Today you can do something that wasn’t possible for any previous generation. You can take a class from a Stanford professor without paying a dime. For the past month, I have been watching Robert Sapolsky give twenty five lectures about the biology of human behavior. As much as I’d like to ask all of you to watch them, I know that few of you will. For that reason, I couldn’t resist the urge to pass on the key insights that I learned from his class.
I urge all of you to give the lectures a try, and to take a look at his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. He is one of the most engaging professors I have ever seen. Providing his lectures with a healthy dose of humor, he has compressed some of the most interesting information in the field into a single course. I will attempt to compress it further.