Robert Sapolsky, Ph.D.: The pervasive effect of stress - is it killing you?

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I'd like to take a couple of minutes to talk about why we don't run ads on this podcast, and why instead, we've chosen to rely entirely on listener support. If you're listening to this, you probably already know, but the two things I care most about professionally are how to live longer and how to live better.
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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest today is Professor Robert Sapolsky, and many of you may recognize that name because Robert has written some incredible books. Probably the one that you would recognize the most is Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, A Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. But he's also the author of A Primate's Memoir, which grew out of work that he spent in his early years in Africa, and he spent nearly 30 years in Africa, four months at a time. The Trouble with Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament. And his most recent book, Behave, The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. This is a book that Robert spent nearly four years researching and writing, and the book is almost 800 pages long. This is a treatise on the topic of human biology and behavior. Robert is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford where he's been, I believe, since he completed his PhD and his postdoc, which he did back on the East Coast. He spent a lot of time in Kenya right after college. He went to Kenya, then Uganda, where he studied for the next 30 years the behavior of baboons and other primates. He is a MacArthur Fellow. In 1987, he was awarded the fellowship, which many of you may recognize by its other name, the Genius Grant. He is very modest and soft-spoken about this and really doesn't like to be reminded of that. But Robert is a really impressive guy. Today is actually the first time we really met in person. I had seen him speak about a year and a half ago, and after the talk, introduced myself, and we spoke very briefly. But I remember during his talk, thinking to myself, this is the first time I'm really being convinced at the true pathology of stress. I think I had certainly appreciated the benefits of meditation before when it came to being less miserable.