This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

We have a special episode for you today, and it's sort of an experiment, so we'd love your feedback.

I'll tell you how to get in touch at the end of the episode. In October, as part of the Bay Area Science Festival, the Leakey Foundation and the Bauman Foundation hosted a live event called Being Human.

Our speaker was Robert Sapolsky.

Sapolsky is a renowned professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Over the past 30 years, he's divided his time between the lab,

where he studies how stress hormones can damage the brain,

and in East Africa, where he studies the impact of chronic stress on the health of baboons.

He's the author of several best-selling books, including a primates memoir and why zebras don't get ulcers.

Here's Robert Sapolsky, live on stage at Public Works in San Francisco.

Okay. I've had sort of a dual career over the years.

Half a neurobiologist, half a primatologist.

I spend about half my time living in a lab

and mucking around with neurons and sticking genes in them and such,

and then about half my time studying baboons

in a national park in East Africa. And if you spend

enough time sort of going back and forth between the two, eventually you begin to look at humans

fairly strangely. They really do take on a different quality. I mean, you obviously wonder about

everybody's neurotransmitter levels, but you look at other guys and you wonder

if they're canines are longer than yours

and you usually conclude that they are,

or you spent a lot of time looking at people's rear ends

...