put together, like, 80,000,000,000 neurons instead of, like, the 100,000 in the sea slug, and out pops theology and aesthetics and economic viewpoints, and who knows what else, an obsession with the Kardashians. How do you
deal with the sense that can can somebody transform? Can they change their course in life? Can they become a better human being? Can they find empathy and compassion if their biology and environment hasn't set them up for that kind of success? You've touched on sort of the second of what I've used, the 3 ways in which people go off the rails and decide they're absolutely seeing
free will in action. The first one is when you very consciously make a decision in that moment, it seems inconceivable that there's not a you in there that's separate of all those neurons. Second is when you look at somebody who's had lousy circumstances and yet through, like, some incredible display of tenacity and self discipline, they come out, woah. They made themselves a self
made person. Pulling one up by one's bootstraps is inherently a belief that there's a me in there that's separate of the biology, and that one is really tempting. And the third one is the one you bring up, which is stuff changes. People change. Society's changed dramatically. I mean, there's there's at least a handful of ex white supremacists out there who pay money to painfully have their, like, tattoo swastikas. Remove people change.
And where that seems to be free will out the wazoo is the fact that in those circumstances, people mistakenly believe that someone chooses to change, and that simply is not the case. What happens instead is we are changed. We are changed by circumstance, and the way in which we are changed by whatever circumstance gets thrown at us is entirely a function of who we turned out to
be when we went in and experienced that change. In an interview you did with Michael Shermer, you mentioned the concept of useful fiction. Rather than there's no free will, that's how the world works, it's kind of a drag, suck it up. My view is actually rejecting free will is wonderfully liberating. And throughout history, every time we figure it out, here's a circumstance of human behavior where, woah, it turns out they had no control over it. It wasn't their fault that they were like this.
Every time we've done that, the world's become a more humane place. For most people, jettisoning the notion of free will is enormously liberating because we got a world that works on the notion that it's okay, that some people get treated way better than average for stuff they had nothing to do with, and some people get treated way worse. And getting rid of the notion that there's anything other than just random stupid luck. I wouldn't
say the world's in a great place right now. Is there anything from what you've studied that we can use as a society to change for the better? You know, this is a world of a huge amount of misery and inequality. The the most pernicious thing about inequality is when it's not only just permeating everywhere, corroding everywhere, but you've managed to get societal beliefs that there's somehow justice built around inequality. People get what they deserve.
People wind up in a way that has to do with justice and entitlement and earning one's position in life and things of that sort. I would say if I have to reduce all of these science factoids, which collectively said we're just biological machines and that's where behavior comes from, if you think you understand why somebody just did what they did, the odds are pretty good that you're wrong because you don't really understand how it turned out that that's how they
function. Or maybe another way of stating it is any time you're about to like judge someone, especially when it's harshly, especially when it's moralistically, stop instead and figure out how did they become that sort of machine. And every time you think you deserve better treatment or entitled to something, ask the exact same question and nowhere in there is agency going to be the answer. But
what's the answer? Somebody is wired to be a pedophile, that assaulting another human being is just within their DNA. How do we address that as a society if we have to have the compassion that that's just who they are, but at the same time, protect the rest of society from who they are. We do it exactly as we deal with 5 year olds with nose colds. 300 years ago, illness and moral worth was intertwined in Europe and if you got sick it was God punishing you for, or if a kid got sick it was
punishing the parents for their sins. And like, okay, we got a different view of illness now. If your 5 year old gets a nose cold, that is not a moral failure on their part. You do not preach at them. But nonetheless, sometimes you gotta protect society from them, which is if your 5 year old is sneezing, you keep them home from kindergarten tomorrow because they're
dangerous. They're a danger to society. And the kindergarten teachers say, you know, if your kid has a cold, please keep them home so they don't get everybody else sick, and you constrain their behavior. You impose what is literally a public health quarantine model, which is you make sure your kid can't hurt, harm anybody else, but you don't do an inch more than that. You don't tell them, and you can't play with your toys today because you're sneezing and you're rotten and you don't preach to
them. And if that seems inconceivable to us that we do that with, like, a vicious, affectless, remorseless, sociopathic, and nightmare of a human, we've done it before. When people figured out that, oh, sociopathic, remorseless people don't control the weather. And when there's a sudden hailstorm and your medieval crops are destroyed, it's not the work of witches. And
it's a better world when we don't burn people at the stake anymore. It's a better world when we figured out, you know, airplane pilots with hay fever who've taken an antihistamine and were drowsy. They can't be pilot for the next 3 days until there's all these ways in which you can impose, in a sense, public health models, figure out how to make this person not dangerous to people anymore, and constrain them in that way. And don't do it an inch
beyond that, and don't moralize about it. And as long as you're at it, put a lot of effort into understanding how people like that turned out to be that way and get a root cause so that's less likely to happen in the future. But what if someone like your with your knowledge was in power instead of having the empathy that you do, they said, listen. This person's never gonna change.
There's no redemption. Let's bring back the death penalty. Are we not concerned that this knowledge in the wrong hands could be abused beyond belief? It won't work or it sure as hell shouldn't work. They had nothing to do with how they turned out that way. And you know what? If they have an itchy back and someone scratches it, they feel better. It's a nicer life for them for 2 seconds there. If they are still capable of experiencing things and they do
not deserve because there's no such thing as deserve. There's nothing earned. There's nothing entitled. They have no more or less claim to having their needs considered than that of any other random human who turned out to be who they are. When we return, more with doctor Robert Sapolsky, and we go back and forth in this conversation of free will or lack thereof. We even talk about how it could apply when raising a child, and, of course, my 3 takeaways.
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. You know, I thought this would be the perfect episode to share some news about the RBC's foundation and their commitment to stronger communities. What they've done is launch a new community infrastructure fund. The end game is to make our community spaces more sustainable and
accessible through retrofits, repairs, and upgrades. The best way to think about what they're doing is to think about a hospital that's easier to navigate, or a community center that's more energy efficient, or a vibrant cultural hub that's more welcoming. That's the future RBC Foundation's investing in, and it's all part of RBC Foundation's $2,000,000,000
commitment to funding ideas for people and planet over the next 10 years. If you're a registered charity, and you want to apply for funding, head to rbc.com. Enhancing the sustainability and accessibility of buildings, well that matters to you, to me, and to RBC. You make a choice. You choose something. You're choosing flavor of ice cream. You're you form an intent, and you act on it. For most people, that is necessary and sufficient to
decide you had free will. How did you turn out to be the sort of person who would have that intent? Where did that intent come from? My guest today is doctor Robert Sapolsky. He's a renowned neuroscientist at Stanford University. And we're talking about his book, Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will, and his argument that our free will is just an illusion. It's shaped by biology and environment. And if that's the case, that challenges traditional views of moral responsibility.
Be curious how you think at the end of this episode. I'd love to see you in a debate with somebody. What's the best debate you've been in, toe to toe, and at the end of it, you walked out smiling, going, we both held our own, and we both feel we've improved our position. What was the most interesting one was when I had during the fall with the philosopher Daniel Dennett. He was one of the most visible strident atheists out there, but was a total mess of a philosopher insofar as he
somehow saw there was still free will out there. People turn out to be the way they are because there's a lot of things that you earn. And if the picture is good, it's because you're entitled to it and having ridiculous statements in all of his writing to the effect not even to the effect of this is, like, verbatim, luck evens out over time. Good luck and bad luck even out over time. And thus people shouldn't cite luck when complaining about
how things turned out not so great for them. And the reality is that starting with like the most basic biology to the most basic sociology, good luck is likely to amplify over time, and bad luck is likely to amplify, and they diverge further and further over the course of their life. So we had a debate, which turned out to be remarkably frustrating, because I think all he was saying at the end is, damn. It just seems so intuitively obvious that there's free will.
Wow. And when you dissected his arguments, intuition is a really lousy guideline for figuring out how things work because, consistently, intuition kinda takes you up dead ends. So we had a debate, and they did, like, the most, like, embarrassing thing that beforehand, the moderator asked the audience to vote on whether or not there was free will, and, like, 30% of
people thought there was no free will. And then afterward, he asked him again, and now most of the people in the audience no longer believed in free will and, woah, what a triumph and all of that. You know, it was cool. It was very stimulating in the sense of seeing all the ways in which his stance did not have much more to it other than, damn, it's gonna be really
uncomfortable to admit that there's no free will. Are you ever concerned that what you've uncovered, this gives people with the wrong intention, the ability to in fact manipulate society if they can in fact rewire where we're meant to be? One of those like comforting things is, you know, life is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine. Every time you answer a question, you generate 10 new ones, and it's
a pretty complicated system. Nonetheless, we have ways of modifying behavior with interventions. We're not at the point of doing it with, like, CRISPR ing somebody's genome into being different, and it is beyond terrifying that that seems inevitable that that's gonna, like, fester in various outposts. There's been one case of it so far. But, you know, we do the same thing with
propaganda. We do the same thing with advertising. We do the same thing when we convince people that they really need to change second messenger pathways in their brain in the morning by drinking coffee and having caffeine do that in order to be alert. Every time scientists come up with something, there has tragically been ideologues who were willing to seize it and run
with it. And some of the time, it's been scientists themselves who've decided this time to put on a brown shirt and start goosestepping. I think if the only logical outcomes of saying there's no free will is blame and punishment make no sense, praise and reward make no sense, Feeling as if you are more morally worthy than any other human makes no sense, and that you've earned nothing and are entitled to nothing more than
anyone else. I don't know. I guess somebody could be creative and produce a truly miserable dystopian world out of that. But I think what it mostly does is it's gotta make you realize, like, you're nothing special. Nobody else is deserving of negative judgment, of condemnation, and hating someone makes as little sense as hating an earthquake. Dan Ariely was on my show, and obviously his passion is behavioral economics.
You've gotta be violently opposed to the whole concept that we can change someone's behavior by, you know, nudges and, you know. Of course, he can. You know, the the danger there is deciding that the nudges and tools of behavior economics are more powerful than they actually are, that they explain everything because they don't, because neurochemistry doesn't explain everything and endocrinology doesn't and
physiological ecology doesn't, and none of them do. You put all the pieces together, but you could change somebody's sociopolitical view by what the smell is in the room they're sitting in. You could change the likelihood of somebody being a conservative or liberal depending on the stress hormone levels they were exposed to when they were a fetus. You you know, all of these influences are
coming in. The the infectious disease load that your ancestors were dealing with 400 years ago is a significant predictor today of the levels of xenophobia in your culture. What scientists tend to do for a living is overinflate the importance of the particular sliver they've just spent their entire lifetime on, but you put all the pieces together. So, yeah, behavioral economics, that's great. We're not rational decision making machines optimizing
whatever, and that's fascinating stuff. And that's great, but that's, you know, one part of the whole thing. There's a lot of parents that'll be listening to this and going, so how do I parent my children? Is there anything I can do? Do I have any, anything that I can impact or is in fact, who I gave birth to is really who they are? No, because you're influencing them enormously depending on what culture you're in
within minutes of birth. Teach them if they wanna judge somebody else, they should stop and think how do they become that way and how do they become that way in ways that I've never experienced and can't even imagine. You teach them when they think that it's not fair, that they're not getting something, that fair is not a relevant concept, and they did not earn the good things they have. They're just damn lucky, and they should keep that in mind. It doesn't make any sense to
hate anyone. And if someone comes up to you and says something like, woah. I'm so grateful that you just did that kind thing to me. They're not making any sense because what they should be saying is, I'm so grateful that you happen to turn out to be the sort of person who could be kind to me just now. And if that's said to you enough times, you no longer say, woah, I am so impressive that, you wind up saying, woah, I guess I'm kind of grateful that I turned out
to be that sort of person also. If kids are brought up that their basic view is they see someone different and whatever the judgment is, if their first thought is how that person turned out to be like that, kids have to wind up being adults who are less judgmental and less entitled and all those good things. So Determines coming out in paperback, somebody was to buy this book
and read it. If you could just say, there's one thing I'd love them to think about at the end of it, would it be just about the sense of judging and empathy, or would there be something even more than that? Basically, I'd be happy with just that. That's, that's plenty. You know, on a certain level, you study biology, and it has to ultimately be a mechanism of
social justice. Because you see us and you see squid and you see how all of it works, and you gotta reach some conclusions, which taken to their logical extent has to make the world more humane. And if you thought about the human race, a 100 years, 500 years, a 1000 years from now, does it continue? Or is it is just the way we're wired that we have a certain life cycle on this planet like almost
every other living creature? You know, I would have predicted we're gonna be a completely dystopian nightmare, fairly soon. We seem to be holding that at bay. Global warming may hand us that. Now if things work out, people in the future will look back at us and be as horrified at our ignorance and our societal assumptions than we are when we look back and see that, oh my god. People used to believe that old ladies with no teeth at the edge of the hamlet could control the
weather. Hopefully, they're not gonna be too self congratulatory about the fact that they've, like, managed to crawl their way a little bit more in the direction of this being a more humane place to be a a human. But, you know, we're we're moving in that
direction. If you ever found peace, whatever you were brought on this planet for seems to be this insatiable appetite for knowledge and curating and synthesizing and digesting and do you ever have a chance to just relax or is this constantly kind of being how you've been ordained? Is this is this is who I am until I leave the planet? I've got some pretty clear,
things that explain how I turned out, how I am. If if nothing else, my my parents traumatized me to the exact perfect extent so that I would, like, wind up being able to be a successful academic, not an inch more or less. But, you know, I see where some of that stuff comes from. I don't know. I'm at the very least a lot mentally healthier and happier once I met my wife about
35 years ago, and my life was transformed by that. And I decided that, like, living alone in a tent with a bunch of baboons in East Africa was no longer my model for sociality. Everything that I took out of the 14 year old conclusion about how things work was pretty grim.
It has settled much better in me since then, focusing on the liberating aspects of all this depressing knowledge and focusing on, you know, we're biological machines, but we're totally weird ones and that we're capable of thinking, we're having emotions, and thus we're capable of having emotions. That softens the blow a little bit over the years.
You know, Robert, I always end with my 3 takeaways and it's interesting enough that as you talked about at the end of how your parents traumatized you, but I think their their love and passion for religion that almost cost you your life was a great gift because it did fuel that brain at 14 to decide, you know, I I could let puberty take over my body, but I'm actually gonna just come to some conclusions that I think at a very early age, most of us wouldn't even factor
in. The you chased this in so many different ways, with so many different degrees, in so many different parts of the world, is fascinating me because maybe it wasn't your free will and this is how you ordained, but I do believe that when somebody finds something in life, if they just continue to chase it, it's an interesting roller coaster between highs
and lows. And it sounds like you've had many of those. But I think the thing that I celebrate the most is just the fact that you do believe in humans, that you do hope that there's a way that we can be less judgmental, less entitled, and much more empathetic about just realizing that everybody is all part of one race. And maybe if we can just think about it that way, we could have a better race to the future.
It's absolutely ridiculous to think that something good or bad can never happen to a machine. But nonetheless, it's a good thing when, like, pain is lessened. Pain is painful even though we're machines. Happiness is fragile, is wonderful. Like, yeah, it's a better world if there's less pain. Thanks for having me on. Once again, a special thanks to RBC for supporting Chatter That Matters. It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.