The Manosphere Report

0:00There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they

0:06see someone suffer if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer.

0:12So ordinarily, if you see someone be shocked, you have interior insula.

0:17It's like you're being shocked, too.

0:19Unless that person is first portrayed as violating some moral or social norm, in which

0:25case, dopamine. You get a reward out of seeing that person punished.

0:30I think that it is a lust just as much as lust for substances or

0:36lust for sexual partners. It is a desire people want to see people punished.

0:42Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for

0:47everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford

0:56School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr.

0:59Catherine Page Hardin. She is a psychologist and geneticist and a professor at the University

1:03of Texas, Austin. Dr. Hardin is an expert in how our genes shape our life

1:08trajectory, especially how they interact with life events during our adolescence and how they impact

1:13our long -term mental and physical health.

1:15Today, we discuss the interplay of nature and nurture in addiction, criminality, susceptibility to trauma,

1:22and the larger themes of sin, sociopathy, empathy, and forgiveness.

1:27As you'll soon see, Dr.

1:29Hardin is unique in her ability to define how biology, psychology, and the sometimes randomness

1:34of life interact to drive people's choices.

1:36Today, we talk about known differences between males and females, the role of hormones and

1:41hormone -independent influences on male -female differences, and how people assume different roles in life

1:46depending on the power structures they find themselves in.

1:49I want to be very clear that this is not a tap dance around the

1:52big issues episode. Today, you are going to hear a very direct conversation about what

1:57the best science says about the role of genes and environment on human choice, and

2:01how the biology, meaning genes and everything downstream of them, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc., drive what

2:08choices are available to people and which ones they tend to make.

2:11I've long been a fan of Dr.

2:13Catherine Page Hardin's work because I know of no one else researching these topics with

2:17the level of rigor that she is, and as you'll soon hear, she is an

2:20exceptional educator. She's clear, she's direct to the question, and her compassion and belief in

2:25people's ability to better themselves no matter what their genes are and to better the

2:29world is woven into everything she says, and it's all backed by data.

2:34I should also mention that I learned during today's episode that Dr.

2:38Catherine Page Hardin has a new book coming out soon.

2:40It is entitled Original Sin on the Genetics of Vice, the Problems with Blame, and

2:45the Future of Forgiveness. And you can find that anywhere books are sold.

2:49It's now available for presale.

2:50Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching

2:54and research roles at Stanford.

2:56It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer

2:59information about science and science -related tools to the general public.

3:03In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.

3:06And now for my discussion with Dr.

3:09Catherine Page Hardin. Dr. Catherine Page Hardin, welcome.

3:13Hi, thank you for having me.

3:14Few things are as interesting to people as the relationship between genes and behavior, or

3:20what we call genotype and phenotype, the expression of all the stuff downstream of genes.

3:25And few things are as interesting as adolescence and puberty and the home we grew

3:30up in and how our genes interact with our choices, et cetera.

3:36You work at the intersection of all of those, which is a very brave thing

3:40to do. Could you just frame for us why you selected to study the relationship

3:44between genes and outcomes using adolescence as the time point in which you jump off

3:53from those questions? Because it could have been, you know, from infancy or in old

3:58age. Why adolescence? Yeah. So I did my PhD at the University of Virginia, and

4:04I was trained as a clinical psychologist.

4:06And if you're looking at when does mental illness emerge, when does this risk for

4:13mental illness really start to increase, it's in adolescence.

4:17So most cases of substance use disorders or addiction begin in adolescence.

4:21That's when people's risk for depression goes up.

4:25If you're going to have a first psychotic episode, that's going to be in late

4:28adolescence, early adulthood. So from a clinical perspective, adolescence is really interesting.

4:34And then I'm also was trained as a lifespan developmental psychologist.

4:38So thinking about how does what's happening early in the life reverberate really through the

4:45rest of your lifespan. And if you think about when in life do individual differences

4:50between people emerge, canalize, get deeper, when are people's life trajectories really starting to be

4:57apparent, it's in adolescence. So I came into this field really interested in teenagers, late

5:04childhood and the teenage years.

5:05So thinking about puberty, sexual behavior.

5:08But then from there, what's happening in adolescence?

5:12It's also rule breaking or aggression or, again, risk for alcohol and drug use.

5:17So my research program was really based on, OK, well, what's happening in this period

5:22of life where the gene.

5:24we're born with and the family environments we were raised with, how do they combine

5:29to shape people's lives? By the time people finish their teenage years, they begin adulthood.

5:36They're beginning adulthood on such different life trajectories.

5:40What ages constitute adolescence? I mean, that's changing, I think, right now.

5:47We typically think of adolescence as beginning with the physical changes of puberty, right?

5:53Adolescence is this period of transition to reproductive and social maturity.

5:59So we're thinking of adolescence as beginning between 10 and 13 when people are going

6:04through puberty. I think more controversial is when does adolescence end?

6:08Because historically, we've defined that as you're an adult when you take on the social

6:14roles of adulthood. And that keeps being, you know, for various reasons, economic, social reasons,

6:20pushed back later and later.

6:21So I've typically studied people between 10 and 25, so that kind of 15 -year

6:27period. A 10 -year -old is clearly a child.

6:30A 25 -year -old is about to be kicked off their parents' insurance.

6:33They can finally run a car.

6:35They can technically take on the social roles of adulthood.

6:38And that's a long period of time where a lot of things are happening in

6:42the body, in the brain.

6:44This may be outside the scope of what you work on, but I've always been

6:48struck by the fact that while kids, including myself, generally hit puberty somewhere, as you

6:56said, between 10 and 13 or maybe 14, some seem to go through puberty for

7:02a much longer period of time.

7:04And I think of puberty as perhaps one of the biggest developmental milestones because the

7:11brain changes, hormones change, of course, but perceptually and how people perceive you changes completely.

7:18And the acquisition of what we know as secondary sex characteristics seems to occur at

7:24such different rates. So, I mean, I can be open about this.

7:27I know I hit puberty by, I know, at 14.

7:33But then I didn't, you know, I didn't really shave until I was almost graduating

7:37college. But I had grown, right?

7:40Whereas there were other kids that we went home for the summer.

7:43And they came back. And they came back like not a grown man, but looking

7:47like this guy's like - Looking like a grown man.

7:49Yeah. And kicking our butts in soccer and he's just, you know, just in terms

7:52of everything, right? But then, and I don't want to out this person.

7:57But then when I look at us now, it seems that the people that went

8:01through puberty more quickly may have aged more quickly in general.

8:05Is there any notion of a clock and the rate of that clock turning can

8:11be sort of visualized in puberty and predict longevity?

8:14Is there any relationship there?

8:15We are working on this right now.

8:17So, we can think about individual differences in puberty in three ways.

8:22We can think about pubertal timing.

8:24So, when does it start?

8:26For girls, pubertal timing seems to be, early pubertal timing seems to be the best

8:32predictor of risk for mental health problems, physical health problems, earlier menopause, shorter lifespan.

8:40Early onset of puberty. Early onset of puberty.

8:42So, it's not looking at the sort of rate of characteristics.

8:45Yeah. For boys, it seems that the difference in pubertal pace or pubertal, some people

8:52call it pubertal tempo. So, not just how early does it start, but how long

8:57does it take for all of those changes to unfold?

9:02We did a study many years ago where we found that boys were less affected

9:06by when it started, but more affected, at least for their emotional development, by how

9:11quickly it happened. With boys where they changed overnight, having the hardest time sort of

9:16assimilating all these changes that are happening because your cognition is not necessarily maturing as

9:23quickly as your height or your musculature or your hormones.

9:27And so, it seems that boys seem to be particularly sensitive to going through puberty

9:32very, very quickly. What we've been looking at recently is how the epigenome changes during

9:39this period of time. So, the genome is your DNA.

9:43It's the DNA sequence in your cells, and that doesn't change with development.

9:47But the epigenome is everything on top of the genome that affects how DNA is

9:53used by the body, used by the cells.

9:55And there's one epigenetic mechanism known as DNA methylation, which is, you know, a methyl

10:02group is basically like this chemical tag and it can get kind of tagged onto

10:07the genome. So, there's great work in aging that shows that the epigenetic clock measured

10:15by DNA methylation starts ticking in infancy and faster biological aging as measured by the

10:24epigenome predicts shorter lifespan, worse health, earlier mortality.

10:30What we looked at is, well, instead of training an epigenetic clock on age, can

10:37we train it on pubertal development?

10:40So, how physically mature you are.

10:42And what we found is you can, so there's these, these, the clock is ticking

10:48as you get older, but the clock is, there's another clock that's also taking as

10:52you become more physically mature.

10:54And those two things are correlated.

10:56So the epigenetic changes that we see as you go through puberty faster do seem

11:03to be related to aging more rapidly even in older life.

11:08So our reproductive development is, I think, very tied at a cellular molecular level with

11:15our lifespan development. And we see this across species.

11:18If you genetically engineer mice to go through puberty earlier, they die earlier.

11:23So we have this tradeoff between reproductive maturity and lifespan across species within species.

11:29And I think now we're beginning to see that at the molecular level too.

11:33Fascinating. I also like the way that answer lands because I had a very protracted

11:38puberty. Yeah. And I feel grateful for that.

11:41Yeah. In retrospect, because, you know, in terms of athletic ability and things like that,

11:47I wasn't really delayed, but I couldn't get past the sort of middle of the

11:51distribution. But then over time, I was like, this is kind of wild.

11:55I feel like I look very different.

11:58And I looked very different at 30 than I did at 20, like markedly different

12:02without doing anything except existing.

12:04Some people seem kind of frozen in their adult look at this earlier age.

12:10At this earlier age. And from the animal literature, and I'm thinking the studies from

12:14my colleague, Eric Knudsen, in particular, where he was looking at plasticity in barn owls,

12:18but it's been looked at elsewhere.

12:19There's this really striking correlation between the onset of puberty and the end of the

12:24so -called critical period for neuroplasticity.

12:28Of course, plasticity can go on throughout the lifespan, but the plasticity that occurs until

12:33and around puberty is, you know, an order of magnitude greater than the plasticity that's

12:40available as, say, a 30 -year -old or 40 -year -old.

12:42So they've done the experiments of, like, over -reactamizing animals or taking the testicles out

12:49of animals and preventing, somewhat preventing puberty.

12:52And it doesn't seem to extend that window.

12:54So in humans, is there any relationship between cognition, brain flexibility, and the onset of

13:01puberty, the timing of the onset of puberty?

13:03That's a really interesting question.

13:06And it's complicated, in part because it's like, well, what part of plasticity you're looking

13:13at? What part of brain development are you looking at?

13:16And also, with humans, we can't, unlike animals, manipulate the onset of puberty in quite

13:23the same way. So it does seem like there are some cognitive functions, like if

13:27you're thinking about executive functionability, your ability to shift attention or update, the things that

13:34are tested by a standard IQ test, those seem to be much more age -related,

13:40whereas your ability to learn from peers versus your parents, your sensitivity to risk and

13:50certain types of emotions, that seems to be more tied to pubertal development than with

13:55age. But they're so confounded within observational studies in humans that it's a continuing challenge

14:02to try to pull these apart.

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16:41Individual responses may vary. I recall some mouse data showing that if you expose young

16:52prepubescent mice to older males, they enter puberty earlier.

16:57Does that exist in humans as well?

16:59So this is a controversial area of research.

17:02It is true that girls, human girls who are raised with a non -biological father,

17:11do on average tend to go through puberty earlier.

17:15And some have hypothesized that it's a similar sort of cue from the environment about

17:20the stability and availability of resources.

17:23If dad is gone, maybe the provisioning of the environment is going to be less

17:29stable. Maybe evolution would favor a reproductive strategy where you go through puberty earlier rather

17:36than this continued, you know, childhood is so costly, right?

17:40Like a human childhood is long.

17:42It takes a lot. I have three kids.

17:44It takes a lot to feed them, to grow an adult.

17:47And so it might make sense to say, okay, well, if resources are going to

17:51be scarce or if resources are going to be unpredictable, it might be better for

17:55me to have this strategy where I go through puberty earlier.

17:58What's difficult about that is that people don't end up in family structures at random.

18:06And moms who go through puberty are more likely to have sex at younger ages,

18:12more likely to end up in non -marital childbearing family structures, and are likely to

18:18have daughters who are being raised without a biological father.

18:21So is it the biological father absence that's causing the earlier puberty?

18:26Or is it that mom has genes that predispose her towards early puberty?

18:30That changes her reproductive life.

18:33And then she's more likely to be in this certain family structure and pass on

18:38those genes to her daughters.

18:40It seems to be a little bit of both, which is kind of the standard

18:44answer to all of our questions about nature and nurture, that there's a very strong

18:49genetic effect on the timing of puberty for both boys and girls, but that also

18:55the environment is pushing it in different directions.

18:59And that's part of why we're seeing that the age of puberty keeps going down

19:03with every successive cohort. I mean, it's been falling for the last, basically, as long

19:08as we've been keeping data, people have been going through puberty earlier.

19:12I'm realizing that you have a very, very difficult job because the languaging is so

19:17delicate. Yeah. So I'm just going to jump on the bed of nails for you.

19:21I've also heard that if the biological father is present, it provides a quote -unquote

19:27protective effect against this earlier onset of puberty in the presence of the non -biological

19:32father. But just that language, protective effect, implies that a one -year shift or two

19:38-year shift earlier puberty is somehow bad.

19:40Like, I think the human brain just works this way, right?

19:43For understandable reasons, like, oh, you know, these young girls that were supposed to go

19:47into puberty at 14, they're now going to puberty at, you know, 10 because the

19:52dad was absent. They pathologize it.

19:54They pathologize it and they write a script.

19:56And then, as you point out, you know, there's things related to the situation as

20:02it relates to the mother and her choices and her genes.

20:05And it's a real barbed wire mess for the typical person to try and pull

20:12apart. You're pulling these things apart beautifully.

20:14But it's also fodder for anyone that wants to drive a narrative.

20:19That's tough. How do you navigate that?

20:21Because I'm going to ask you about adolescence and genes and sexual promiscuity, right?

20:28We're talking about, today we're going to talk about sin, you know?

20:30And so how do you, how do you look at these things?

20:34I know you look at them objectively, but then how does one choose to communicate

20:37about these things in a way that doesn't arm people to kind of run their

20:41own agendas, whether they realize it or not?

20:43Yeah. I'm not sure I'm the best person to give advice about that.

20:48I, you know, I'm a scientist.

20:50I'm a mother. I'm a college professor.

20:53I teach intrapsych at UT.

20:54And so I'm always thinking about what does the science say?

20:59How would I explain this to my 13 -year -old?

21:02How would I explain this to my undergrads?

21:04And with a sense of awe and respect for how amazing a human body and

21:13brain is, right? Like to think about we as women, as at one time girls,

21:20are equipped with a brain that's, you know, looking out into the environment and integrating

21:29all of these signals about internal and external, about, you know, resources and stress and

21:36body weight and light and integrating that to say, okay, now's the best time for

21:43us in our situation to go.

21:46Now is the time for...

21:47our bodies to change in these amazing ways that is puberty.

21:51I feel like I keep coming back to if we have respect for the amazingness

21:58of the human body and the brain, and I'm trying to communicate it with clarity

22:04and empathy in the way that my 13 -year -old son would understand it.

22:09I don't always succeed at that goal, but that's really my, I feel like that

22:12as an educator, that's how I'm approaching these topics.

22:15Well, I appreciate you saying that.

22:16I didn't ask that to kind of inoculate against anything, but now we can really

22:21get into the tangle. Now you can let her rip.

22:24Yeah. I have long thought that the hypothalamus, right, these various clusters of neurons above

22:31the roof of our mouth that drive hunger and sex behavior and thirst and aggression

22:36and a bunch of other interesting things.

22:41It's sort of the seat of the seven deadly sins.

22:45I have heard you say this before.

22:47And of course, all those brain circuits and structures interact with other brain circuits and

22:52structures. There's no one location in the brain that governs a behavior entirely with some

22:59rare exceptions. How do you think about the genetic programming of the hypothalamus in terms

23:05of people's proclivity for addiction, promiscuity, aggression, being overly passive in a way that might

23:14harm them or other people as well?

23:15I don't really think that much about the hypothalamus per se, actually, in relation to

23:20those behaviors. So just stepping back one step when you made this reference to the

23:27seven deadly sins, right? So if I can, I kind of remember all of them.

23:31There's wrath, there's envy, there's lust, there's greed, there's sloth.

23:36And what do the seven deadly sins have in common?

23:39How can we operationalize that more scientifically?

23:43You know, what those behaviors all have in common is, I mean, except envy for

23:49a second, is doing something that might be pleasurable in the short term to the

23:57extent that there's negative consequences, negative consequences to yourself or negative consequences to other people.

24:03I think envy is interesting because you're seeing other people enjoying pleasures and you're like,

24:07I want that one, right?

24:09So it's kind of looking at other people, other people's pursuit of things.

24:13I think of envy as a severe opportunity cost because as long as you're envying

24:17what someone else has or is doing, then you're missing all the stuff that's happening

24:23now that you could build your life on.

24:25I think of envy as like a clue to what do you desire that you

24:29haven't admitted to yourself. One question I ask graduate students when I'm recruiting them is,

24:34whose career do you want?

24:37Whose career do you envy?

24:38Because that tells me more about where they really want to go with their lives

24:42than, you know, their kind of prepared speech that they have for me.

24:46Great question. Yeah. You know, let's take wrath or let's take lust.

24:50You know, anger is an emotion that's useful.

24:53Sexual desire is an emotion that's useful.

24:56When do they become sins?

24:57They become sins in our minds when people are engaging that behavior in situations where

25:04we think it's going to be harmful, not just to themselves, not just to themselves,

25:07but to other people. From a clinical psychology perspective, we would never say we're going

25:14to study the seven deadly sins, but we do have clinical language or diagnoses where

25:22the predominant symptoms that you see are people engaging in behaviors that are impulsive, that

25:30are maybe immediately pleasurable, but in the long term harmful to themselves or other people.

25:38So the obvious constellation of this is substance use disorders, right?

25:42So it's, I'm, I'm ingesting a substance.

25:45It feels good. And I'm doing that at significant costs to myself and other people.

25:53We can also think about in childhood, what would be called conduct disorder, which are

25:58people who are children who are engaging in wrath.

26:01They're engaging in aggression towards other people that hurts other people, their parents, their teachers,

26:07their schools, the law is mad at them and they're doing it anyways.

26:11So what we're interested in scientifically is, um, are there genes that affect the likelihood

26:17of developing these disorders? Yes.

26:20Um, are there genetic overlaps between these different things?

26:26So do the genes that, um, are the genes that make it more likely for

26:31you to become addicted to substances also make you more likely to have many sexual

26:36partners, also make you more likely to engage in impulsive aggression?

26:41That also appears to be the question.

26:43Yes. And then if we're looking at genes that have these associations, not just with

26:48substances or not just with sexual behavior or not just with aggression, but have cross

26:54cutting effects on all of them, what are they?

26:57Like, what are those genes?

26:58Where are they, where are they active in the brain?

27:01When are they expressed in development?

27:03So that's the work that our group has been doing for eight years now to

27:07try to discover what these genes, we have a good idea from twin and adoption

27:11studies that there are genetic influences on these things.

27:14And now influences on these things.

27:15And now We want to figure out what are they and where are they active

27:18in the brain. And it turns out that it's not just hypothalamus.

27:20It's really broadly distributed, you know, throughout your brain.

27:24I'll update my messaging. And I did couch it as a hypothesis.

27:28I never said that there were, you know, that you could lesion one of the

27:31sins. There are genes that vary between individuals that predict addiction, predict impulsivity, and other

27:42things. Yeah. You're exploring how the genes that predict addiction might predict impulsivity for other

27:50types of behaviors. Yes. I think I heard that the answer is yes.

27:54Indeed, there's overlap. Yeah. So I'd be very curious to know what those genes encode

27:58for. What are the protein systems and neural circuit systems, hormone systems downstream of those

28:04genes? Yeah. If we go back one step, just why did we think that there

28:09were going to be genes that overlap between this?

28:12The biggest set of results that supported this hypothesis were adoption and pedigree studies.

28:19So these big data registries, you get them in Sweden, you get them in the

28:23Scandinavian countries that keep track of every single one of their citizens.

28:26And what you see is that the seven deadly sins run in families.

28:31So if you have an adoptive parent who's addicted to alcohol, you are more likely

28:38to have many sexual partners, and you're also more likely to be diagnosed with conduct

28:42disorder or be arrested for a violent crime.

28:46Even if you were never raised by that parent, and it's not just substance use

28:51to substance use or violence to violence or, you know, risky sexual behavior to risky

28:56sexual behavior. It seems that having a family history of any of these things increases

29:02your likelihood of manifesting any one of them.

29:06So that's why we thought that there was this genetic commonality across them.

29:11So what we found is that there's many, many, many genes that affect all of

29:15these behaviors. It's massively what we call polygenic.

29:19So it's not just one thing in one part of your genome.

29:22It's distributed throughout your genome.

29:24And that those genes are most expressed in neurodevelopment in utero, in second and third

29:34trimester. So if you look at genes that are associated with all of these things

29:38and you see, okay, when in the human lifespan are they most active?

29:42They're active during cortical development in the second and third trimester.

29:47So there's something very, like, early neurodevelopmental that's going on them.

29:51And it seems to be affecting the brain's balance of inhibition and excitation.

29:58So as your brain is developing while you're in utero, the GABA system, which is

30:05inhibitory, and the glutamate system, which is excitatory, sort of being tuned.

30:10Like, and the balance between those two things is being worked out.

30:15If children are born preterm, part of the reason that that affects their psychological development

30:21negatively is because it affects this balance between inhibition and excitation.

30:26So I think we're still very, at the beginning of this, understanding the bioannotation of

30:32it, the biological mechanisms of it.

30:33But what it suggests to us is that, you know, sometimes you hear, like, ADHD

30:39is a neurodevelopmental disorder. I think that substance use disorders are every bit as a

30:44neurodevelopmental disorder as ADHD. I think conduct disorder, which is characterized by impulsive aggression, is

30:52every bit a neurodevelopmental disorder as ADHD.

30:54Because if you look at the genes that are causing them, they seem to be

30:58affecting this pattern of brain development very, very early in life and this balance between

31:05the brain's inhibition and excitation.

31:08Fascinating. I mean, I have to be careful not to go down this rabbit hole.

31:11But I started off as a developmental neurobiologist.

31:13Yeah, yeah. So, you know, fetal brain wiring is, you know, we've never really talked

31:19about it on this podcast, but we've talked about the effect of fetal exposure to

31:23hormones in the brain in particular in terms of sexual differentiation.

31:28But, yeah, there's a ton going on in there at these stages.

31:33And when I hear you talk broadly about, you know, the balance between excitation and

31:38inhibition and some disruption in that or some alteration in that setting up a probability

31:45of the expression of some behavioral disorder or choice, set of choices, it makes me

31:51wonder, you know, about brain function more broadly is, you know, does that somehow make

31:58these choices to use a given substance or to do an impulsive behavior?

32:02Is it, we have to be careful not to project, but is it an attempt

32:07to restore some sort of order to that balance or is it an expression of

32:12an imbalanced system? It's just a seesaw that doesn't tilt all the way to one

32:17side or the other. I think that's a really good question and I don't know

32:20the answer to that. When you talk to people who are, you know, experiencing a

32:25substance use disorder, sometimes you hear narratives that are very much in this kind of

32:31self -medication frame, right? Like, I took this substance and it made me feel normal

32:36and I didn't feel normal before I had that.

32:38But that's not everyone. I mean, addiction is a very heterogeneous disorder.

32:42I mean, addiction is a very heterogeneous disorder.

32:42And so I think people's perceptions of their motivations to engage in substance use that's

32:51harmful for them, and then how does that relate to the brain mechanism, and then

32:56how does that relate to early neurodevelopment, I don't think we know, you know, the

33:00specifics of those links to the extent that you exist, yeah.

33:03My colleague, Anna Lemke, who wrote Topamine Nation, she once said that many addicts, behavioral

33:11addictions, I guess they call them process addictions or chemical addictions, that they have this

33:16feeling that unless they're experiencing something really intense, like life isn't really happening.

33:23Like they crave this intensity of experience.

33:26They want peak experience. Yeah.

33:28Either to numb themselves, I mean, it could be a trough experience in the case

33:32of sedatives, but that stuck with me.

33:35Implied in that is that not everyone is seeking these kind of extreme states.

33:39And so layered on what you just described in terms of excitation inhibition balance, I

33:43kind of wonder if people who struggle with addiction are, they're craving getting out of

33:51too much inhibition or too much excitation, but this is probably an overly simplistic hypothesis.

33:57So just thinking about that sensation -seeking thing, that driving for intensity, usually when we

34:03think of people who are chronically engaging in some behavior despite it having negative consequences

34:11for themselves and other people.

34:12So this could be drug use, this could be aggression, this could be risky sexual

34:15behavior. We can typically think of three dimensions of sort of personality and temperament that

34:24are often at play. And one of them is this sensation -seeking drive for intensity.

34:31So I want it, I want it, and I want a lot of it, right?

34:36And then one is this disinhibition, failure of self -control.

34:41Um, I can't stop myself.

34:44And then another, which I think is less well -studied, is what people call antagonism

34:49or callousness, which is, um, I know this has, uh, negative consequences for other people,

34:56but I don't really care.

34:58Like, that doesn't bother me.

34:59And I think what you see is that the, the combination of factors that goes

35:05into any one person's behavior can really vary.

35:09So for some people, it's like, this feels great, this feels good, I want the

35:13high, I want it to be intense.

35:15I'm not disinhibited, I'm deliberately seeking out this behavior.

35:20You know, I plan the drugs that I'm going to use for the club the

35:23whole week, and I plan my week afterwards.

35:25It's not, it's not disinhibited at all, it's very purposeful.

35:28And then there are people that are like, I wasn't planning, but now I'm at

35:32the club and someone offered this to me and I can't stop myself.

35:35And then other people are like, I'm not, I like it, okay, and I could

35:40stop myself, but these negative consequences, the consequences that people keep harping on, you know,

35:45the fact that my partner doesn't like this, or the police don't like this, like,

35:51oh, you know, I'm indifferent, right?

35:53And so all of that to say, I think we need to be aware of

35:57the complexity and the heterogeneity of different people's motivations when they're doing these behaviors.

36:04Yeah, and these days we hear a lot about the role of trauma in addiction.

36:10I mean, I can't do a single post or podcast about addiction and the biology

36:15and not hear, well, it's trauma -related.

36:21But of course, genes come from our parents.

36:24We'll talk about that, heritability.

36:26And so generational trauma or just childhood trauma, doesn't even have to be transgenerational, it

36:34can get layered in there in a complicated way.

36:36And I'm not trying to say that trauma doesn't play a role.

36:38Well, clearly it does, but it seems that genes could be primary, trauma in the

36:44parents, trauma in the children, traumatizing, you know, hurt people, hurt people, kind of, you

36:48know, it's the one cliche that seems to, you know, stand the test of time.

36:53I think it's very hard to say that something is primary or secondary because everything's

36:57interacting with everything else. One of the scientific challenges and then also one of the

37:04very human tragedies that we often see is that the parents who have genetic risks,

37:12who are passing those on to their kids, are also the caregivers for those kids.

37:17And so the kids who would most benefit from firm, warm, stable, nurturing parenting are

37:25also the least likely to get it because the parents themselves are also dealing with

37:29their own stuff and they're also leading their own complicated lives.

37:32And so it's a tapestry.

37:34Like, there's a warp and a weft to a piece of cloth.

37:38There's the threads that go this way and this way.

37:40And I think that's how I think about the relationship between genes and trauma early

37:47experience is that really they both are woven together to build the brain and the

37:53body and the personality that then struggles with these behaviors later on in their life.

37:58So if we were to have access to our genomes heading into adolescence or to

38:04our kids' genomes and we know based on your work and the work of others,

38:10presumably, that some of the genes that predispose to impulsive behavior, addictive behavior, promiscuity, et

38:16cetera, that would be useful information, I would think.

38:20Then one could think carefully about friend choices, situational choices, install buffers.

38:26It sounds so mechanical, but have people around who can help buffer against these genetic

38:33predispositions, which no doubt, as you just said, weave into situational predispositions.

38:39Why don't people want that information or do they want that information?

38:43Because I remember in the 80s hearing, oh, you know, soon we're going to have

38:46genomes and you can know if you're going to get Huntington's, this, you know, very

38:50destructive degenerative disorder. And then people said, well, I wouldn't want to know.

38:54I mean, I think many people would also want to know.

38:56And especially parents, you know, if they can just get past their guilt that it

39:01has something to do with them, I think they'd want to help their kids avoid

39:05these predispositions, given that most of what we're talking about are maladaptive predispositions.

39:10So this is a complicated and really rapidly growing area of research, which is what

39:17happens if you return people's genetic information back to them.

39:21So if you have ever done 23andMe or some sort of direct -to -consumer genetics

39:26company, you might have gotten, like, this is your genetic risk for Crohn's disease or

39:31this is your genetic risk for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.

39:34And now there are more companies that are expanding into that genetic information around many

39:43gene indices. We call them polygenic indices or polygenic scores that are correlated with someone's

39:50risk for developing an alcohol use disorder, say.

39:54I think there's a couple of things to keep in mind here.

39:56One is that our genetic information is rapidly improving.

40:02It's still not very good at the level of predicting an outcome for an individual.

40:09So as an example, you can think cities that are at higher altitude tend to

40:17be colder. Like, that's a correlation.

40:19That's a correlation of around 0 .4, 0 .5.

40:23You can know that if you're trying to think about, okay, well, which cities are

40:27colder on average than others.

40:29That's not going to tell you, do you need to pack a sweater if you're

40:33going to Montreal next Tuesday, right?

40:35Like, that's a specific weather incident.

40:39Polygenic scores right now are, like, I can tell you that, you know, in general,

40:45like, these people have a higher risk than these people, but they're not, they're not

40:50a pregnancy test or even a Huntington's disease test.

40:53They're not prognosticators of, like, an individual person's risk for an alcohol use disorder.

40:59There's some uncertainty there. The other question is, what are the ethics of telling someone

41:04that they have a low genetic risk, especially if we're uncertain about that?

41:09Like, you've talked a lot about how, you know, no alcohol on average is better

41:14for you than some alcohol.

41:16We think about the risks of telling someone that they're genetically predisposed towards a negative

41:22life outcome, but there's also risk to telling someone that they're not genetically proposed because

41:28is that going to, are they going to interpret that as license to drink more?

41:31I don't need to worry about that.

41:32I need, I don't need to worry about my consumption because this company told me

41:36that I'm at low risk.

41:38And then the other thing you're picking up on is that there are individual differences

41:41in desire for kind of deliberate ignorance.

41:45So there's a great study after the wall came down in Berlin that was conducted

41:52on whether or not people want to know the contents of their Stasi files, like

41:57who was reporting on them.

41:59And some people were like, of course I want to know, of course I want

42:02to know who was saying what about me.

42:04And other people were saying, no, I don't.

42:07Deliberate ignorance. Ignorance is bliss.

42:09Deliberate ignorance is what I want.

42:11This is what other people were saying about them.

42:13Yes. Yes. Don't read the comments.

42:15Yeah. Deliberate ignorance. Don't read the comments.

42:18It's also a form of deliberate ignorance.

42:20This is like an avid debate between podcasters.

42:23You know, Rogan is the Mr.

42:25Don't, don't read the comments.

42:27Lex Friedman, I go back and forth on this.

42:29I'm reading the comments. I mean, yeah, it can be useful.

42:32So all of that to say, I think we're in a situation in which the

42:35science is rapidly developing. It's not nearly at a point where it's going to be

42:40a high confidence predictor. There's also risks to being told that you have a low,

42:46you know, a low genetic risk because it might act as a permission structure for

42:51behavior that might ultimately prove to be risky.

42:54And also people's psychologies are complicated and not everyone responds to more information as a

43:02good thing. Not everyone wants to read the comments of their DNA.

43:05This isn't a pushback, but I feel like most people, even if they don't understand

43:09genes and heritability, understand that they got their genes from their parents.

43:14Yeah. So there is an argument to be made, perhaps that people are already doing

43:19this. Like someone whose father was an alcoholic, whose grandfather was an alcoholic could say,

43:25well, yeah, I got to be really careful because obviously this runs in my family.

43:31Right. And then someone say, well, your mom doesn't have an issue with alcohol.

43:34She could have a couple of drinks.

43:35No big deal. So you're protected.

43:37And we don't know how.

43:38Dosing protects us or makes us vulnerable.

43:40No one knows, but we all do this, right?

43:43Yes, I think we do.

43:44I mean, we'll get into discussions about genes and heritability, but, you know, like the

43:48topic of eugenics and genetic selection even within embryos is super dicey nowadays.

43:54Everyone's, you know, like, you know, it's so scary to even have the discussion.

43:58But then I've always said, I mean, people do a kind of genetic selection.

44:03They pick sperm donors and they pick partners.

44:05Yes. Oftentimes based on a combination of traits, which are clearly involved genes.

44:10You know, so people are doing a genetic selection in partner choice anyway.

44:14And so to me, maybe it's just the scientist in me, the conversation feels unnecessarily

44:20scary. But when it comes to things like substance use disorder, I mean, tell me

44:26if I'm wrong. I think it makes sense to look at your parents and say,

44:28listen, if one of them has an issue with alcohol or both of them have

44:33an issue with alcohol, I have to be very careful with alcohol.

44:35And with your children too, right?

44:38I think as parents, at least as a mother, I look at my kids and

44:41I think they don't have the same temperament.

44:44They don't have the same personality.

44:46I think the risks of cannabis use is different for my son and for my

44:52daughter. And so I think an attuned parent is going to be thinking about what

44:56do I know about my kid as they go into adolescence?

44:59How does that inform how I'm helping shape their environment?

45:03I think what you're picking up here is that oftentimes people treat genetic information as

45:09if it exists in a vacuum and it's the only thing we know about a

45:12person. And that's obviously not true.

45:15There are phenotypes that we see in our family members, in our prospective mates, in

45:20our children. And most of the research can also act as if you would be

45:26returning genetic information about a child or about a person to that person.

45:31And it's the only thing that they know.

45:34And that's not true. So I think that we really are at a place where

45:37we need more meta -science, science about the science, in what is the most responsible

45:44way to give people access to their genetic information in a way that permits them

45:50to make the best choices.

45:52But we're not going to be able to do that if we're continuing to pretend

45:55that genetic information exists somehow siloed from all the other things that people are paying

46:00attention to when they're observing themselves and their family members.

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46:56I feel like the more information we have about our parents and their parents and

47:01their positive traits and their, let's just call them maladaptive, destructive traits to themselves or

47:07to others, the more informed our choices can be.

47:10But I do understand that it can start to set up some constraints in our

47:13mind of what we are capable of or not capable of.

47:16But I also feel like, especially in the United States, there's this notion that we

47:20can become anything. It wasn't until I was in a relationship with somebody from Southern

47:24Europe that I realized that that notion growing up with that is kind of outrageous

47:29to some people in the world.

47:30Because in a lot of areas of the world, as you know, people get siloed

47:34really early on. And not everyone grows up thinking they could be an amazing athlete

47:39if they chose that path.

47:41They could be a billionaire if they chose that path.

47:43You know, they could. But in the United States, we love this notion of anyone

47:46can get to any position if they just work hard enough and believe in themselves

47:50and align with the right people.

47:51So I think that you think of it probably as, you know, another source of

47:55data. And isn't more data better?

47:58Like isn't we improve our decision making when we have more variables at hand?

48:02And that's a very scientific way to think about genetic information.

48:07Whereas I think for many people in the broader public, there can be a temptation

48:13to see genes as a very special sort of information.

48:17There's a lot. Genetic has a myth around it that maybe this is my data

48:24on my heart rate variability doesn't have about it.

48:28But often I think that people can fall into these really essentialist stories about genetics,

48:33that it's telling them something about their deepest or truest selves.

48:40And that's when the delivery of genetic information, without correcting their perception of what genes

48:46are really telling us, can start to be dangerous.

48:48I mean, I think about 23andMe, their tagline for many years was, welcome to you.

48:55Spit in this tube, welcome to you, right?

48:58We are not just going to give you another piece of information about yourself to

49:03add to all the things that you could be using.

49:05We are going to tell you who you really are, and it's when the genetic

49:11information lapses into these more essentialist stories that I think things get to be, in

49:16your words, a little bit thornier, a little bit riskier.

49:19I never did 23andMe, but they were just right up the road, but somehow never

49:23did it. But I did hear that one of the surprising results of 23andMe and

49:29companies like it was that a not insignificant number of people discovered they have relatives

49:35that they didn't know they had.

49:36Yes, or that their father isn't the father that they thought they had.

49:39Which is a pretty major psychological frame shift.

49:42Yeah. I gave a talk at a college, a small college, and it was a

49:47writing class, and they had to write about a book, and they chose my book

49:52to write about, which is great.

49:54It's like, you know, freshmen, and they all have to actually write something, and they

49:56chose a book that was deliberately, you know, a little bit controversial to give them

50:01something to push off on.

50:02And I asked him, I said, why, how, you know, you're a writing professor.

50:06How did you find my book?

50:07And he said, well, I did 23andMe, and I realized that my, the man who

50:12raised me is not my biological father.

50:16My parents didn't know this.

50:17It was our fertility doctor who was my biological father, and I have something like

50:2326 half -siblings because this guy had been doing it in his practice for years.

50:30He's now, the doctor is now deceased, and I just was like, that's so much

50:35more interesting than I'm going to talk about, like anything I'm going to talk about

50:37with these freshmen. This story and that, and I think that speaks to, he had

50:43a whole narrative about his life and his family.

50:47And then he got this piece of genetic information, and it blew that story out

50:51of the water because there was something about the genetic lineage that is really important

50:57to our sense of who we are.

51:00And he really had to reconstruct, you know, his family story and his identity in

51:05the light of that information.

51:07That's so interesting because I've heard of people learning something unfortunate, bad about their grandparent

51:16or parent that they weren't aware of, and then internalizing that somehow they are bad.

51:22Mm -hmm. Especially young kids can internalize that message.

51:25Yeah. This is a message to all people who may end up divorced.

51:30Don't badmouth the other parent because you're essentially telling your kids that they come from

51:36bad, there's badness in them.

51:39Yeah. You know, and we all think that this is about people's behavior, but my

51:44understanding of spent a little bit of time with this literature, just how people interpret

51:48information and how kids interpret information is that they're like, oh, I come from something

51:54bad. And there's actually, I mean, there's all these movies about this.

51:57Star Wars has this and, you know, and other movies.

52:01You know, like our genetic origins and how those played out in previous generations can

52:09frighten people about themselves. Yes.

52:11So to go back to your earlier question about how do we talk about genetics

52:18in relation to these phenotypes that are really part of our identities, another thing is

52:24that I don't think anyone's bad.

52:26I don't think anyone's all good either.

52:28I think that humans are complicated and our behaviors are complicated and none of us

52:33can be reduced to one thing we've done or one gene we have or one

52:37aspect of our phenotype. But that is a really common perception that genetics is telling

52:44us something essential about ourselves and that it might turn out that that essential thing

52:50is a bad thing. I write in my new book about this letter that I

52:58got from a man who is in prison.

53:02He's been in prison since he was 16 for a horrific crime that he committed.

53:11It's a, you know, sexually violent crime that he committed when he was 15 years

53:16old. So still an adolescent, still a growing brain, still not an adult.

53:22In Texas, you can be tried an adult as 15 and he's been in prison

53:25ever since then. And he read about my lab, my, you know, our behavior genetics

53:31lab at Texas and an issue of Texas Monthly Magazine, which I guess the prison

53:36subscribes to. And he wrote me a letter and it showed up in my university

53:40mailbox. And it was him singing, I've done this thing, like, let me tell you

53:46about myself. I've been in prison my whole adult life, even before then.

53:52What do you think makes a child go bad, nature or nurture?

53:57And that question haunted me because I could give him a technical answer, which is,

54:06I could say, it's, we know that nature matters.

54:09We know that nurture matters.

54:10We know that all of our behaviors are influenced by both nature or nurture.

54:16But I think when he's writing me, he's not just asking for a science lesson,

54:21right? He's someone who's done something horrible.

54:22And he's saying, I feel like I'm inherently a horrible person and that might be

54:28because of my genetics. I'm like, do my, do my genetics make me bad?

54:32And I. That's a story about genetics, which has no scientific basis, but really pops

54:40up in a lot of places in our culture.

54:42And it makes it very difficult to talk about because, you know, you're here saying

54:47these genetic variants are expressed at this point in prenatal development, and that increases your

54:52probability of having these behaviors.

54:54But if someone hears that as I could be born bad or I could be

54:58born broken, that's absolutely not what we're saying.

55:01But that story about genetics is really, you know, woven through our culture.

55:06The bad seed. The bad seed, bad to the bone, natural born killer.

55:11We have – I think the fact that we can come up with English idioms

55:15and phrases for this so easily tells us something about the way that we think

55:19about behavior, morality, the self, and biology.

55:26I have so many questions, but I think the first one I want to ask

55:30is a developmental one. Yeah.

55:32I think most of us presumably carry this idea that it's during puberty and the

55:39activation of hormones, in particular testosterone, that takes a sweet kid and makes them a

55:45bad kid. I think that's not true.

55:49I don't believe that's true.

55:51But are there examples of – in the literature of kids prior to puberty being

55:59destructive in a sociopathic way?

56:02Yes. And that's one of the biggest predictors of what people have called a life

56:07course persistent pattern of antisocial offending, which is onset before the age of 10.

56:15Antisocial behavior that's not just destruction of property but also aggression against other children.

56:20And when we're thinking about aggression, oftentimes we discriminate between aggression when provoked versus proactive

56:30kind of cold aggression. So the worst prognosis we would anticipate would be a male

56:38child who begins to aggress against other children or against animals before the age of

56:4610 and doesn't feel guilt or remorse around that, that has kind of this cold

56:52callousness about it. That's a poor prognosticator of having well -regulated behavior into adulthood.

56:58So of those kids who have conduct disorder, especially before the age of 10 with

57:04these callous emotional features, we would expect that 50 % to 75 % of them

57:09will have a substance use disorder in adulthood.

57:12A non -trivial percentage will have meet criteria for antisocial personality or another personality disorder

57:18in adulthood. And so, again, I think we're looking at a subset of children where

57:24there's clearly a heavy genetic component.

57:28There's clearly a heavy nurture component.

57:30It's very neurodevelopmental in terms of its origins and early brain development.

57:35And currently we have vanishingly few effective treatments.

57:42And, again, I think that's because people have maybe implicitly or unconsciously interpreted the genetic

57:50research or the biological research as these kids were born bad.

57:54But not, these kids were born with a set of neurodevelopmental liabilities and we really

57:59need to figure out how to help them.

58:01You know, what are the treatments we can offer them?

58:04And when people see something as a moral failing, they're less likely to see it

58:08as a biomedical problem that we can, you know, throw the weight of science behind.

58:13What percentage of these kids younger than 10 that show this antisocial behavior are male

58:18versus female? The sex ratio varies, but sometimes it's 2 to 1.

58:22Sometimes it's as high as 4 to 1.

58:25That can't be explained by post -utero testosterone because they haven't hit puberty yet.

58:30Yeah. So it either is an early organizing effect in utero or there's something on

58:35the Y chromosome that creates a susceptibility.

58:38And we really don't know.

58:39Actually, one of my former postdocs is working on this now, the analysis of the

58:43X chromosome. Because most genetic studies just focus on the autosome, so just focus on

58:48the, you know, the non -sex chromosomes.

58:51The other thing is we also see this in animals, that male guinea pigs are

58:57much more vulnerable to the effects of preterm birth than female guinea pigs.

59:02Again, preterm birth disrupts that same kind of GABA to glutamate excitatory inhibitory balance that

59:09we're also seeing popping up in the genetic research.

59:12Also, I've just, I have two, three kids.

59:15I have two girls and one boy.

59:17And even with humans, the labor and delivery nurse will be like, okay, well, we

59:21got to keep him in longer because those early, early boys, they struggle.

59:25They know that the male fetus seems to be more vulnerable to these insults than

59:31the female fetus. Are the guinea pigs sociopathic?

59:35Guinea pigs, I mean, all of these things you can, you used to work with

59:39non -human animal models. I, for better or worse, I've worked with so many different

59:45species. I have to say, I do not miss working with animals for a variety

59:49of reasons. That's how I ended up in a clinical psych program.

59:52Humans can consent to be in an experiment.

59:54I, as an animal lover, it eventually wore on my soul too much.

59:58And I understand the, where it's necessary.

1:00:01I also think there's an excess in particular, and I'll lose some friends with this,

1:00:06but in particular, with some of the larger primate work, one really needs to justify.

1:00:12And there are instances where there's good justification, but yeah, I've worked with a lot

1:00:16of different animals. But I was about to say, I know we both dog lovers,

1:00:21there's this saying, there are no bad dogs, just bad owners.

1:00:25But we don't say that about humans.

1:00:28We don't say, oh, you know, there are no bad people.

1:00:29Everyone is a good person.

1:00:31They're just bad parents. At some point, usually 18, we say you're responsible for your

1:00:38actions, regardless of what happened to you, regardless of the genes you came into this

1:00:41world with. And things shift where people understandably are responsible for their behavior in a

1:00:49different way. Sounds like in Texas, it can come in earlier, depending on the crime.

1:00:53But I assume all dogs are good dogs, that they're trustworthy, that they would never

1:01:00harm you or another dog, maybe an animal, because I've seen what happens when certain

1:01:04dogs get a hold of certain animals.

1:01:06But I don't think we make the same assumption about people.

1:01:11I don't think we do either.

1:01:13I titled my new book, Original Sin, to really spotlight this exact thing.

1:01:22You know, before I was a scientist, the first 20 years of my life, I

1:01:27was an evangelical Christian. So I was raised in a very fundamentalist household, Southern, praised

1:01:34God and passed the ammunition in lots of ways.

1:01:37And in my brand of Christianity that I was raised in, which was Protestant, Reformed,

1:01:47Calvinist, I really was raised with this idea of original sin, which is that humans

1:01:54are born bad, that they're born depraved, that they're born broken.

1:01:59And I don't believe that's true, but that's the explicit teaching of some religious traditions.

1:02:06And that's a religious tradition that was really foundational to our culture and our institutions.

1:02:12So I don't think it's a coincidence that we talk about how there's no bad

1:02:17dogs, but we assume people can be inherently bad.

1:02:22Because I think many of us were taught that, you know, from a young age,

1:02:25that all of us or some of us, you know, if you're thinking about Calvinist

1:02:30theology of some people are the elect and some people are that, that some of

1:02:33us are inherently bad. So you can be raised with a religious tradition that really

1:02:41is talking about inherent depravity.

1:02:43And then you have a scientific tradition that's studying, well, how do genes affect bad

1:02:49things that people do? And then we have debates about how science should be used.

1:02:55And that's where I think things get really thorny and really tricky, which is how

1:03:00do we apply the science without lapsing into this really ancient way of thinking, which

1:03:08is interpreting the science as proof that we're broken, that people are broken.

1:03:15At the same time, I mean, going back to this letter that I received, people

1:03:19do horrible shit. Like people do horrible things to each other.

1:03:24And I think about that man who wrote me a letter and I can say,

1:03:28I think he did a horrible thing.

1:03:30And I think he probably, everything I know scientifically, I think he probably had horrible

1:03:37luck in terms of his parents and his genes and his birth experiences and his

1:03:41childhood experiences. And so how do we put those together?

1:03:46What does it mean to hold someone responsible for how they behave?

1:03:52I do think that we are responsible for ourselves and responsible to each other.

1:03:56While also keeping in mind the fact that no one created themselves from scratch.

1:04:02By the time he was an adult, he was already in prison for the things

1:04:07that had happened to him while he was still technically a child.

1:04:10I wrote this book, my new book, because I was really attempting to wrestle through

1:04:15that question. I think I'm getting this story right.

1:04:19It's a true story that was told by our former director of neurosciences at Stanford,

1:04:25Bill Newsom. About the guy who went up in the tower at UT Austin and

1:04:34shot a bunch of people.

1:04:35The tower shooter. The tower shooter.

1:04:37I think he was eventually taken out by a security guard.

1:04:41The remarkable thing about the story is, at least the way I remember it, is

1:04:45that this guy knew something was wrong with him.

1:04:49Thought that the site of the problem was in his brain.

1:04:54Was asking people to look at his brain and help him.

1:04:58I think I'm getting this right.

1:04:59We'll double check. And then said, at the point where he realized he was going

1:05:05to go through with this thing, with this act, that he wanted them to look

1:05:10at his brain. And it turned out he had a tumor in a, I think

1:05:14it was some temporal lobe region that.

1:05:16It was amygdala. Oh, it was actually in the amygdala.

1:05:19So you know the story clearly.

1:05:20Yeah, yeah. And it's where you work.

1:05:22Yes. Fortunately, it occurred long before you work.

1:05:25I mean, terrible that it happened at all.

1:05:26But in this age of school.

1:05:28I love it. Shooters and public massacres, right?

1:05:31People were just, you know, going up into Vegas hotel window and, you know, hosing

1:05:35people with bullets. This case is a unique one because the guy knew there was

1:05:40something wrong with him, in some sense wanted help, but you can kind of create

1:05:47this picture of, you know, angel devil conversations in his head between neural circuitry that's

1:05:53saying, don't do this, don't do this, ask for help and do this, do this.

1:05:57I mean, it's like the cartoon or movie with the angel and the devil on

1:06:02the shoulder or in each ear.

1:06:04What are we to make of that?

1:06:06Yeah. Gosh, the Whitman case is so, it's so interesting because he did say that

1:06:13he, there was something wrong with him.

1:06:16He did ask for help.

1:06:18After he died, the state of Texas ordered an autopsy and they found that they

1:06:25had this tumor. And the whole thing was basically labeled like, um, almost like a

1:06:31natural disaster had hurt, had occurred.

1:06:33So the, the report talks about like the catastrophe or the, you know, the, this

1:06:39incident that happened. Um, so the, they ultimately, when, when trying to make sense of

1:06:46Whitman's shooting people from the tower, uh, at Texas took what some philosophers have called

1:06:54this objective view. So basically like he, they weren't viewing him as an agent who's

1:07:02choosing, who's doing something in the realm of good or bad, a moral failing.

1:07:09They were viewing him as kind of a machine that's gone haywire, right?

1:07:12He got a tumor in his amygdala and he wouldn't have done it if he

1:07:16hadn't had this tumor. How would they have made sense of his behavior if he

1:07:21hadn't asked for a brain autopsy?

1:07:23If they didn't know about this tumor, how many other people have something going on

1:07:30with them in a specific location that, um, if we knew about it, might help

1:07:37us understand how this behavior came across?

1:07:40I, uh, I, uh, I write in my book, this story of this Dutch family

1:07:44where basically all the women in the family were functioning okay, but half the men

1:07:51in the family were, one raped his sister, one stabbed his boss with a pitchfork,

1:08:00one multiple, one committed arson, multiple of the men were in prison.

1:08:05And at some point, I guess one of the women was like, y 'all, you

1:08:07have to figure out what's going on with the men in our family.

1:08:10Like this is too much to be a coincidence.

1:08:13And what they found is that on the X chromosome, they had inherited a rare

1:08:20mutation in the MAOA gene.

1:08:24So MAOA is an enzyme that degrades monoamines that, you know, regulate how your neurons

1:08:30are talking to one another.

1:08:32And women have two X chromosomes.

1:08:35So if they inherit a bad version, there's still the other version, whereas men only

1:08:39have one X. And so from their mom, they got a 50 -50 shot.

1:08:43Am I going to get the mutated version or the non -mutated version?

1:08:48I mean, I find this study fascinating on so many levels, right, that the single

1:08:52letter change in your DNA could have this massive effect on your behavior.

1:08:58But also that all of these men were in the criminal justice system and had

1:09:03not been obviously flagged as something organic or biological or mental illness going on with

1:09:09them. And later, there was another group that found this, you know, ostensibly rare mutation

1:09:17in several other impulsively aggressive boys that had been referred to their hospital.

1:09:24And they ended their scientific paper on what I find one of the most haunting

1:09:29notes in the scientific literature, which is, is this actually rare or is it that

1:09:36when we're faced with people doing horrible things, we never even stop to look for

1:09:42what might be causing it from our genetic or neurobiological, from organic way?

1:09:48Which I think that's a really, really chilling thought.

1:09:53So how do we, you know, in the absence, I think the question that you're

1:09:56asking is an important one, which is in the absence of some smoking gun, you

1:10:01know, the mutated gene, the amygdala tumor, how do we put together our knowledge as

1:10:08scientists, as people who read the science, that yes, it's genes, yes, it's environment, yes,

1:10:14it goes into the behavior.

1:10:15And also, we're humans, we have this outrage and this, naturally, this blame towards people

1:10:23that harm each other. How do we as humans hold both of those truths at

1:10:28the same time? I think that's the real challenge.

1:10:30I think once somebody is harmed, our empathy shifts to the victim.

1:10:35Yes. Or victims. Yes. In a way that occludes our, maybe even at times, depending

1:10:42on how close we are to the victims or how much we identify with it,

1:10:46that occludes our, even care.

1:10:49Yes. Like, okay, this guy.

1:10:51Our benevolent concerns. This guy went up on this, I'm describing it historically, this guy

1:10:54went up on this tower, killed his people, the security guard.

1:10:56However, maybe that's fine. I actually got him, but the, you know, the parent of

1:11:00that kid that was just walking to class or, you know, the young woman who

1:11:07was, you know, freshman year or whatever, you know, she's dead now.

1:11:10Yeah. She's gone. Yeah. And so I think that in a, in a kind of

1:11:13healthy way, not kind of, in a healthy way, we just, we think the hell

1:11:17with that guy. One less, glad they killed him.

1:11:20People will say that, right?

1:11:21People say that. I'm not necessarily, you know, I guess in some sense, if I

1:11:24just stand back and my reflexive response is like, this guy killed a lot of

1:11:28people. I understand he was driven to it.

1:11:30He was stricken with something.

1:11:32And I, but it's hard for me to get to, okay, well, there's a genetic

1:11:37thing that set him up from a glioma in the amygdala of all places.

1:11:40Like he, he bad luck, but because we assume that people can intervene in their

1:11:45own behavior. This gets down to kind of free will type stuff that my colleague,

1:11:49Robert Sapolsky, you know, he'll argue.

1:11:52To the end of time, there's no free will, which is a frustrating one for,

1:11:56for many of us. But, you know, he's a hell of a smart guy.

1:12:00You know, I think that the, the issue for many people is that genes are

1:12:06fairly far upstream from behavior.

1:12:08Yes. You know, if I said, okay, there's this guy down in, you know, Los

1:12:13Angeles and, you know, he, I don't know, he, he, he got rabies from a

1:12:18dog he was trying to save from the LA river.

1:12:20And then three days later, you know, he randomly committed this crime.

1:12:25He killed somebody. He'd say, well, he had rabies.

1:12:27He was rabid. Like we can make the connection very easily, but that's a, you

1:12:31know, a neural virus that hits the amygdala among other things and causes people to

1:12:35get very aggressive. We'd go, okay, you know.

1:12:37Well, you can imagine him without the rabies.

1:12:41So there's, there's, you, you, you can, there's some distance between the self that is

1:12:49the object of moral judgment and the cause that you're locating as the salient cause

1:12:56for this behavior. And if there's daylight between those, then you can say, okay, well,

1:13:00I can imagine what he was like before the rabies.

1:13:05Genes make it harder to do that because when we think of them as so

1:13:10essential to the making of the self that is the object of moral judgment, who

1:13:17is the person that has different genetics, right?

1:13:19We can't imagine, we can imagine what Whitman would have been like if he didn't

1:13:23have the tumor. We could imagine what the guy would be like if he didn't

1:13:26get with rabies. But who is the person who has a different genotype?

1:13:30It's very difficult to cast a different self.

1:13:34And so it's very difficult to rescue that self from our condemnation.

1:13:39I'll say something controversial on the back of what you just said, which is there

1:13:44may even be, I'm speculating here, you're the geneticist.

1:13:48There may even be some deeply hardwired, unconscious notion around genes that we know that

1:13:57genes can be inherited, that if somebody has a gene which makes them a quote

1:14:03unquote bad seed or predisposes them to a really bad behavior and then they engage

1:14:07in it and then they're in jail for the rest of their life or they

1:14:10get shot by the security guard, we hear the words good riddance.

1:14:14Good riddance implies, good, those genes were now stopped.

1:14:19We don't know if they reproduced before that.

1:14:22So there's something, which makes the example you gave before, especially eerie of the IVF

1:14:30doc that was literally seeding these eggs with his own genes.

1:14:35And then somebody is like, I mean, the implication is not that that person was

1:14:38killing themselves, but whoever that physician was, I mean, not somebody, A, it's terribly unethical

1:14:44at every level. And he's replicating.

1:14:48He's replicating his bad genes, whereas if somebody who has a genetic predisposition to be

1:14:54sociopathic or really destructive is eliminated, for lack of a better word, or taken out

1:15:00of society. I mean, sure, I can, you know, orient to the empathy around this

1:15:05person who feels stricken, but I think we are, I believe we are more hardwired

1:15:10to think about, you know, inheritance and propagation of genes than maybe we are consciously

1:15:18aware of. I mean, growing up, I mean, my dad's, he's, I wouldn't say he's

1:15:24like super old school, but I remember growing up, like one of the messages I

1:15:26got was, you know, if you're going to date someone, meet the parents.

1:15:29Like you can learn a lot by meeting the parents, which on the one hand

1:15:32is really cool. It's like, oh, see how their family is and how they interact.

1:15:35But it has a genetic, you know, inheritance implication.

1:15:39Like if they're kind people, if, you know, what do you look, are you looking

1:15:44for pathology? No, you're, you might be, but you're mainly looking for good features or

1:15:48what, what's there. No one talks about this openly these days, I feel like it's

1:15:53a really hot button issue.

1:15:54But if I asked you, for instance, you know, if the guy in prison had

1:16:03four kids before he went to prison, does that worry you?

1:16:08I feel like those kids statistically would need more.

1:16:15Like they, you know, there, a lot of this research didn't panned out, but as

1:16:20a metaphor, I think it's really still useful is the idea of like.

1:16:24Candy lions and orchids that there are or sunflowers and orchids like I do think

1:16:28there are some children who by virtue of their temperament brain development are pretty resilient

1:16:35across a variety of different environments and then I think there are children who I'm

1:16:41back to dogs just like there are dogs that like you can you can be

1:16:45a lazy dog owner and the dog will be still be fine.

1:16:47Or you can have a dog where because of their size and because of their

1:16:52temperament and because of their breeding they need a skilled and loving owner and we

1:17:01can think of that very clearly.

1:17:02So like my dog I caught him as a rescue and we think he was

1:17:07being they were being bred as fighting dogs in Texas and you know you can

1:17:12be like well you there's a vicious attack dog he's being bred as a fighting

1:17:16dog and you found out he's had a litter of puppies.

1:17:19Does that make you feel appalled or like they're bad puppies or you're like no

1:17:24they need really good homes we have to find really good homes.

1:17:27My friend Whitney Cummings would be on her way she's constantly adopting and like rescuing

1:17:31pit bull after pit bull like I think she subscribes the idea there I don't

1:17:35want to put words in her mouth but they're like no bad dogs just bad

1:17:38owners and there are many sweet sweet sweet pit bulls that come from fighting camps.

1:17:43In many ways I feel like as soon as we get out of how we

1:17:48relate to each other as humans and we think about this we can think about

1:17:51dog behavior more objectively than we can about human behavior and we can think even

1:17:57if personality and temperament is heritable and even if the parent did terrible things the

1:18:03offspring are still not bad puppies.

1:18:05They're puppies that are puppies that are puppies that are puppies that are puppies that

1:18:08are puppies that need a more skillful care and that's how I also think about

1:18:13this. I don't know about hardwired to pay attention to heritable traits.

1:18:19I do think we are evolved to matter to each other in a way that

1:18:25we call moral. I think that we are a social species that evolve to cooperate.

1:18:33And at every point in our evolutionary history, every cooperative system has some mechanism of

1:18:42enforcement. If you have bacteria, colonies of bacteria, and one bacterium starts to soak up

1:18:51too much of the iron or some mineral in the environment that they all need,

1:18:55the others will send out signals to try to hurt that one.

1:18:59And they're like, stop doing that.

1:19:02Stop freeloading. Stop taking too much.

1:19:04If we go all the way back to the beginning of our evolutionary history, we

1:19:09have cooperation and enforcement of failures to cooperate.

1:19:14And I think that evolutionary history is a big part of why we feel so

1:19:19intensely when someone harms one another.

1:19:22So Sapolsky can make all his arguments that we're not supposed to feel moral outrage

1:19:26at people. And for me, I'm like, that's like telling me that everyone should be

1:19:30abstinent. Like, it's just I think that that mattering to each other in the way

1:19:36we call moral is as deeply baked into the sauce of what it is to

1:19:40be human as sexuality is.

1:19:43And so of course we get caught in this, what philosophers call this rescue blame

1:19:49trap, which is they did a horrible thing.

1:19:54We think of humans as having agency.

1:19:57Of course they're to blame for it.

1:19:59They deserve to be punished.

1:20:01Oh, but wait, his genes, his brain, his trauma, his childhood environment.

1:20:06He was also a victim here.

1:20:07Maybe he needs to be rescued from blame.

1:20:11Oh, but he did it.

1:20:12And like he was so bad.

1:20:14And we, you know, we go back and forth.

1:20:15We go back and forth about ourselves, right?

1:20:18Like if you've ever done something that you really regret, you have probably done this

1:20:24where you're like, here's all the reasons that I was trying and these were my

1:20:28good intentions. But, oh, I can't believe, you know, and how do we find our

1:20:33way through the rescue blame trap?

1:20:37And for me, it was thinking about bad luck doesn't negate responsibility.

1:20:44It might not have been my fault, but it's still my responsibility.

1:20:47But holding people accountable doesn't have to mean harsh punishment, that accountability doesn't mean making

1:20:55someone suffer. And keeping both of those in the same mind is really what made

1:21:00me feel like I could push through this rescue blame trap.

1:21:03I'm letting that sink in.

1:21:04Everything you say resonates, and I, therefore, am updating my hypothesis.

1:21:12Again, just a hypothesis that people have an inherent desire to stop the progression of

1:21:17the bad seed. I'm intentionally using this language.

1:21:20Like we want to, like if that person is, sure, stuff happened to them.

1:21:24But guess what? Stuff happened to them because their parents were bad.

1:21:27And guess what? They're bad because their parents were bad.

1:21:28And like those are, they're a bad seed at the extremes, of course.

1:21:33I'm just, I also think because based on your dog example of adopting puppies from,

1:21:40you know, fighting parents, that in that example, there is this notion that with the

1:21:48appropriate amount of love and care that we can rescue.

1:21:51them. But also we can choose whether or not they have puppies.

1:21:56So I do think that there is this idea that like, if we see children

1:22:00in really horrible circumstances, that I think it's a very human hardwired thing that we

1:22:06can rescue the lineage. Yeah, that we can rescue lineage.

1:22:11I mean, one thing that's always fascinated me and encouraged me is I think, yes,

1:22:15there's lots of you know, transgenerational trauma, whether or not it's purely through genes or

1:22:20through experience is still debated, but probably both.

1:22:26But that also in a single generation, you know, the child of severe alcoholics who

1:22:32makes the choice not to drink or to quit drinking to then pair with somebody

1:22:37who can have a healthy relationship to alcohol.

1:22:40They're cycle breakers. They're cycle breakers.

1:22:42So you can, I think we understand this without understanding genetics.

1:22:45Yeah. Like we don't have to take a class and understand Mendelian genetics, you know,

1:22:50to understand that in one generation, something can start or stop in a family line.

1:22:54Yeah. And I think most people are wise to the idea that family lines no

1:22:58longer exist in small tribes.

1:23:00I mean, you see shows like Succession, right?

1:23:03Where it's over like, oh, let's talk about the propagation of sociopathic -ish narcissistic traits.

1:23:09They were not trying to be cycle breakers.

1:23:12No, they were trying to maintain the cycle that had fed them in their niche.

1:23:17I mean, I think the other thing with regards to cycle breakers is also people

1:23:21tend to think of genetics in terms of how it makes you like your parents.

1:23:27You know, you got your genes from your parents.

1:23:29But the other thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is

1:23:31genes recombine, right? You are not just like your dad or like your mom.

1:23:36You are a random draw of all the potential draws that you could have gotten

1:23:41from their genotypes. And so even within a family with the same parents, you see

1:23:46tons of differences. I have three kids and they are different personalities, definitely different risks

1:23:52for addiction and conduct disorder problems across the three of them.

1:23:56And so I think it's a mistake to think of lineage as genes being an

1:24:01unbroken lineage because our genes are getting recombined in these novel ways with every generation.

1:24:07That writer Andrew Solomon says that we should never use the word reproduce.

1:24:12Reproduce is something that lulls parents into thinking that they're copying themselves, but that every

1:24:18child is produced. Every child is a new product and it's unpredictable what that product

1:24:24is going to be. Oh, that's interesting.

1:24:26I never thought about that word in that way.

1:24:29Yeah. Yeah. Wild. Who said that?

1:24:31Andrew Solomon. He wrote Far From the Tree, which is about children who are very

1:24:35different from their parents in some way.

1:24:37So deaf children of hearing parents, savants whose parents are like, we don't know where

1:24:43this chess or music or math came from.

1:24:46And then also interviewed Dylan Klebold's mother.

1:24:50So Dylan Klebold was one of the Columbine shooters.

1:24:53So normal suburban parents who ended up having a child who was a school shooter.

1:24:58And he talks about this idea of horizontal versus vertical identities.

1:25:03So you get your vertical identity from your parents, but then you're not, you are

1:25:08not your parents. You are not a reproduction of them.

1:25:12They produced you and that there's an identity that's separate from that lineage.

1:25:17Beautiful. He's a great writer.

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1:26:59have made the switch to Our Place kitchenware.

1:27:01I like to believe that despite the fact that humans have some selfish wiring, that

1:27:08we are all inherently good, can be drawn toward goodness, can in the right conditions,

1:27:15and with the right amount of effort, can direct ourselves.

1:27:19ways that are really beneficial.

1:27:20Learn from mistakes, be benevolent, all that.

1:27:24So I think I believe that.

1:27:25I think most people believe that.

1:27:26We want to believe that.

1:27:28If we step a little bit away from the extremes of severe psychopathology and sociopathy,

1:27:33some people are more mercenary than others.

1:27:38And our society in certain careers tends to favor that.

1:27:42When I was coming up in science, I don't know what it was like in

1:27:45psychology, but there was this cohort of neuroscientists in New York.

1:27:49They were called the New York Neuroscience Mafia.

1:27:51Two of them have Nobel Prizes.

1:27:53I'm friendly with these guys.

1:27:55But you'd go to meetings and they would hold court in a way that it

1:28:00was all about them. It was all about their displays.

1:28:02They're brilliant. They've done brilliant work.

1:28:05But for a lot of people coming up, it was sort of a pressure test.

1:28:08Do you think we could make it in this field?

1:28:11We're going to have to either wait until these guys die or somehow integrate with

1:28:18this scene. And they would pick favorites and they would decide who they'd go to

1:28:23drinks with. I mean, it was very hierarchical.

1:28:26Every scientific field is like this.

1:28:27Yeah. Okay. Good. Okay. All right.

1:28:28So I'm both relieved and dismayed that every field is like that.

1:28:32And very different than the West Coast version of it, because we are a little

1:28:35softer on the West Coast.

1:28:36But on the West Coast, there was a more cryptic version of it.

1:28:39Yeah. Southerners are like that too.

1:28:40Oh, is that right? It's not that they aren't mercenary.

1:28:43It's that they hide it.

1:28:45Right? Under a blanket of softness.

1:28:48Is the Midwest the only place where people are truly decent?

1:28:51Have you ever seen that thing where it's like, it divides the country into quadrants

1:28:55and it's like, ax mean, is mean.

1:28:58Like, ax nice is mean.

1:29:00That's the South. And then I think it's the Pacific Northwest is ax nice is

1:29:04nice. But I don't know about the Midwest.

1:29:06What was California? I don't remember.

1:29:09Oh, probably ax nice is mean.

1:29:10Is that the sort of...

1:29:11Probably. It could be. Could be.

1:29:13I mean, here we're focusing on the dark and there's good people in every field.

1:29:17But I remember thinking, you know, like going to a meeting meant you had to,

1:29:22you couldn't get, you couldn't let your guard down.

1:29:24Yes. And I now know, because I'm, you know, I'm adjacent to it now because

1:29:29I'm not, I don't depend on them for grant reviews or I don't need anything

1:29:33from those guys anymore. I remember the moment where they sort of invited me in

1:29:38was based where one kind of took a little jab at me and I jabbed

1:29:42right back, but I hit them harder.

1:29:44Why would it be that like you get invited into a group with special resources

1:29:53by virtue of being kind of a jerk?

1:29:56Yeah. Like I'm going to be a jerk to you.

1:29:57And if you can be a jerk back, like we can be jerks together.

1:29:59Yeah. It's a status dominant.

1:30:01I mean, it sucks. It's a status dominance move at saying, um, I, I'm signaling

1:30:08to you that I'm confident enough in whatever this is that I don't need to

1:30:12cower or submit. And then someone's like, oh, I, maybe I don't want to be

1:30:16in a status dominance aggression competition with him because he might win.

1:30:20So now we're going to, I have a theory that a lot of scientific fields

1:30:24and men in scientific fields are a little bit like mice in that mice have

1:30:31very rigid social hierarchies that they establish through aggression.

1:30:38And once everyone's figured out like who can bite whom without getting bitten back, then

1:30:44they can settle into their nice hierarchy and you bit back.

1:30:48So you were like, no, I'm higher in the hierarchy than you think in a

1:30:51big pack of guys. Like I never was the aggressor, but like if, if you

1:30:54don't bite back, you know, when somebody kind of with more power than you pokes

1:31:00on you, you, uh, you.

1:31:02But you were saying, I'm not acting like you have more power than me.

1:31:05I'm acting like I can poke back.

1:31:08Right. But it doesn't feel good.

1:31:10Right. We would all like to believe that we can ascend in our fields, settle

1:31:14into our place without having to like.

1:31:17Throw elbows. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, cause anyway.

1:31:21So I think one thing that you, the story gets at too is, you know,

1:31:26we talk about impulsivity and desire for intensity and I, uh, disagreeableness.

1:31:33Like I don't actually care who's, who I'm hurting in this as unambiguously bad things,

1:31:38but a little bit of those is actually can be very adaptive in some circumstances.

1:31:46Like you don't want your surgeon to be like, oh, am I hurting them by

1:31:50cutting them open? Like you want someone who's a little bit callous to your physical

1:31:55pain because they're focusing on you as a body and doing this.

1:31:59If you look at, um, studies of who is a successful entrepreneur by the age

1:32:05of 30, they are white men.

1:32:09So social, social advantage, high IQ as measured by a standardized test history of a

1:32:16little bit of adolescent delinquency.

1:32:18Right. And that makes sense.

1:32:20If you're thinking about adolescent delinquency was a manifestation of risk tolerance, of sensation seeking

1:32:26and who are the people who are not going to be real great at having

1:32:30a boss, but able to tolerate the risk of starting a business.

1:32:34Right. Like academia is full of, full of people like that, that are like, um,

1:32:39I want to think about what I want to think about and I don't want

1:32:42anyone telling me what to do.

1:32:44And I don't really care if other people think.

1:32:47This is useful, and I'm willing to be really competitive to get resources.

1:32:51And I'll use taxpayer dollars, thank you, to do it with.

1:32:54Exactly. So I have this thought experiment in my book where I think, again, thought

1:32:59experiment, I'm not recommending this, where I think, what if we did have the means

1:33:06to select every baby that was born?

1:33:12Every reproducing couple is going to do IVF.

1:33:17They're going to create as many embryos as they can, and we're going to select

1:33:20the ones that have the lowest antisocial behavior substance use genes.

1:33:25And we have a generation that is the most puritanical, risk intolerant, non -sensation -seeking,

1:33:34controlled, not disinhibited, you know, very inhibited.

1:33:38Is that a good thing?

1:33:39Like, is that a world that we would want?

1:33:42You don't want my opinion on this.

1:33:43To live in? I do.

1:33:44I would love to hear your opinion of this.

1:33:46I mean, I don't want sociopathy.

1:33:49I mean, the really dark examples are so salient.

1:33:52I have to be careful not to end up there.

1:33:54But I watched that. I didn't watch the Dahmer thing on Netflix.

1:33:59I would pay money to not see that.

1:34:00I don't want to see that.

1:34:01No, no, I don't have the time.

1:34:02But I did watch the Richard Ramirez Night Stalker story a few years before that

1:34:09was on Netflix, and it was done exceedingly well at the level of it scares

1:34:13the shit out of you.

1:34:13And he was a true sociopath by all measures, you know.

1:34:20But then when you hear the history of his childhood, you know, just horrible treatment

1:34:26of being, I think, I think I have this right, like being tied to a

1:34:29gravestone in a cemetery overnight as a young kid, like three or five, and just

1:34:34left there like his father did.

1:34:36I mean, just horrible things.

1:34:38But again, it doesn't change what I see is the guy with the pentagram written

1:34:42on his hand in the court, like the mental imagery, right?

1:34:46So taking away guys like that, people like that, I think you go, yeah, I

1:34:50mean, he was a sadistic killer at every level.

1:34:52But then a bunch of just pure passivity everywhere, I don't know.

1:35:01I mean, I guess it depends on how far it goes because in the earlier

1:35:05example when we were talking about this academic interaction, my friend Jocko Willink, former Navy

1:35:11SEAL, he's very active in – and now talking about kids' health and education, and

1:35:16his – he's doing a lot there, and he reposted something recently that I had

1:35:23a good chuckle at. It was certainly true for me, which was that it said

1:35:2890 % of being a dude is making fun of your friends to their face

1:35:33and cheering them on behind their backs.

1:35:37And I think every guy that had a lot of guy friends or has a

1:35:40lot of guy friends growing up, or even just a couple good ones, knows that

1:35:44that's true. And the inverse of that are the people you're trying to select out,

1:35:49right? You don't want somebody who's nice to your face and then behind your back

1:35:52is trying to backstab, right?

1:35:53Or be kind and then backstab.

1:35:55But, yeah, a lot of being a dude is like making fun of each other

1:35:59but then rooting each other on at the same time.

1:36:01That's kind of how we grow up.

1:36:03So I wouldn't want a society where people wouldn't make fun of me and I

1:36:07couldn't make fun of them.

1:36:10But the encouragement part is also really important.

1:36:13Yeah, yeah. And I don't know what it is for girls.

1:36:16I mean, I have a sister and, I mean, she's a very, very, very kind

1:36:20person. And I was always shocked the way that girls treated one another.

1:36:27So they can be really mean.

1:36:29Girls can be really mean.

1:36:31They can be really mean.

1:36:31Yeah, yeah. I mean, relational aggression, there's literature on this.

1:36:36You know, when we talk about aggression, we so often think in terms of physical

1:36:40aggression. You know, I'm punching you.

1:36:43I'm stabbing you. I'm hurting you.

1:36:44You know, relational aggression where you're destroying someone's reputation or social standing or making them

1:36:50feel isolated is just as painful as physical aggression, if not more so.

1:36:55I mean, there's few things that humans are more attuned to than that feeling of,

1:36:59oh, am I being pushed out of the group, right?

1:37:03Because that means, like, ancestrally, that means death.

1:37:06And so what we see research is that the same genes that predict physical aggression

1:37:10in boys predict relational aggression in girls.

1:37:13And relational aggression can be every bit as damaging.

1:37:16But I think also kind of bewildering to the adults around it.

1:37:20Like, it's more covert, right?

1:37:21And it's hard to see it.

1:37:23I was shocked at how early that started.

1:37:27I thought it was going to be something I dealt with with my daughter when

1:37:31she got to be a teenager.

1:37:33Four years old. Ellery said this.

1:37:38And, you know, Lily isn't my friend anymore.

1:37:41And I met with her preschool teacher, and I was like, what is going on?

1:37:45And she was like, this is what four -year -old girls do.

1:37:48They make relationship conflict, and then they repair relationship conflict.

1:37:53And they do it all the time, every day.

1:37:55And that is why they are so much less bewildered by repairing relationship conflict than

1:38:01your average teenage boy is by the time they reach adolescence.

1:38:05And I was just completely thrown and fascinated by this experience.

1:38:10Yeah, boy, sort it out in such primitive ways.

1:38:14I mean, I... I can remember dirt -clawed wars where somebody broke the fundamental rule,

1:38:18which is you can't throw rocks.

1:38:19They threw a rock, then someone gets upset, then they get into a scrap.

1:38:24And then sometimes somebody went home and then, but the longest it lasted in terms

1:38:30of a fracture in the group or the relationship was like a day maximum.

1:38:34And then we'd just kind of forget about it.

1:38:36Yeah. Yeah. And it was kind of understood that someone was going to push the

1:38:40boundaries. I am not completely confident that I'm remembering this study correctly.

1:38:45So if you're on, you know, if your listeners are like, no, Paige, you got

1:38:48this wrong. But I remember hearing about a study that was about marital conflict where

1:38:54they had married partners keep diaries of their interactions.

1:38:59And then also, I think maybe like spit into a tube every morning and evening.

1:39:04And they looked at how long did men's cortisol remain elevated after an argument compared

1:39:10to the wives' cortisol. I was basically like they had the fight has spiked up

1:39:16and then it went down like classic Trier curve of shh.

1:39:20And hers was elevated for like 24 hours afterwards.

1:39:25And if you think about what that means for their psychological sense of what's happening

1:39:29in their relationship, she's like, I'm still amped about this.

1:39:33And he's like, what are you talking about?

1:39:35Like we had that fight and then my cortisol, like we're over it, right?

1:39:39So I do think there's some interesting sex differences in the relationship between our physiological

1:39:45arousal and our conflict styles and just the timeline that that plays out.

1:39:52Fascinating. Yeah, so many ideas.

1:39:56You're thinking of all the examples.

1:39:58Well, I'm thinking of some examples and, yeah, and of course what the evolutionary benefit

1:40:05is of those different cycles.

1:40:07I mean, there's certain interactions you don't want to forget.

1:40:10It can be damaging to self to forget fights so quickly.

1:40:16Yeah. I mean, I can say I've had interactions where at the moment it felt

1:40:22so vital and then a day later it's like, I'm like, how is it that

1:40:26I'm like, this might not be good that I'm not still thinking about this.

1:40:30Yeah. But life is carrying on.

1:40:32Life moves on. You know, the conveyor belt's still moving.

1:40:34So I think it's only fair that I ask about, you know, we talked about

1:40:40pathology as expressed in boys and it always seems to come out as aggressive violence,

1:40:46et cetera. In girls, you're saying that the social dynamics can be benevolent, right?

1:40:53Because you did say conflict and repair.

1:40:56Yeah. That sounds healthy. Yeah.

1:40:57But in terms of genes that predispose for addiction, do those show up differently in

1:41:04girls? Is it, you know, I think the assumption that some people have is like,

1:41:07oh, it's always going to be promiscuity.

1:41:08But nowadays, especially because of access to prescription drugs, and I was told this by

1:41:14a former guest, Heath Humphreys, you know, if you look at addiction, men and women,

1:41:19it tended to lean more towards men than women until you get to prescription drugs

1:41:22because there's something, I don't know, less seedy.

1:41:29The social opportunity is different.

1:41:31Yeah. Yeah, I mean, what we see in the twin studies and the adoption studies

1:41:37and then also in the newer studies where we're looking directly at people's DNA is

1:41:42that the manifestations of at least the genes we've discovered so far are remarkably consistent

1:41:49between men and women. So if you have, you know, a genetic liability towards disinhibition,

1:41:58problems with self -regulation, that can manifest as alcohol use, that can manifest as aggression

1:42:03and antisocial behavior. But there aren't really strongly sex -typed manifestations where it always looks

1:42:09like this in women and always looks like this in men.

1:42:12You know, we haven't discovered all the genes and we haven't looked at the sex

1:42:17chromosomes yet, so there might be something different.

1:42:19But the theory so far that seems to have the best evidence is that the

1:42:26underlying etiology is remarkably consistent across men and women, and it's just really the mean

1:42:34that differs between men and women.

1:42:36So you just get higher rates of all of these behaviors in men, but the

1:42:41underlying disposition is really similar across the sexes.

1:42:44So if we were to say sensation -seeking, novelty -seeking, equally distributed, but men act

1:42:50out more. Yeah. So what you see is that men show slightly higher sensation -seeking,

1:42:55but the genes that predispose a man towards sensation -seeking seem to be similar in

1:43:02women. If a woman has a fraternal twin who's a boy, his sensation -seeking will

1:43:09protect hers just as well as if she had a twin sister.

1:43:12So similar genes, just a mean shift.

1:43:15What you see is that actually in adolescence, boys and girls have very similar trajectories

1:43:19of sensation -seeking. Where they differ is in the evolution of their inhibitory control.

1:43:24So girls mature in terms of their impulse control faster than boys do.

1:43:30We did a study maybe 10 years ago now.

1:43:33It was basically, it took until men around the age of 24, until around the

1:43:39age of 24, to be as controlled.

1:43:42As your average 15 -year -old girl was, there's like a decade -long gap in

1:43:48the maturation of impulse control.

1:43:50You're nodding, and I used to be a 15 -year -old boy.

1:43:53I mean, yeah, that tracks.

1:43:55I think the point is that men develop more slowly.

1:43:58Yeah. But presumably they catch up, but then they die earlier, so.

1:44:01Well, they go through puberty later, and they have a more extended, you know, increase

1:44:08up to having adult levels of reproductive hormones.

1:44:11I mean, men's testosterone is increasing.

1:44:16Puberty is over, but their testosterone is still going up through their teen years and

1:44:19into their 20s. And they die earlier, but they, women have that long, you know,

1:44:26they're alive, but they're not healthy for, you know, on average at the end of

1:44:30their life. Like their health, the difference in health span is less different than lifespan,

1:44:33as you know. So there's something interesting about the ways in which men seem to

1:44:40be slower developing in uterus.

1:44:45They're getting to reproductive maturity later, and they're getting to adult levels of personality later.

1:44:50We need more patience. Women are all thinking, we've given you enough patience, you know.

1:44:55We require more patience. That's the right phrasing.

1:44:59Let's talk about punishment. Yeah.

1:45:01But maybe also talk about rewarding good behavior.

1:45:05A while back, I think it was Zimbardo at Stanford was talking about, you know,

1:45:09that we're everyday heroes, you know, or that we were supposed to start orienting towards,

1:45:14you know, rewarding the everyday heroes of life.

1:45:17This was kind of a thing in the early 2000s, as I recall.

1:45:20And there's the positive psychology notion.

1:45:22And I feel like psychology is kind of split into dark and light.

1:45:26The people who like to look at the dark stuff versus the light.

1:45:28And we call it morality, but I'm an outsider.

1:45:31I don't know. But we spend a lot of time thinking about whether and how

1:45:36we should punish people. And of course, at the extremes, it's obvious, right?

1:45:41To the legal system, it's obvious.

1:45:44But the middle ground is the interesting ground.

1:45:47Penalty boxing people, maybe not even with social isolation, but who we reward and place

1:45:54into positions of leadership. I mean, this is very salient right now.

1:45:58And it comes with a lot of assigning of labels about psychopathology from people that

1:46:04may or may not be qualified to assign those labels, right?

1:46:07Yeah. How do you think about the genetic and evolutionary, but also the societal labels

1:46:16of punishment and forgiveness? Yeah.

1:46:20Oh, such a good question.

1:46:22So first of all, let's just define punishment, because that actually can mean different things

1:46:28to different people. So as a, you know, a psychologist, I think about punishment is

1:46:36applying an aversive stimulus in an attempt to reduce the frequency of behavior, right?

1:46:43So it's the rat is in its Skinner box.

1:46:47And every time it goes into this area, you give it a shock.

1:46:50And that's a punishment to make it not go into this area of the box.

1:46:55If you have a child, punishment is you're going to be in timeout, or I'm

1:47:00going to spank you, I'm going to give you some sort of thing that I

1:47:03know you're not going to like, in order to try to reduce the frequency of

1:47:08this behavior. From psychology, we know from decades of evidence that punishing bad behavior doesn't

1:47:17work nearly as well for shaping behavior as rewarding the behavior that you want, right?

1:47:24So if you reward a rat for pressing a lever, it'll do that all day

1:47:30long. If you give a rat alcohol every time it presses a bar, and then

1:47:36you stop mid -experiment and you start shocking it, some rats will stop pressing the

1:47:43bar, and other rats will actually increase the rate of behavior.

1:47:49They'll be like, maybe this time, maybe this time it'll be.

1:47:52It's the same thing with kids, right?

1:47:54We know from, you know, all of our research on corporal punishment that children who

1:48:01are spanked do not behave better than children who aren't spanked, and if anything, they

1:48:07behave worse. So you've had Dr.

1:48:11Becky Kennedy on here. You know, she has been, I think, so influential in that

1:48:17you need to have consequences, but attempting to help your child behave better through harshness

1:48:25is on average going to be a losing strategy.

1:48:29And then I think you said, you know, it does, you know, maybe at the

1:48:33extremes with the criminal justice system, but we also see that in the criminal justice

1:48:37system, that increasing the harshness of criminal penalties doesn't predict a decline in crime.

1:48:43The thing that seems to predict it is the likelihood of getting caught and having

1:48:47other potential opportunities to get the rewards that you want in your social structure.

1:48:54But just increasing penalties for crime doesn't, on average, reduce crime.

1:48:59So, you know, whether we're talking about rats or children or prisoners, adding more harshness

1:49:07is not, we know, the most effective.

1:49:10effective way to get the behaviors that we want.

1:49:13This is also true going back to dogs, right?

1:49:16Like what is the best dog training method?

1:49:18It's never harshly punishing them or applying pain for behavior you don't want, right?

1:49:23It's firmness, boundaries, but rewarding the behavior that you do want.

1:49:28And also in the context of building, you know, trust in a relationship with your

1:49:32dog. So I feel like no luck doesn't obviate responsibility.

1:49:40Like we are still responsible for the people that we are, even though we're shaped

1:49:44by factors that aren't in control.

1:49:46But in terms of holding people responsible, punishing them harshly doesn't bring about what we

1:49:54really want other than just satisfying that retributive itch.

1:49:59It's giving them opportunities in the reward structure to be rewarded by the things we

1:50:05do want that we know is the most effective strategy all in all.

1:50:10So I think the slide that people make is if someone's responsible, if someone had

1:50:18agency, then they deserve to be punished.

1:50:22And what I'm trying to separate is those two things.

1:50:25Can someone be responsible? They had agency.

1:50:29We want to hold them accountable.

1:50:31But how do we do that without immediately jumping to?

1:50:35And so therefore they deserve to suffer.

1:50:36And so therefore they deserve to hurt.

1:50:39And there's no like one size magic bullet to making that happen, right?

1:50:43Like, you know, that's how do we relate to each other as people.

1:50:47But as a mother, my strategy with my own kids has been really heavily influenced

1:50:55by thinking about like punishment is not the most effective way.

1:50:58That doesn't mean we live in a no, there's no rules, anything goes household, right?

1:51:02Like we have consequences, we have accountability, we have boundaries.

1:51:06But there's always space to say, reflect on what you did, reflect on what needs

1:51:12to be different for your behavior to be different in the future.

1:51:15And how can we create an environment that helps you grow, helps you helps that

1:51:21happen? I'm pretty anti punishment.

1:51:23I'm pro responsibility and pretty anti punishment as a way of holding each other responsible.

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1:53:03The last few years, there's been a real shift, it seems, in how we hold

1:53:10people accountable for their behavior in teen years.

1:53:14I think it's with all the cameras and everything.

1:53:16There have been a few examples, for instance, of text message threads were unearthed of

1:53:21people who are now in their 20s and 30s from their teen years.

1:53:25I think in one instance, it was a group of friends and people were making

1:53:30racist comments. Then I think the ultimate decision was, okay, if this person apologized, their

1:53:41whole life shouldn't be ruined on the basis of a comment made earlier, five, six

1:53:46years earlier in a different context, et cetera, et cetera.

1:53:49I think that's how it moved forward.

1:53:50But there were people calling for like, hey, this person is a racist.

1:53:54They should be forbidden from having a government job.

1:53:59And I think it played out pretty quickly.

1:54:03But nowadays with social media, everyone can chime in.

1:54:08So we're not really talking about courtroom decision.

1:54:11We're talking about court of public opinion.

1:54:13A different example, perhaps, that I'd like your thoughts on is like Kanye a year

1:54:20or two ago made a bunch of really anti -Semitic remarks.

1:54:23He was wearing a SWAT T -shirt and then recently published an apology.

1:54:28He said he was sorry.

1:54:29He wasn't in the right state of mind, et cetera.

1:54:32He's talked about some mental health challenges and things of that sort.

1:54:35And he seems to be largely forgiven.

1:54:38At least that seems to be the sentiment.

1:54:40Now, of course, he also brings something that a lot of people want, which is

1:54:44music that people love to hear.

1:54:48So there's always this kind of value add, value subtraction thing when we punish people

1:54:52versus the anonymous person, right?

1:54:56They're not doing anything for people.

1:54:58So they're more quick to just say, well, just punish them, lock them away.

1:55:01It's fascinating because even though these are public facing examples, we use these as a

1:55:06template for how to deal with someone who got too drunk at the dorm party

1:55:13on Friday and said something really stupid and got a bunch of offended people.

1:55:17Do you kick them out of school?

1:55:19Maybe. Or her. Or do you sit them down and go, hey, that was really

1:55:23insensitive and they have to do a bunch of sensitivity training and, you know, and

1:55:27then you go, okay, like they're healed.

1:55:30I mean, I don't have any answers to this, but this is how it seems

1:55:34to play out in the real world.

1:55:35It's sort of like very salient examples, not at the super extremes.

1:55:39I mean, racism's bad, but he didn't kill anyone.

1:55:42So then the punishment is either, do we keep them or do we isolate him?

1:55:47And then what happens does set the course of what happens at more everyday levels.

1:55:54So I think what you're pointing to is America is an incredibly punitive, retributive culture.

1:56:03There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they

1:56:10see someone suffer, if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer.

1:56:16So ordinarily, if you see someone be shocked, you have interior insula.

1:56:21It's like you're being shocked too.

1:56:22Unless that person is first portrayed as violating some moral or social norm, in which

1:56:29case, dopamine, you get a reward out of seeing that person punished.

1:56:33I think that it is a lust, just as much as lust for substances or

1:56:39lust for sexual partners. It is a desire people want to see people punished.

1:56:45Nietzsche was an amazing observer of human nature before there was a scientific psychology.

1:56:51And he wrote about how, why do we use monetary terms to describe people being

1:57:01punished, pay their debt to society?

1:57:04People shouldn't get off scot -free.

1:57:07Scot is a word for tax.

1:57:09What is that? And what he theorized is that what you're being paid back with

1:57:16is the pleasure of seeing a fellow human hurt.

1:57:19You hurt someone and we can't undo that hurt.

1:57:24We can't magic it away.

1:57:25How does them being punished pay their debt to society?

1:57:29And he wrote, maybe it's that cruelty is a currency and that all of us

1:57:34have a primitive desire to be the punisher and that's what's being repaid.

1:57:39Blew my mind when I was reading it.

1:57:42And now that I see it, I see that everywhere.

1:57:44I think we see that in cancel culture mobs.

1:57:47I think we see that in politics.

1:57:50I think we see in America a real lust to make other people suffer and

1:57:57finding ways that they're guilty that allows us to feel entitled to that pleasure of

1:58:04punishing them or entitled to that pleasure of witnessing them being punished is absolutely runs

1:58:11through our culture, top to bottom, both sides of the political spectrum.

1:58:16One of my favorite books that I read when I was, when I was, when

1:58:19I was writing my book is this book called One of Us.

1:58:22And it's about the Norwegian mass shooter who shot all of those children at a

1:58:30summer camp, who was someone who was afflicted with terrible luck.

1:58:35From the time he was, from the time he was a child, he was described

1:58:37as someone who had a temper, who was socially odd.

1:58:45His mother was very unstable.

1:58:47A lot of nature and nurture and circumstance conspired.

1:58:51And during his trial, they had this whole debate about, is he insane?

1:58:56Is he not insane? And they had a psychologist who gave testimony and he said,

1:59:02no matter what's happening, he's one of us.

1:59:06He's part of our society.

1:59:07So how are we going to deal with him without exiling him, throwing away the

1:59:13key? And all of the examples that you described are people trying to make this

1:59:17decision about like, who do we keep in our group?

1:59:20Do they have enough for us that it's worth keeping them?

1:59:24And who do we get to exile and then feel entitled to feel the pleasure

1:59:28of watching them suffer? And I think that's a fundamentally inhuman way to look at

1:59:33our, I think that we are a society and that means everyone, even people who

1:59:38do terrible, terrible things. There's still one of us.

1:59:41There's still, there's still one of God's creatures.

1:59:44There's still part of, part of our human circle.

1:59:47But how do we shift our culture away from this glee at punishment?

1:59:51I don't know. I think it's, I think it's, you want to talk about sin.

1:59:56I think, I think that's the original sin of American culture is our delight in

2:00:00punitiveness. Incredible. Incredibly sad. incredibly important and an incredible opportunity for us hopefully to navigate

2:00:13out of what seems to be one of the deeper troughs of this that we've

2:00:17been in at least since I've been alive.

2:00:19I want to just ask about this cruelty currency because I learned a long time

2:00:25ago that one needs to be very careful about coming up with evolutionary just so

2:00:29stories. It's so easy to do.

2:00:31It's so seductive and it can be oh so wrong.

2:00:35So with that stated you know you said that if somebody observes somebody else being

2:00:44harmed it activates areas of the brain that are associated with empathy and presumably a

2:00:49surge of hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel bad.

2:00:56If that person was a perpetrator and we're aware of that then it feels good.

2:01:01It's not just neutral. It's the inverse of that.

2:01:05And then you said that Nietzsche described it as a cruelty currency and I've been

2:01:10wondering about something and forgive me I don't know if I can articulate this very

2:01:14well because I haven't thought about it out loud.

2:01:17Just think through it. If we return to the idea that every species including our

2:01:21own wants to make more of itself care for its young and propagate that there's

2:01:25a there's some forces there clearly.

2:01:28I've often thought about dopamine as the universal currency of reward and certainly there are

2:01:33other chemical currencies of punishment and maybe drops in dopamine are punishment and increases or

2:01:39and etc. Overly simplified but I think we have enough data to support those statements.

2:01:45And then I think about how we punish people and let's think about on a

2:01:51on a hockey rink you put someone in a penalty box you take them out

2:01:55of play. Yeah. In society somebody could be canceled either permanently or they're they got

2:02:00to like take a break.

2:02:01Yeah. Or somebody's put in jail they're taken out of society.

2:02:05Yeah. Several examples came up already today of people who were able to propagate their

2:02:10genes or not propagate their genes depending on honest like finding a partner making the

2:02:16decision about you know consciously or unconsciously the genetics their personality etc.

2:02:21And okay I'm going to create children with this person I'm going to create new

2:02:24life. Versus the IVF doc who cheated in one of the most egregious examples I've

2:02:31ever heard creating new life.

2:02:34And I think about maybe the currency that is dopamine is about energy and the

2:02:41opportunity to create more life.

2:02:43It's like life energy. It gets a little bit woo.

2:02:46But when I think about it it's like if somebody gets something by virtue of

2:02:50their hard work we expect and want them to be rewarded for it.

2:02:53If they lie to get it you know like a Bernie Madoff who admitted to

2:02:57lying so I don't think I'm gonna get in any trouble by saying I think

2:03:00he agreed he that he lied to get all that money.

2:03:03Then he he robbed people of currency.

2:03:06He got a lot of currency in that and we hate that.

2:03:09He got more life energy.

2:03:11And when we're punished we lose even if there's not a an explicit behavioral punishment

2:03:16that hopefully the shame the regret it takes us out of the running a bit.

2:03:21Yeah. You know and people will play these games they'll try and manipulate around this.

2:03:25But a lot of life is about doing things that give you more opportunity that

2:03:30give you more life energy that allow you to move forward.

2:03:33And a lot of the ways that we punish people is by trying to take

2:03:36away life energy forgive the term that we feel you didn't deserve that.

2:03:41Yes. Or you did something so that you shouldn't be able to continue to propagate

2:03:45your life energy. And so it gets in I'm weaving it partially in with reproduction.

2:03:51But it's really about resources for your family so that your kids can have more.

2:03:55But I do think that in the end what we're competing for is energy.

2:04:02And what we're punishing for is people that we think got it unfairly.

2:04:06Yes. And we definitely reward people that we that we feel gave us energy through

2:04:12a song through art, etc.

2:04:15With money, which is really opportunity.

2:04:17There's nothing inherently valuable about it, even gold backing it doesn't do that.

2:04:22So, you know, so I feel like in the end, we're playing an evolutionary game

2:04:25for energy and the opportunity to propagate our genes.

2:04:30Okay, so just some responses to that, like, as you were talking, I was reminded

2:04:35of certain things. If you look at punishment, I won't even say punishment, if you

2:04:42look at enforcement, if you look at enforcement of cooperative norms in non -human species,

2:04:47even in not even in animals, a really consistent feature of that is reducing the

2:04:54the the the punished organisms fitness opportunities.

2:05:00I'm going to block your access to mates.

2:05:03I'm going to eat your eggs so that, you know, I'm going to wasps reproduce

2:05:11via figs. And if the fig tree detects that the wasp is being a lazy

2:05:17pollinator, it will rot and wither away the figs that the wasp has laid its

2:05:25eggs in. It's it's denying it reproductive opportunity as a as a, you know, it's

2:05:31a it's a retaliation against it's better.

2:05:33So I think what you're picking up on is like, you know, the ways that

2:05:38we punish people, rob them of fitness opportunities, that's something that we see as an

2:05:44evolutionary through line. If we think about when we're trying to understand animal societies, what

2:05:48counts as a punishing behavior?

2:05:50Is it reducing their fitness opportunities of the punished thing?

2:05:55The thing about our language is to say like penalty box.

2:06:02You know, a hockey player is put into a penalty box.

2:06:04They don't get beaten with a Red Hawk poker when they're in there.

2:06:07They're just not allowed to play the game for a period of time.

2:06:10And I think this is where people get somewhat confused between retributive punishment and boundaries

2:06:18to keep the person and their teammates, which is all of us, since we're in

2:06:24a society, safe, right? So I'm not against people being in prison necessarily.

2:06:31The prison abolitionists will be mad at me for saying that.

2:06:33But we've never had a society of any sort where there isn't some mechanism to

2:06:38say we need to be protected from this person.

2:06:41And this person needs an opportunity to have a timeout from society while they reflect

2:06:47on how they're going to behave differently in the future.

2:06:50But we don't have to design that system the way that we designed it here,

2:06:53right? There's this Instagram meme, which is, is this a Scandinavian prison or a London

2:06:58hotel room? And people can't tell the difference.

2:07:02It's just a surveillance dome on the ceiling.

2:07:05And that speaks to something, which is that the purpose is not to make the

2:07:08person suffer. The purpose is to put them in the penalty box to protect the

2:07:12rest of us from their behavior.

2:07:16How do we get it so that our reactions to each other when we're holding

2:07:20boundaries is more like you're in the penalty box and less like, I want to

2:07:25make you suffer and I'm going to feel delighted that you're suffering?

2:07:28The Danes are wonderful people and do seem to have this like sense of morality

2:07:34and decency. And social contract.

2:07:36And social contract. Although, in fairness, I think there's been some criticism that some northern

2:07:42European countries have been too lenient on violent offenders and it's made society more dangerous.

2:07:48This is a very complicated literature.

2:07:50And it's, you know, I'm not saying that it's just their prison system, but their

2:07:53rates of violent crime are astonishingly low compared to America as a whole and particularly

2:08:01as compared to Texas. Yeah, I think that these templates for punishment versus reward, because

2:08:06we haven't really talked much about reward, realizing, you know, that the punishment piece can

2:08:11be scaled, penalty box versus flogging.

2:08:15Forgive me for telling you another story.

2:08:17I've been reading a history of the counterculture movement mostly in California recently.

2:08:22Oh, interesting. But also the human psychology evolution movement and it takes us to Big

2:08:29Sur inevitably. And some interesting, Joseph Campbell was there and worked there and wrote there.

2:08:36But Hunter Thompson was a security guard up there.

2:08:39A security guard. Yeah. At 20 years old, he was hired as a security guard

2:08:43because he had a gun and he could keep order on this place where people

2:08:48would come to use the baths.

2:08:49And it was, it wasn't quite counterculture yet, but there's a story and I believe

2:08:55it's true that he was making some homophobic remarks and there were some gay bodybuilders

2:09:01up from Venice, California. So the group decided what his punishment would be.

2:09:06His punishment would be that these bodybuilders were going to hold him over the cliffs

2:09:10above the ocean, which is maybe three, 400 feet to his drop.

2:09:13Oh, my God. Until he renounced homophobia, which eventually he did.

2:09:17Yeah. And then they let him back on and then he was able to live

2:09:20on and work and like, they're like, okay, he's cured, you know.

2:09:22Yeah. So, I mean, it's a ridiculous example.

2:09:25On the other hand, everyone participated in this decision and apparently he was very frightened.

2:09:32And I don't know, I didn't know him, but apparently he adjusted at least his

2:09:36behavior. Yeah. Kind of an interesting, silly, you know, funny enough, but serious enough example.

2:09:43Nowadays, it would be very different, right?

2:09:45He would have lost his job and no amount of apology would have rescued his

2:09:48job, which on the one hand, you could say, okay, well, he's homophobic.

2:09:52They didn't want anyone homophobic working there.

2:09:55On the other hand, the opportunity to potentially convert his thinking is lost.

2:10:00And so I think that's what you're talking about, that there are certain forms of

2:10:03punishment that give the opportunity not just to protect others, but to really help people

2:10:11evolve their moral concept. Yes.

2:10:13I think sometimes people talk about this as the difference between a backward -looking conception

2:10:18of justice versus a forward -looking conception of justice.

2:10:21So a backward -looking conception of justice, you are often caught in this, again, this

2:10:28rescue blame trap, which is, does he deserve to be punished?

2:10:34Or maybe he doesn't deserve to be punished that badly because of these insinuating circumstances.

2:10:38Oh, but he did this horrible thing.

2:10:40He made these homophobic comments.

2:10:43Whereas a forward -looking conception of justice is, given that we are where we are

2:10:48today and given the harm that he has caused and given the brain and the

2:10:53body that he has, how do we best maximize our chances of other people being

2:10:59protracted from future harm? and him changing, him having, even if he doesn't change in

2:11:06his heart of hearts, changing the words that come out of his mouth, taking responsibility

2:11:10for what he says. The rule in my house with my kids is you're not

2:11:15allowed to tell me about what your brother did.

2:11:19Your brother will tell me about what your brother did, and you'll tell me about

2:11:22what you did. And then we're going to talk about what you want to happen

2:11:26in the future, and then we're going to talk about what everyone needs to do

2:11:30so that we can not have this argument.

2:11:33But this constant, like, attempt to figure out, like, how much does he deserve to

2:11:38hurt? I feel like it's an abyss.

2:11:42You know, you just drown in it.

2:11:44And you drown in it with yourself, too.

2:11:46Like, if you've made comments that you regret yourself, like, how much do I deserve

2:11:51to be punished for that versus, but I can remember all the extenuating circumstances.

2:11:55No, it's what do I need to do better in the future?

2:11:59And what do other people need to know that they are safe around me now?

2:12:03Which might be, you know, might be a penalty box.

2:12:05But, you know, thinking about punishment, not as, again, this is, it's not about some,

2:12:11you know, justice for, attempt to weigh the scales in the past.

2:12:16It's about how do we make things better in the future?

2:12:20How do we keep people safe and repair things in the future?

2:12:23Before moving to reward, one thing that occurs to me is people seem to integrate

2:12:28what people deserve now on the backdrop of all the shit they had to put

2:12:33up with in the past.

2:12:34Yeah. Not just from that person.

2:12:36I feel like we're all integrating on the backdrop of how we were treated, how

2:12:42much pain and frustration we've had to endure.

2:12:45And that weaves in with how much forgiveness we have for when people screw up

2:12:51or when they're like being just jerks or they're being outright awful.

2:12:57So I feel like it's an almost impossible problem to wrap our arms around, except

2:13:04at the very extremes. So I think when people feel that they've been victimized accurately

2:13:12or inaccurately, that amps up that retributive urge.

2:13:19And again, I'm not saying that, you know, this is just some people.

2:13:23I think this is part of being human, that when we feel hurt, we want

2:13:27to hurt back and we want the person that hurt us to be hurt.

2:13:31And we're trying to keep some ledger of power and victimhood in our minds.

2:13:39I think that's, to some extent, an inescapable emotion of being human.

2:13:45But we don't just have to respond to our emotions.

2:13:49We don't have to let that lead, right?

2:13:51We don't have to let that run the show.

2:13:53So I do think that you're right, that in all situations, we're thinking about the

2:13:57situation and also the backdrop of the situation and thinking very much about power.

2:14:03I mean, going back to what we can learn about punishment from looking at non

2:14:07-human animals or not even not animals, even trees, even bacteria, is who is punished

2:14:14and who is the punisher is always a statement about the social roles within a

2:14:22group. And those social roles are structured by power.

2:14:27I talk in my book about how you can have alpha queen wasps and they

2:14:33eat some proportion of the eggs of the beta queens in their colony.

2:14:39But if she eats too many of the eggs, her sisters will bite her.

2:14:43They will be like, okay, you're allowed this much power, but no more.

2:14:48And we're going to enforce those limits.

2:14:50So I think a lot of the debates that we're having about punishment in our

2:14:56society, who should be punished, are really debates about who gets to have power and

2:15:00to what degree in our society.

2:15:03What's interesting to me is how much the language of choice is leveraged or used

2:15:11in those debates. People, so common, once you listen for it, it's really, really common

2:15:18that as soon as someone wants to justify punishment, they don't say, I'm justifying this

2:15:24to prevent harm or I'm justifying this to maintain or change a power structure.

2:15:30They say something about how the person being punished chose that.

2:15:35They chose to be there.

2:15:37They chose this thing. I think a lot of our focus on choice in American

2:15:43culture is really an interest in being entitled to punish people.

2:15:48If you're on a plane and they're trying to get people to check their bags,

2:15:53they'll never say that the airline chose to overbook the plane.

2:15:57They'll say, if you've chosen to bring more than one bag with you, then you're

2:16:01going to need to check it, right?

2:16:03Which is like, you chose, so therefore you can be inconvenienced.

2:16:08You'll hear it everywhere now.

2:16:09I'm going to listen for this.

2:16:11Okay, reward. The good stuff.

2:16:15When I was a kid, we'd go to dinner.

2:16:18We didn't go out to dinner very often.

2:16:20It just wasn't our family.

2:16:21But when we did, we could get soda.

2:16:24We couldn't have it at home.

2:16:27And I would drink. some soda, then my sister would make sure that she drank

2:16:30a little less soda so that at any point in the meal, she had more

2:16:34soda than me, even though we started off with more soda.

2:16:37That is such a classic sibling thing.

2:16:38Okay. So she's a wonderful person.

2:16:41I adore my sister. And yet she had to win that competition.

2:16:46Yeah. And so - That's some primal stuff there.

2:16:49That's some primal stuff. I don't know if it's the hypothalamus, but it's definitely -

2:16:54Do my parents love me more?

2:16:56Exactly. And if you feed two dogs at once, you know, because I had a

2:17:01bulldog mastiff. My girlfriend at the time had a pit bull and whoever got food

2:17:06first, and I swear they're paying attention to the size of the little but I

2:17:10mean, they are processing that at laser speed.

2:17:14What's going on? We pay attention to how much people are rewarded.

2:17:18Yes, we do. And we get something about rewards that go beyond just the reward.

2:17:25I mean, again, we are a species that's evolved in cooperation and there's really nothing

2:17:32worse for a cooperative society than freeloading.

2:17:35Someone being rewarded without putting effort into the collective.

2:17:42There's this great study that was run by these economists where people were put into

2:17:48these online, basically like online, you know, kind of societies where they could interact with

2:17:55one another. And you could pick which society, which village did you want to join?

2:18:01And you could switch villages at any time.

2:18:05And in both villages, everyone who was in that society, society, online society, online game,

2:18:12was given an allocation of digital money.

2:18:16And they had to decide how much are they going to donate from their personal

2:18:21wallet into the collective. And so there's a, that's a classic economic trade -off game,

2:18:27which is what's best for my self -interest is if I don't contribute anything and

2:18:32everyone else contributes the maximum, and then I get to benefit from the common good,

2:18:37right? That's the freeloading problem.

2:18:38But if everyone does that, then there's nothing in the common good.

2:18:42Okay, so in one of these societies, people were given, this is back to reward

2:18:47and punishment, people were given the ability to see how much other people donated and

2:18:54could pay to punish people who they didn't think had donated enough.

2:19:00So we're, we're in a society, and if we're in the, the punishing society, then

2:19:05I can see that you got rewarded with this, and then you didn't contribute enough

2:19:10of it back to the collective good.

2:19:12And then I could pay my own money to take away some of yours.

2:19:16And in the other society, people got to make their decisions, but they were anonymous,

2:19:22and you couldn't respond to other people's decisions.

2:19:25The rules are transparent. It's not mysterious what's happening.

2:19:29And at the beginning of the experiment, participants are allowed to pick, like, which village

2:19:34do I want to be in.

2:19:35And they think, I'm against, I'm against punishment, and I don't want other people to

2:19:40know my business. So I'm going to go to the non -punishing society.

2:19:46And then it basically collapses in like three rounds, because everyone's keeping their stuff to

2:19:52themselves and not contributing to the good.

2:19:55A few people pick the, the society where they have the opportunity to punish from

2:20:01the very beginning, and they immediately establish a strong norm of you, if you get

2:20:09a lot, you give a lot.

2:20:11There's not going to be some asymmetry between how much you're taking, how much you're

2:20:16keeping for yourself, and how much you're contributing to our collective society.

2:20:19By the end of the game, the non -punishing society has collapsed, and everyone has

2:20:24migrated to the punishing society.

2:20:26And they are incredibly attuned to freeloading.

2:20:31So your sister is like, he's not getting more soda than me, is he?

2:20:36And I want to, if I'm going to feel something, I want to feel like

2:20:40I have more soda than my brother does.

2:20:42I told my kids last week, I was like, I'm going to just start acting

2:20:45like a capricious dictator, and just like make no more attempt to keep things even,

2:20:51Stephen, so that you can understand what unfair really feels like.

2:20:53Because I'm so sick of this, like, Joan, I got half a chocolate chip more

2:21:01than me, and it's cookie.

2:21:03Why is seeing someone punished if they've done something wrong?

2:21:07Why dopamine? Why that? It's because it is so foundational to our survival as a

2:21:14cooperative species to have social norms and see that they're enforced.

2:21:21And seeing someone get rewarded when it doesn't feel like it's fair, I think activates

2:21:29all of our freeloader alert, freeloader alert, like we cannot have this module.

2:21:35Paul Bloom, who's a child psychologist, has a great paper where he says people prefer

2:21:40inequality to unfairness. It's not things being unequal that they necessarily dislike.

2:21:50It's things being unfair. It's when the inequality feels unfair that people are like.

2:21:58no these days uh i love observing online behavior that makes one of us it's

2:22:03the science it's just a scientist in me you know i just well i feel

2:22:06like there's something to be learned from it if one has a little bit of

2:22:10like if you if you can have some distance from it and um i think

2:22:15uh i don't spend all my time in the comment section um but it's sometimes

2:22:19interesting things play out and and you can see this you know and it's it's

2:22:25really yeah this this concept of of kind of who gets money attention etc which

2:22:31is really life energy and gets to keep playing the game of life versus who's

2:22:35getting batted back and penalty boxed and i think fairness lets us rest like the

2:22:40sense that there's fairness lets us rest yeah i think that um some people more

2:22:46than others like the the sense of um seeing injustice feeling injustice activates people and

2:22:53it activates them in a direction typically that they don't get paid for that is

2:22:58taking away from their other um life energy i mean the media i'm not gonna

2:23:03blame social media but or the algorithms that's no longer a good argument in my

2:23:09opinion but i do think that there are monetization systems that try and hijack people's

2:23:17sense of injustice to drive more clicks and views more advertising and that's how you

2:23:21that's how you get people moving forward but they're not really the illusion is that

2:23:25they're moving forward the in fact the the financial incentive there is to just keep

2:23:29people on a treadmill where they feel like they see more injustice and they're angrier

2:23:33and angrier and they just continue and nothing changes and i i i'm not dystopian

2:23:37but i think we're one has to be careful not to get caught up in

2:23:40that it's very different than a game like a game of football or who gets

2:23:45more soda um i think that right now who gets rewarded seems to be uh

2:23:53more under control than who gets punished like we feel like the i think a

2:23:57lot of people feel like the bad guys and gals are outside of our control

2:24:00so now it's a question of just making sure people don't get rewarded as you're

2:24:04talking i'm thinking again about that study i was describing where you have the two

2:24:08villages and the people who are who were most influential in setting the norms of

2:24:19the society that ended up thriving in this online game were people who engaged in

2:24:26a lot of punishing and rewarding public punishing and rewarding behavior from the very beginning

2:24:31and again i think this goes back to punishment and reward is is a way

2:24:37of establishing power right what is it is a way of asserting power over what

2:24:41are the rules what are the rules in this society like what are we doing

2:24:45here i'm picking a society that has these rules and i'm going to enforce them

2:24:49we now live in this this community collapse where we don't live in isolated villages

2:24:57we don't live in small tribes where we interact with each other reciprocally over time

2:25:03in dense kin networks we are massively connected with a lot of one -time interactions

2:25:11between strangers and as you were talking i was just like is that taking a

2:25:17psychology that's evolved to be in connection in a small community where the purpose of

2:25:25rewarding and punishing is to establish the norms for your group but now there isn't

2:25:31a group there's no one group they're not a cohesive group and so people are

2:25:35they're essentially arguing about what are the rules are going to be but it's like

2:25:38they're playing a game and they're arguing about what the rules are in the middle

2:25:41of the game and if you feel like the only tool available for you is

2:25:46to just ratchet up the consequences and and yell louder right but yell louder into

2:25:54the void it's not a real community like x is not a it's it's the

2:25:59internet right like that is not who you're living next to i love doing this

2:26:03podcast but the reason i continue it is for the opportunity to have conversations like

2:26:08this in person yeah yeah with you i get more intellectual stimulation from this job

2:26:12frankly than i did when i was in my office at stanford every day because

2:26:15people were we were all so busy yeah yeah but it's also so people can

2:26:19hear the conversations because what you're describing is very real it things are so diffuse

2:26:24now um and there isn't really an opt -out option um is that legitimate can

2:26:33you say that you can't really opt out um i'm opting for an opt -out

2:26:37option being a legitimate statement um you know where would where would one go it's

2:26:42a i'm not sure we can get completely offline um i think it's possible in

2:26:47small amounts but certainly younger generation you know i've talked to my niece about this

2:26:50like no no dice it's not happening it's the question is i guess how big

2:26:54is your sphere of yeah visibility i think that's a really hard question there's a

2:27:00british writer oliver berkman who has written he has this great newsletter called the imperfectionist

2:27:07and one piece of advice he gives is about you know letting your energy and

2:27:15your heart be local and for me i feel like that's a real struggle to

2:27:21think think about how do you not harden your heart you to people that are

2:27:24suffering, right? At the same time, how do you let, if you're keeping yourself tender,

2:27:31if you're keeping yourself attuned to caring about fairness, caring about injustice, caring about the

2:27:38vulnerable, where is that energy going?

2:27:43And if it's just going back to the internet, I'm not necessarily sure that it's

2:27:47really helping. But if it's to, how does my neighborhood organize a winter coat drive?

2:27:57Or do I make sure that, you know, I fill up a stocking for children

2:28:04whose families can't afford Christmas gifts for my children's preschool?

2:28:07That feels so much more satisfying than any amount of yelling on social media everywhere.

2:28:13So it's, how do you be tender to the world, but act in your own

2:28:17neighborhood? Feels like the balance that I feel the best when I'm there, but it's

2:28:24a very difficult balance to maintain.

2:28:27Winning the game of everyday life is exactly what you just described.

2:28:31I think one can be online, see what's happening in the world, but there has

2:28:36to be a buffer there.

2:28:37There has to be an emotional buffer, because otherwise you lose our minds.

2:28:43I mean, you know, steal your words from earlier, although I won't say it nearly

2:28:47as eloquently. I mean, it's a new technology that's forcing us to reevaluate our morality.

2:28:54Our hardwiring hasn't changed. Our ability to softwire our brain and modify it hasn't really

2:28:58changed in tens of thousands or more years.

2:29:01So I think it took about 10 years of smartphone use for us to arrive

2:29:05at this place. We're like, oh shit, like how often should we be on this

2:29:08thing? And how much I, like what aspects of this are beneficial and healthy and

2:29:12which aren't? A lot are not.

2:29:14Yeah, well, and the whole world migrated into the position right before you know this.

2:29:18But then also I say that, and then I'm like, but it's given me such

2:29:20incredible opportunities. Like would I have written a book without, you know, it was Twitter

2:29:25at that time. Like would I be here and getting this opportunity to talk to

2:29:30you? One of my best friends I met online.

2:29:35So to the extent that it is a tool for real life connection and real

2:29:40life action, then I think it's good.

2:29:42And to the extent that it takes you out of real life, then it's bad,

2:29:46at least for me is how I have come to think of it.

2:29:48I'm certainly immensely grateful for the work you do.

2:29:52It's, you're a brave one.

2:29:54Oh, thank you. Willing to go into these corners of the psyche, corners of human

2:30:00reflexes for better or worse.

2:30:03And to be willing to, you know, talk about issues of morality, sex differences, reward

2:30:09and punishment. There's some questions from quote unquote, the audience from the dreaded internet.

2:30:14Speaking of the internet that we've just been talking about this whole time.

2:30:17I trust in people. They're like dogs.

2:30:19They just need to be treated right.

2:30:20That's a compliment by the way, at least coming from me.

2:30:24Okay. Questions from the interweb.

2:30:27Always a fun and dangerous thing.

2:30:30Now these are excellent questions and you've answered many of them in our conversation already.

2:30:35A couple of people asked, how can identical twins be so incredibly different?

2:30:41What's going on there? So this is not just identical twins.

2:30:46We see this in other genetically identical animals.

2:30:51There's studies of inbred mice.

2:30:53There's studies of, we were talking earlier about armadillos who give birth to four identical

2:30:59quadruplets. There's studies of clonal fish.

2:31:01And what there seems to be is what some scientists have called developmental noise, which

2:31:07is this emergence of individuality that's neither nature nor nurture, but is something about the

2:31:15like initial chaos and then path dependence of development.

2:31:20One of my favorite studies about this, they raise these mice, inbred mice, genetically homogenous.

2:31:28They raise them in identical rearing environments and then at a certain point put them

2:31:33together in this big vivarium where they could interact.

2:31:36And you saw almost immediately just variability, which might've been initially random in activity levels,

2:31:45aggression levels, where in the cage they like to hang out.

2:31:50And then those differences started to stabilize.

2:31:53You basically saw the emergence of individual differences in mouse personality over time.

2:31:58And it's experience. It's experience that's, there's some randomness and then there's a path dependence

2:32:05there. And then it's your nervous system responding to experience that leads, leads paths to

2:32:12diverge. I actually think that's one of the most interesting things about identical twins is

2:32:17that they can be different.

2:32:19If you have one twin who has schizophrenia, you, there's only a 50 % chance

2:32:23that the other one will.

2:32:2550 % is way higher than 1%, which is the base rate, but it's not,

2:32:28not destiny. If someone wants a fiction treatment of this, I Know This Much Is

2:32:33True is a novel by the novelist Wally Lamb.

2:32:36And it's written by the perspective of an unaffected identical twin whose identical twin has

2:32:43paranoid schizophrenia. And it's very scientifically interesting because it captures a lot of the, did

2:32:49one of them get exposed to a virus?

2:32:51And it's very serious that...

2:32:51One of them get kind of singled out for maltreatment by the stepfather.

2:32:56So some things that might have gone into that difference, but also just the phenomenology

2:33:00of being genetically identical to someone who's having such a different psychological experience as you

2:33:05in life. Twins fascinate me.

2:33:09Just as a nature nurture thing, which, by the way, we are only saying now

2:33:15in this podcast. Amazing, right?

2:33:16Are there specific periods in development when genetic influence is at its strongest?

2:33:22And how does that influence shift relative to environment across the lifespan?

2:33:27Oh, this is a really interesting question with a complicated answer.

2:33:31So in some ways, genetics matter most when they affect fetal development because that's laying

2:33:38the groundwork for how the brain is wired over time.

2:33:42When you look at heritability estimates, so when you're estimating how much of the differences

2:33:48between people are due to genetic differences, you can estimate that using twins by looking

2:33:55at how much more similar are identical twins versus fraternal twins.

2:33:59And what you see is actually that heritability goes up with age.

2:34:04So the heritability of cognition, intelligence test scores goes up until around age 12, in

2:34:10which case it stays pretty heritable from then.

2:34:12Heritability of personality continues to increase until around age 30.

2:34:17And so how can that be that the older you are, the more your genes

2:34:21matter because you've been acquiring experience all this time?

2:34:24And part of the answer to that is that people are picking their own experiences.

2:34:28So people are picking their environments, they're responding to their environments according to their genetically

2:34:36shaped temperament, personality, neurobiology. And what that means is that identical twins actually converge over

2:34:44time, even though they are acquiring experience over time.

2:34:48So when do genetics matter more?

2:34:52It kind of depends on what you mean by matter.

2:34:54When are genetic differences most predictive of your phenotype once you're an adult?

2:35:01Because you've had a chance to pick your own life experiences.

2:35:05There are several questions that I'm going to merge into one.

2:35:09Okay. Earlier at the very beginning of the conversation, we were talking about possible pheromone,

2:35:14but if not pheromones, then odor effects of timing of puberty because of the presence

2:35:20or absence of a male.

2:35:21Well, it's kind of an interesting example, but I'm sure there are other examples where

2:35:25something about the environment at a chemical level impacts whether or not gene expression is

2:35:32turned on or off. And so this is an infinite space to consider, but depending

2:35:41on where one is born in the world, maybe you're getting longer days and shorter

2:35:44nights for a portion of the year if you're near the equator, less of that,

2:35:48if you're in Scandinavia, you're getting some extended periods of lack of sunlight.

2:35:53And there were a number of questions about how sunlight can impact gene expression.

2:35:57So if you take two identical twins and you raise them in very different environments,

2:36:03let's say equator versus closer to the North Pole, is there any evidence that amount

2:36:08of sunlight to day length across the years can impact expression of what would otherwise

2:36:13be called genetically determined traits?

2:36:15So I will say that I don't have any expertise specifically around sunlight, or I

2:36:21don't typically study physical environments.

2:36:23I usually am studying social environments.

2:36:26There is one hypothesis about how basically people whose ancestors are from equatorial climates, if

2:36:36they are in colder climates, if they are more susceptible to schizophrenia because of activation

2:36:46of risk genes for that.

2:36:48I don't actually know the current state of the literature on this.

2:36:52The human being is both developmentally programmed in this very resilient way.

2:37:01The fact that we managed to grow such a complicated nervous system and psychology from

2:37:08so humble beginnings is really amazing.

2:37:11And also, we are incredibly adaptable creatures.

2:37:15And the reason why we're adaptable is because our genotype, that developmental program, can respond

2:37:22so flexibly to the environmental inputs that we're in.

2:37:26So that's kind of a non -analyze, I mean, that's a very vague answer.

2:37:29But your DNA is a molecule that's sitting in your cells.

2:37:35It's not doing anything until it's acted on to be read, to be transcribed, to

2:37:41be expressed. And so that always requires an environment and is sensitive to an environment.

2:37:46Well, thank you so much for answering those questions.

2:37:49And I mean, you've really expanded everyone's thinking about genes and morality.

2:37:54And I know that people, including me, but many, many people will really appreciate the

2:38:00thoughtfulness and the rigor that you approach these things because they are dicey topics.

2:38:05But they're central to who we are and how we're functioning.

2:38:08And it's also very clear from everything you've said that there's a ray of optimism

2:38:12thread through all of it.

2:38:14I hope so. You know, that we can make positive choices for ourselves.

2:38:18Yes. Well, I really appreciate the conversation.

2:38:21You know, I'm an academic, so I'm used to giving talks and getting a Q

2:38:25&A, but it is rare to have an interviewer that is so delightfully varied in

2:38:31their questions and so careful in the questioning, too.

2:38:34So I really appreciate the conversation.

2:38:36Thank you. Well, we certainly have to have you back again.

2:38:39Before I forget, you have books.

2:38:42We'll put links to those.

2:38:43Great. What are you most excited about now?

2:38:45I'm sure you're working on something right now.

2:38:47I mean, I'm really excited to talk about the book.

2:38:49My new book is coming out on March 3rd, and I'm just really excited to

2:38:53be in conversation with people about these issues that I've thought about for a long

2:38:58time. What's the title of the book?

2:39:00Sorry to interrupt, but I want to make sure.

2:39:01The book is called Original Sin on the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame

2:39:05and the Future of Forgiveness, and it's out in early March.

2:39:09Amazing. All right. I am going to go purchase it.

2:39:11Don't send me a free copy.

2:39:13I always tell people, don't send me a copy.

2:39:14I want to buy the book to support, but also to read.

2:39:18Amazing. Okay. Awesome. Fantastic. Well, thank you.

2:39:21We'll have to have you back again.

2:39:22I would love to. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr.

2:39:26Katherine Page -Harden. To learn more about her work and to find a link to

2:39:29her new upcoming book, Original Sin, on the genetics of vice, the problem of blame

2:39:34and the future of forgiveness, you can simply go to the link in the show

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2:40:13For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out.

2:40:16It's my very first book.

2:40:17It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.

2:40:21This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and

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2:40:27And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related

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2:40:44There you can find links to various vendors.

2:40:47You can pick the one that you like best.

2:40:49Again, the book is called Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body.

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2:41:32We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training.

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2:41:49Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr.

2:41:52Catherine Page Harden. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in

2:41:56science.

How Genes Shape Your Risk Taking & Morals | Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden