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Our gold standard of incorporating neuroscience into making sense of humans at their worst moments is relying on neuroscience that was derived from knowledge in 1840.

We haven't incorporated anything new since then. And this is appalling.

Hello, welcome to Mr. Clanchon, the Vox Media Podcast Network.

But at the beginning of today, by making again a request I made a couple of shows ago, which is trying to get here at the end of my first draft of my book, which is this book is if you've been listening, which is about political identity and polarization in the way the two coalitions are sorting and how that is changing,

various institutions and American politics. If there's someone you think I should talk to for that on the show, if there's someone you would like to hear me discuss this with somebody who you think is making polarization worse, or you think has a way of making it better, or has a perspective or a research line on it that I should be considering, you know, is in a discipline that I don't talk to enough, whatever it might be, I'd love those ideas.

I want to make sure that I'm casting the net as widely as I can and getting the perspectives that I should be into it. My email is as reclined show at Vox.com again as reclined show at Vox.com. And I'd be grateful for your for your help and your wisdom.

All right, I've been very excited about the show today. My guest is Robert Sapolsky, who is a neuroscientist at Stanford and just a genius, just a genius, if you read his work or have listened to his lectures, he's the author of a bunch of really beloved books. I'm the most recent one is behave.

But before that, he wrote, what is I think the seminal text on anxiety, a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Oldsurs? I talk a bit about this in the show, but I pick this book up because I have anxiety. I struggle with that. And I want to understand it better.

But it's really in the back half of the book where he began talking about anxiety and poverty and anxiety and society that I was on a plane reading this. And I just sometimes read a book and you just get excited.

Like these are just great important ideas. And so immediately when I landed, I got in touch with him and asked him to come on the show.

The reason I think this is an important conversation. And in fact, one of the more important ones we've had on the show is that politics and policy making, it needs to begin from a realistic view of human nature.

And it's so often doesn't. I mean, it's so often comes from values, from ideology, from interest, but not from an understanding of how human beings work.

They were laddering up to an understanding of how to build a society in which they can thrive.

You hear in politics all the time, it drives me crazy. You hear all the time, oh, I don't want equality of outcome. I want equality of opportunity.

As if equality of opportunity is some get out of jail free card for social policy. As if equality of opportunity is something somehow easy to achieve.

Anybody who is thought seriously or studied the contributors of opportunity knows that it's not you.

A quality of opportunity is such a, it is such an ambitious goal that there is absolutely no chance we will ever reach it.

But striving for it, which is difficult, which would require policy far more radical than anything we have today.

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