Sapolsky was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in Brooklyn, the son of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Sounds like an interesting character. He makes some good points. There's a reason many of us refer to the general populace as NPC's. How much agency do people have who are so easily manipulated by the media and their authority figures? They are almost certainly living their lives by a script and make very few (if any) choices that are outside of their programming.

You may have had the uncanny experience of talking about an upcoming camping trip with a friend, only to find yourself served with ads for tents on social media later. Your phone didn’t record your conversation, even if that’s what it feels like. It’s just that the collective record of your likes, clicks, searches and shares paints such a detailed picture of your preferences and decision-making patterns that algorithms can predict — often with unsettling accuracy — what you are going to do.

This is another great example of how predictable a human is.

However, I do think there is a line that some people cross into sentience. It seems like our species has been flirting with the idea of sentience for thousands of years, and occasionally someone breaks through into relative sentience. Eventually, our entire species will become sentient, but I think the majority are as easy to understand as any animal that you can observe in the wild.