Transcript of Kathryn Paige Harden (behavioral geneticist)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman.

Hi.

Today we have Kathryn Paige Harden. She is a professor of psychology at where we should have gone, University of Texas, Austin, where she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab. Her previous books include The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, and her new book, which is so tasty, is called Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Delicious.

It's a good one.

Please enjoy Katherine Page Harden. This episode of Armchair Expert is presented by Apple TV, the new US home of Formula 1. Starting March 7th, you can watch complete all-access live coverage of every Grand Prix, including practice, qualifying, and sprints, all in one place. Watch every race live only on Apple TV. I brought you something.

Oh, okay. Which is that I brought you the UK copy of the book because it has a much cooler cover.

Oh, also it does. It's reminiscent of Beowulf. It's a boar's face on a woman's face. Tell me more about that.

I think they were thinking about how there's a lot of animal research in there.

Yeah.

And also just thinking about in what ways are we animals, you know, in what ways are morality connected to the animal world.

Yeah.

You know, I sent them a whole mood board and my US publisher was like, all these look like novels. Or poetry collections that doesn't read science nonfiction. And then my UK editor was like, let's go.

Let's party.

Let's do something weird.

Yeah, what are the known differences in how UK publishing and the US publishing differs?

I don't think I know because this is my first rodeo.

Well, the English are so fascinating, aren't they?

Yes. I think they're darker and twistier and more repressed.

Because they're— yes, exactly. The repression begats more perversion.

I totally agree. It's a Freudian analysis of the British culture, but I believe that.

I'm so sneaky.

Hi.

Hi.

Hello.

It's so nice to meet you.

So nice to meet you.

Thank you for inviting me. This is such a surreal treat.

So let's start. Did you just fly in from Austin?

I did last night.

You teach at UT, right?

I teach at UT.

Where did you go to undergrad?

I went to Furman University, which is— have you heard of that?

I have. My friend's mom went to Furman.

Back when it was Baptist?

Probably.

Probably. Yeah. Yes. So it's a small liberal arts school in Greenville, South Carolina, and it was a Baptist college until I think like 1995. And then I started in 1999. I'm dating myself here. So it still was private, Southern, still very Southern Baptist in its inclination.

But you were evangelical. So how does that jive with being Baptist? Did your parents worry?

No, it was sort of the general kind of Protestant conservative fundamentalists. It wasn't culturally very different than my upbringing. And they give a lot of scholarship money away. So I actually wanted to go to Vanderbilt because I loved Nashville, but I didn't get the full ride and Furman paid for me to go. So that's how I ended up at—

What part of Texas did you grow up in?

I grew up in Memphis, actually.

Oh, you grew up in Memphis?

Yeah.

Oh, you just live in— I got chemistry.

I live in Texas. My dad was a Top Gun pilot. Oh. So we moved around when I was little and then he worked for FedEx and FedEx is in Memphis.

Were you suburbs of Memphis?

Yeah. Like deep exurbs of Collierville.

I lived in Collierville for 2 years.

Are you serious?

I did.

That's wild. I did. How did you end up in Collierville?

Second and third grade, my dad got a job there and so we went there. My brother was born there and then made me laugh. My mom—

Collierville Elementary School? Did you go to public school?

She hated it. I went to, I think it was Miss Zeeman. That's amazing.

Are you serious? Is that our niche cultural overlap?

That's wild. I remember our house compared to the house we had just come from felt like a mansion.

Oh yeah. Where were you coming from?

I was coming from Georgia and it was a small little house and this felt like a huge huge house. I mean, I want to go now.

Is this— see it as an adult? Yeah, you could Zillow it if you remember your address.

But it's an upscale area. I was just at either a Sprouts or a Food Mart. Remember I did a stop outside of Memphis and one of the gals who was visiting said, you know, this is where Monica lived. Yeah, it's kind of nice, right?

Yeah, we moved there in like the mid-'80s, so it was very, very small. It was still its own town. And I think my parents were getting out of the military, transitioning to a job, and they wanted a house where they could raise kids. And so they bought out in Collierville.

Yeah. So funny.

Okay, so you graduated from there and did you do graduate school somewhere?

Yes. So then I went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for my PhD, which was lovely. I mean, Charlottesville, I don't know if you've been.

Yes.

It's a lovely place and a lovely place to be a graduate student because you can live there even though you are below the poverty line. Yeah. You know, I think I made $12,000 a year when I was a graduate student, and I still lived there, and I was very happy.

And the college was famously designed by Jefferson.

UVA was Jefferson's Academical Village. And so he designed the Rotunda, which is this Palladian architecture in the middle of campus. And there's still kind of his original architecture down the mall. And then you see from certain places in town, Monticello.

Oh, you can.

So it's very Jeffersonianly inflected. It has a kind of pomp to it because of that.

And you got your PhD in?

Clinical psychology.

What's the transition from that to then teaching at UT? Did you have stops in other places?

So I had an unusual path that I went to my faculty job almost immediately after graduate school. So in order to get a PhD in clinical psych, you do the research part of the graduate work and you do a dissertation, but then you also have to do a year-long clinical internship, which is in a hospital or a VA or a university counseling center. It's all direct patient hours, and that gets you the PhD in clinical psychology.

Okay.

So I had this one year in Boston where I worked at McLean Hospital, which is outside of Boston in Belmont. It's where— have you seen or read Girl, Interrupted? Oh, Susanna Casey. That's McLean. So it's kind of this storied place in American psychiatric history. So it was this strange year of my life where I went from doing a lot of research and a little clinical work to one year full-time inpatient psychiatry, eating disorders, psychotic disorders, personality disorders.

So intense.

So this hospital, McLean, what reputation is it like? Where everyone would show up? Is it that kind of— is it more private?

It looks in some ways like a college campus. And then there are these tunnels that connect the buildings, and they put all the graduate interns in the tunnels. That's where your office is. If you've ever seen the Angelina Jolie movie, there's a lot of scenes in the tunnels, and those do exist. But it is a private hospital. And so you get this interesting mix of people who just ended up there because that's where they went, and people who went there because that's where MIT will refer graduate students if they're having a first psychotic episode, or people who come from old money in Boston.

Yeah, like, are there any people going there to rest? That kind of vibe?

No, it's really hard to go to a psychiatric hospital to rest. No.

Well, rest is in quotes. Like, they would say they're going away to rest, but really they're having a psychotic episode.

The bar's probably pretty— you got to be showing something.

Yeah, you still have to be— even self-pay patients, which are a very privileged minority. I mean, and this is true of psychiatric hospitals in every city in America, which is the need is so much higher than the number of beds. That you really have to be at a level of functioning that's pretty impaired in order to be staying kind of residential or inpatient in a psychiatric hospital.

And did you have any kind of awakening during that clinical work where your interest shifted or you thought you were going to do one thing, but this experience clinically changed you?

Yes and no. So I knew when I was a college student that I wanted to be a scientist and I wanted to be a professor, and that was my goal. So I knew even on internship that I wasn't going to stay in full-time clinical care. That I was gonna pivot, try to get a faculty job, start a lab. My primary life activity professionally was gonna be doing science. I think what working in an inpatient facility impresses upon you is that psychiatry is not a solved problem. There's still a level of distress and impairment that no amount of money and no amount of resources and no amount of being the high-functioning Harvard grad student or MIT graduate student can get you out of. So part of my clinical work was in case management, which is, okay, now when someone's leaving hospital, where are they going?

What's the aftercare plan? Like, who are they living with?

Who is gonna make sure that they can get to appointments? How are their medication gonna be filled? Even for people with resources, that is an incredibly difficult thing to manage. Oh yeah. So just as like a lived experience in bad systems hurt us all, even the most privileged among us, It was kind of a radicalizing experience to work in that situation.

Well, it could make you quite pessimistic, I think, that experience.

It can, but then you also see people who get better, or even if they don't get healed, like there's no healing. You're not going to become not schizophrenic. You're not going to not have bipolar disorder anymore. And that doesn't mean that there isn't ways to help How can we make your life better and less distressed today? So this kind of ruthless pragmatism of we can't make your brain different totally, but we can make you less distressed in this moment about these hallucinations that you're having.

I guess you would just have, yeah, variable goals as opposed to an oncologist is like, we must beat the cancer. That's the signal of success.

There's that line which is hope is a discipline. And I do think that working with the most seriously impaired patients in a hospital setting make you realize that you're not hoping for miracles. You're not hoping for overnight transformation. You're having a discipline of what can we do today, given our tools and resources to make tomorrow better? That is a perspective that I think I've carried into my adult life.

Okay, so your current lab at UT deals with development.

Yes.

And so how do we get into that as your focus?

Okay, so let's start at the beginning.

Yeah.

So my first job in science when I was an undergrad at Furman was a research assistant in a mouse lab. So they studied opioid addiction and withdrawal, and I loved it. It was my first job in science. My previous jobs had been waitress in a diner, retail shopgirl, and I wasn't good at any of them. And then now I just thought, this is amazing. So when I was deciding on graduate school, school. I wanted to stay thinking about genetics, thinking about the brain, thinking about addiction, antisocial behavior, but not in mice. I didn't want to work with rodents anymore. So I ended up in a clinical psychology program, which is about those same problems but in people. And then I went to McLean, where I worked with some people who were recovering from substance use disorder, some people with serious mental illness. But I had this one rotation on eating disorders. Unit, which was all adolescent girls. And that really solidified my interest in adolescence as this incredibly important period in the lifespan. So then when I started my lab at UT, it was really, how do I pull all of this together? So we're looking at genes, we're looking at the brain, we're looking at addictive behaviors, but how they begin in late childhood and adolescence and what's the kind of nature and nurture of those things.

So it was trying to pull together those different threads into one research program.

And would you agree from '98, did you say when you started college?

I started in '99.

'99 till now, even that statement, nature versus nurture, then was kind of an ironclad dichotomy, which now no one who's hip to it thinks those are different things in a lot of different ways, which we'll explore. I want to go back to the lab work you were doing on the opioid. I think what might be interesting, because your book is very unique, Original Sin. It's very memoir and academic. There's a lot going on in it. The professor who you were working under, she herself was a recovering cocaine addict.

Yes.

And do you think her kind of openness about that liberated you for the rest of your life and being not a presentational professor, but someone— no, no, I'm a whole person. I'm not going to pretend.

So what's so fascinating is that I didn't know that.

You didn't know that about her?

She hadn't disclosed that to me. I learned that later. When I was no longer a student. And then she wrote a memoir of her own. It's called Never Enough. It's very good, by Judith Grissel. And how she changed me was how she showed up in the world and in her work every day. So I came from this relatively religiously fundamentalist household, and many of the women that I knew growing up were primarily stay-at-home moms, didn't work outside the home. So I just hadn't seen many adult women who were running labs and doing research and being professors. Yeah. And so I happened to get this research assistant job with her as an 18-year-old new baby adult. And I remember she came to the lab the first morning and she was late because it was such a beautiful morning, she decided to bike. And she just had this freedom of how she showed up in her everyday life.

She sounds Attic-y already.

That really made me be like, what is this? Like, what is this person? Who is this lady? Who is this lady? And so I worked for her, and then I took a biopsychology class where for our final, she would just give us names of drugs and we had to draw where in the brain and what neurochemical systems they were. And so I really learned this very intellectual approach to understanding addiction from someone who had lived experience, but I didn't know that at the time. And then when I finally got to know her a little bit as a person later on, I was like, "No wonder I thought you were so cool when I was 18." Prior to that, I'm sure what you learned in your day-to-day life as a kid in Memphis, in an evangelical home, is like, "Addiction is a failure of willpower and morality.

It's a character flaw." Whereas this laboratory was demonstrating, "Oh, when you give these mice opiates, their brains immediately adapt, requiring a larger dosage." They are absolutely right. Absolutely incapable of not becoming addicted to it because that's how the thing functions in their head. Like, I think that would have been very illuminating as far as what you had been told.

It's totally paradigm shifting. I think that if you're raised and you think that drug use is a sin and that the answer to sin is prayer, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, atonement, that addicts deserve to be punished in order to punish the sin out of them, which As we know, that's not very effective. And on the one hand, all of those things can be very powerful for people who want to change their lives. A spiritual practice, a relationship to a higher power. And at the same time, that's not the whole story. Addiction doesn't exist on some metaphysical plane that's free-floating away from our bodies and our brains.

Yeah.

And it's also not even a uniquely human phenomenon. And so I think to go from a very moralizing perspective on addiction to understanding it as a natural phenomenon— this is something that we can make happen in mice, and this is something that we can manipulate in mice by injecting things into their brains— that is a fundamentally different way of seeing the relationship between the body and behavior, and also a different perspective on What needs to be done if you don't want people to be addicted to opioids? It offers a new lens of a path forward.

Yeah.

When you were, like, coming home and talking to your parents about the things you were learning and stuff, how did that go?

Oh, that's such an interesting question. I don't have very clear memories of this except for two interactions that I had with family members when I told them this isn't a passing phase. I'm going to go to graduate school. I really want to make psychology and genetics and science my life. And one of my family members said, I think psychology keeps people from Jesus. Another one said, oh, I was afraid you were going to say that. So there really was a sense of this way of seeing the world and this endeavor is dissonant, maybe in ways that we haven't fully articulated to ourselves, maybe couldn't necessarily fully articulate to you from our worldview. And I do think psychology is kind of a radical science. I mean, you are an anthropologist. Anthropology, if you study it, you see the world differently for the rest of your life.

Oh, absolutely.

And I think psychology does the same thing.

Yeah.

I teach intro psych at UT, and we introduce it as Psych is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior. And if you just think about that as a phrase, the scientific study of the mind and behavior, it really is a paradigm that changes the way that you see the world and can be inconsistent with how other people see behavior, especially bad behavior.

Yeah, blame.

Yes. When you're in a blaming mindset, you're in this judge's mindset, then everything that you see is filtered through that lens. And that prevents you from seeing—

Or disgust. Like, that's a very powerful one too.

Yes, disgust too.

Okay, so your book starts off, you about to take a trip with your boyfriend to go do LSD in the desert in West Texas. Yeah. You're going to have your kids go to their house for the weekend. And we quickly learned that, you know, you'd done LSD once before and that your boyfriend was like, let's not fuck till after. We're coming hard for a professor. I'm like, okay, this is already juicy and fun. And then also just kind of brave. How do you get liberated to write? I admire it and I think it's fantastic. But you're also a professor. I'm like, does it cross your mind while you're writing?

Like, 100%. I have 1,000 students in my intro psych class right now, and this is not usually the parts of my life that I share with them.

Yeah.

So there's a couple things here. One is I wanted to write something that felt different on the page than many social scientists, psychologists, academic philosophers write. There's a lot of great nonfiction that are written by other professors, and those books can be awesome. And also, there is a kind of continuity of tone and voice across them. As a writer, I kind of just wanted to see if I could pull something off that was a little bit different. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love it. You're starting off, as we already talked about, as a kind of what we might call a recovering Christian. So you have a lot of your own stuff going on.

Yeah.

So tell us about the acid trip and how it kind of informed you to write this.

The other thing is the book is called Original Sin, and that name, that phrase, original sin, we get from St. Augustine in the church, who came up with this idea that Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, and that original defiance of God is inherited over generation to generation, such that what you inherit could not just predispose you, but actually condemn you, damn you, make it inevitable that you're going to behave in ways that are amoral or immoral.

To the degree that his conclusion was, yes, infants are sinful.

Infants are sinful. Infants deserve to go to hell.

Yeah.

And that thing that you inherited, even though it wasn't your fault, it's your burden. It doesn't get you off the hook. It doesn't make you less damnable. It makes you more damnable. That theme, that idea, I think, is carried through now. Even if we're not Christian, even if we were never raised in that tradition, even if we've never heard of Augustine, we live in a culture that's shaped by these ideas about what does it mean to have a body that seems sometimes at odds with what you want that body to do? And what does it mean to be morally responsible, responsible to each other? If we have cells and we have amygdalae, we can also study that from the perspective of scientists. There's a content warning to those of you who don't like scripture being quoted, but there's this line in the Bible book Romans, Paul's letter to the Romans, where Paul writes, "The things I don't want to do, I keep on doing, and the things I do want to do, I don't do." And I think that captures such a fundamental human experience.

Oh, yes.

The things I don't wanna do, I keep on doing. So we can think about why do humans do things that they don't wanna do? That's a fundamental problem. And we can come at that from an objective perspective, as scientists, as philosophers, as scholars. But the reason why that question is pressing is because we all have lived that experience internally. We have a subjective experience.

Anyone who's looked in a food pantry has experienced that. What I should do, and there's what I wanna do.

Exactly. So I didn't wanna write a book that is about this tension between the objective and the subjective and only have the objective perspective in there and not have any of the, well, what is it like to be a person?

Yeah. It's endurance.

That wants things that are messy.

Yeah.

And then the last thing is Augustine's most famous book is his Confessions. It's a memoir. And I thought, well, if he can do it and that can be a book of ideas, why can't we we have a memoir that's also a serious book of ideas. So that was my goal.

And his intellectual adversary was— well, how do you say it?

I think it's Pelagius, but some people say Pelagius.

So Pelagius was coming from the opposite point of view, and this was a grand debate in Christianity.

This was a grand debate. So I went to Christian school my whole life, and no one ever told me that the doctrine of original sin, this idea that you inherit Adam's sin, is something that was invented 400 years after the birth of Christ. So we have had, at this point, centuries of Christians who understand a relationship between the body and morality. And then Augustine comes along and is like, actually, no, you inherit sin, you inherit physically. That's why he was so anti-sex, is he thought, well, there's no possibility of having good sex because every time you procreate, you physically pass on this.

You transmit.

You transmit it to the next generation. And his big adversary, Pelagius, was like, what are you talking about? So they're from opposite ends of the British Empire. Pelagius is British, Augustine is from North Africa. And Pelagius says, if something is inherited, it can't be sin. It's either nature or it's morality.

Yeah, the framing is if it's nature, that's not choice.

Yeah.

And only choice is sin.

It had to be an act of will in order to be sin. And if you think about this dynamic of someone saying you inherit a body that's bad, and your nature just makes you more punishable. Or if something is of the body, in the body, nature, then it's not an act of will, it's not morality, we can't hold each other morally responsible for it at all. You see that dynamic everywhere in contemporary culture. Every conversation we have about weight, about sex, about drugs, about addiction, you see these two perspectives. And they don't say, "I'm siding with third, fourth, fifth century church father when they do it. It's secularized. I think it's interesting to think about how did those ideas still influence how we respond to the science? And also, is there another option?

Well, I was just gonna say—

Exactly.

Why are we stuck with the only two options that were given to us nearly two millennia ago at this point?

Well, and I think when people hear those two options laid out, they will be drawn to one or the other. And I think what is interesting is, is you go through different examples, I will guarantee that you will flip-flop a lot. At first, I would go, no, that's horseshit. Right? So that's my knee-jerk. But then weirdly, as we understand behavior and genetics' role in behavior, again, on a big spectrum, that's also true. We do inherit things. Whether I'm going to label them sin or not is not really relevant. But lo and behold, you do inherit quite a bit that has nothing to do with your will or choice. And so in some weird ways, we do inherit sin.

That's not positive to you. That can be negative.

As we'll uncover. But let's go back to the acid trip because you're having a lovely time. And Travis— okay, now he's your husband.

Yeah, we got married.

Okay, congratulations. But Travis has a terrible trip.

He does. Oh no.

And he is caught in a hallucination where he has crashed the car, he has killed you, and he is to blame.

Yes, it was awful.

I've been with someone on a terrible trip.

That's horrible. And you were also tripping.

And I was also— and I had come out of it a little bit. But, you know, if you're still tripping a little bit, you're not the best companion if someone's having a very bad trip. Oh my God. You know, there's a contagion there. So I think there's several things about this story. One is this is a reason why you should not do psychedelic drugs unless you have really trusted people to process the experience afterward with. I don't necessarily say that in the book so explicitly, but this turned into a piece of art in terms of the book and growth for him, in part because because he could talk about it with me and his friends and his parents and his therapist, and like, we could really integrate that into our experience. So I think we're learning more and more that psychedelics can be really powerful tools for growth and discovery. But it's not just like insert drug, output growth. There needs to be some— there needs to be some processing and human interaction and attachment that helps you make that experience coherent and learn from it. It was this horrific time in which he was absolutely convinced that he had done something wrong.

He was absolutely convinced that there was no way he could have not done it every time the loop was played. And he was absolutely convinced that he was totally guilty of doing it, that he was totally on the hook for this action. And so it was, in so many ways, the lived experience of this Christian doctrine of original sin, which is there's no way for this to have gone any other way, and you are 100% damnable. You're guilty for doing it. I didn't know this at the time. My mind wasn't going like, okay, I understand why this experience is so intellectually and personally meaningful to me. It's his trip. Why am I writing about it? And it took a while to really articulate, what does this experience have to teach me? Why can I not forget about this?

Yeah.

And that was the connection. It was in that moment that felt so true. This thing that I've completely dismissed is like a relic of my Christian childhood. Is it true? Are we on the hook for things that we can't change? What does it mean to be on the hook for things we can't change? And that's where the book goes from there.

Yeah, I think it opens the door to a really compelling thought process, which is blame in itself. You give the example of Oedipus, who has sex with his mom and kills his father and then gouges his own eyes out.

Yes.

And he gouges his own eyes out even though he's not to blame. He didn't know. There's also this juicy debate about is blame relevant if the person had no idea? There are schools of thought that yes, they are, and there are schools that no. So let's talk about blame a little bit.

So complicated.

So just what is blame? Part of blame is an emotion. Blame is this feeling of I'm outraged and I'm entitled to be outraged, or I'm resentful and I'm entitled to be resentful because you've done something that violates some moral norm, some social norm, some legal norm. The philosopher Peter Strawson, who's working in the middle of the 20th century, called this the reactive attitudes, and basically argued, I think convincingly, that there is no human life without other people mattering to you in a way that makes you sometimes really pissed off at them because they have hurt you in some way. So the blame is this idea of, "I am entitled to have these reactive attitudes to you. I'm even entitled maybe to make you suffer or want other people to make you suffer because you've done this bad thing." Part of the journey that I took in writing this book— I actually wrote this book, I wrote a draft of it, and I sent it to my editor, and she was like, He was like, this book reads like you figured out what you were thinking as you were writing it. So now that you figured that out, can you please rewrite it?

Oh, interesting. And then I took it apart and I had to rewrite it. And so part of my journey in this book is really thinking about what is the difference between blame and accountability? And I think blame is you've done something bad, you're bad, I'm entitled to treat you like you're bad. I'm entitled to feel outrage and resentment at you. Does accountability have to be that? And that was a big intellectual growth and personal growth for me over writing the book, is trying to pull those ideas apart in my brain.

Because on one hand, we think that blame is warranted when a decision was an option and you picked one or the other. You picked wrong, so you deserve blame.

Yeah.

But we are very forgiving if you had no choice, you weren't aware of a choice. We don't seem to blame there. But then back to the biblical framing, if you sin, regardless of if you knew it was a sin or not, it's a sin.

You're still blameworthy.

Yeah, so it's like we already have kind of two radically different—

There's a lot of different ideas that we can realize are contradictory in our collective sort of cultural unconscious that are pulling on our intuitions in different ways.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert.

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So I think we can define sin in two different ways. I think it's been defined in two different ways in church history and then and also it corresponds to these kind of two different notions of blame that we've been talking about. So one is sin is doing something that you ought not to have done. There is some rule in your society that's a moral rule, that's a legal rule, that's a social rule that says thou ought not kill someone, thou ought not have sex with someone that's not your spouse. And you do it anyway. And usually breaking rules comes with some sort of censure or punishment.

And it has to be an active choice or no?

And it just has to be an act either way.

You say your favorite definition of it is from Francis Spufford?

Yes.

Definition: uppercase Sin is the human propensity to fuck things up. It's our active inclination to break stuff. Stuff here includes moods, promises, relationships we care about, and our own well-being and other people's.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I think that's a lovely thing for us to think about.

And I think it gets to, one, it's not just like there's some authority that's telling you what not to do. When you violate a norm, you are hurting people. Often you're hurting people you care about or people who care about you. And so that tendency to fuck up your relationships because you're doing things that you shouldn't be doing because the rule is there to protect the relationship or to protect the community. I think that's a really good way to think about sin. What's interesting about that definition is he says it's the tendency to do that. And I think this is where we can kind of have two definitions of sin. Is sin the action, the doing it, or is sin the tendency to do it, which could be governed by all sorts of things? And I think in the Augustine tradition of you inherit sin, you're not inheriting doing something, you're inheriting a tendency to do something. When you're thinking about, about are you to blame for what you've done, and then the choice comes in. But sometimes we blame people for even wanting to do something, you know, for being prone to do something.

We've even had criminal cases where someone was thinking about cannibalism, and that became a court case. Where do we delineate between thinking of something and—

Yeah.

Okay, so that's all of your kind of personal journey, but then your professional journey, which predates this book, which is heavily involved in the book, is that you publish a paper that talks about a certain aggregate of genes that you have discovered that overlap with really increased outcomes of addiction, aggressive behavior, eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, a whole bevy of different behaviors that seem to be linked by some grouping of genes.

Yes. So my lab is in what the field is known as behavioral and psychiatric genetics. So what we're interested in doing is discovering certain parts of the genome, certain parts of your DNA sequence that differ between people that increase your likelihood of developing a certain mental disorder, mental illness, and/or behaving in a certain way. And this is a method, kind of a general enterprise that is shared across lots of labs, across lots of countries, most of whom have nothing to do with anything that we would consider moral behavior. And the way these studies work is you're basically getting DNA from millions of people.

God bless the Scandinavians, right? Let's give them a shout out. They have got a public—

Scandinavians, Iceland, UK Biobank, which is in the UK, and then 23andMe customers. So it's a lot of people that are white British 60-year-olds who've spit into a tube and given the British government so much information about their lives.

And also in Scandinavia, though, their medical records are public, although the identity is obscured.

So you can do these enormous epidemiological studies and they link across medical records, criminal legal system involvement records.

They don't do that in China.

Well, if they do, they're not sharing.

They're not sharing, but they're probably doing it.

But how they infamously debunked these vaccine autism connection claims was they were able to look at a group of 3 million kids who had been vaccinated and then a million that had not, and they could immediately show there's no difference.

There's no difference there.

So that's where it's like this huge benefit.

You have these huge data sets and you're basically going through and you're saying, where do people differ in their DNA, and are those differences correlated with whatever behavior that I'm interested in? So what we were really interested in, in my group, was what's known as conduct disorder, which is this diagnosis that's given to children if they are persistently breaking rules, aggressing against other people, maybe aggressing against animals, And there just wasn't the data on that in enough people. So our strategy was basically to say, what other behaviors do we think are caused by the same genes because of family studies, because of adoption studies, for which we do have enough data on huge numbers of people? Let's pull as much data as we can on all these different behaviors and kind of triangulate across them to be like, which genes are are associated with all of them. So we were looking at ADHD symptoms in childhood. We were looking at sexual behavior, age at first sexual intercourse, and number of sexual partners. The UK Biobank, if you say that you've had more than 99 sexual partners, it gives you a follow-up question, which is, are you sure?

Wow, that's very cultural.

Are you sure that you've had more than 99 sexual partners? Have you ever smoked pot? Have you ever smoked a cigarette? Are you engaged in problematic alcohol use? So you drink to the point that it's a problem in your life. And do you describe yourself as a risk-taker? And none of these are serious antisocial behavior, like having sex at a slightly younger age or like being a little bit more hyperactive. Most people wouldn't even consider that necessarily sinful behavior. But what all those things have in common is because someone in our society, maybe not your group, but someone in our society thinks that's bad behavior. And you did it anyways. You had sex even though in 1960s England it maybe wasn't that acceptable.

Is that like, misdemeanor sense?

Misdemeanor. That's a great word. And what's interesting is that if you identify genes that are associated with these misdemeanors that are consistently associated with all of them, you end up with a set of genes that also predict felonies.

Oh, wow.

Like, literally predict your likelihood of ever being arrested, of ever pulling a knife or gun on someone, of engaging in much more serious antisocial behavior. It also predicts if you've ever attempted suicide. So it also predicts kind of this harmful disinhibition against the self.

Yeah. And in this paper, you establish that this group, the people who share this cluster of genes—

Yeah.

Are twice as likely to be arrested. So that's a pretty significant finding. And I'll add too, it's not the case of 1 in 1 million versus 2 in 1 million. This is like 20% versus 40%.

Many Americans have a lot of interactions with the criminal legal system. But yeah, so it's not destiny, right? It's not 100%. It's not all genetic. This probably goes without saying, but no geneticist believes really in genetic determinism. This is not a set of genes that fate you to be arrested, but it is is a very significant increase in risk, and it's a significant increase in your risk of developing an addictive disorder too. And this is tricky to think through. How should this information, if at all, affect our judgments of the moral blameworthiness and the legal responsibility that are attached ordinarily to these behaviors?

Well, I think the adoption studies are really interesting. That's another great a great resource, right, to establish a genetic predisposition to some of this behavior. So tell us about what we discovered.

Yeah, so again, this is— thank goodness for the Northern European countries that have these registries, although there are some good adoption studies in the United States too. My colleague Janay Niederheiser runs one of them. So what you're looking at is children who've been given up for adoption at birth or very near birth and raised by adoptive parents in a closed adoption where they're not having contact with the biological parent. Does the characteristic of the biological mother or father or both predict something about the child's outcome regardless of the adoptive parent that they were? And what these studies show you is that it's always nature and nurture. So if you're adopted into a family where they have substance use problems, you're more likely to have substance use problems. But if your biological parents were addicted to substances or had ever committed a violent crime, you are more likely to develop those same things.

3 times more likely.

Even if you never met them, even if you're raised by other people. And those odds ratios can change, you know, and for some things it's as high as 3, sometimes it's 1.5 times more likely. These are people that you've never met that never raised you, and it still is affecting your behavior.

I like this line: adopted children who never lived with their biological parents are 3 times more likely to abuse drugs if biological parents abuse drugs. Drugs. Identical twins are similar in their drug abuse as they are in their body mass index or coronary artery disease.

Yeah.

Wow. Isn't that telling?

Yeah. So there was a great paper published in 2015 by Tinka Polderman in Nature Genetics where they looked at 50 years of twin studies and aggregating across all of those twins, how similar are identical twins, how similar are fraternal twins, what psychiatric traits look like, they look almost identical to cardiovascular traits. I find that a really interesting comparison for our intuitions because we are now so used to thinking, of course your body weight is nature, of course it's nurture, of course it's gene-environment interactions, of course you have some agency but also a limited amount of it, at least that's your experience of it, and your set point that you inherited from your parents that maybe got canalized really early in your life all make a difference. We can do that so easily when it comes to weight. Why do we have such a hard time doing that with becoming addictive to alcohol or drugs?

On a sliding scale, addiction, we can kind of get there. Violence, we don't want—

We don't want to let anyone off the hook for that. Yes. Because violence has a clear victim other than the person doing the behavior. Behavior. So addiction can hurt other people, but the primary victim is the person using. And so when we're asked to make sense of the science, and we tend towards a kind of Pelagianism of it's either biological nature or moral, and we're asked to choose. For body weight, we can be like, "Okay, let's reclassify this as biological instead of moral." With addiction, there's like, I don't No. But then as soon as it's obviously a moral issue, because there's nothing that gets closer to the heart of what humans think immoral behavior is than hurting another person deliberately.

Yeah.

And then we're saying we're not gonna be able to reclassify this as not moral. And also you have to take seriously that there's a biological element of it, but that doesn't mean that some people are born bad. That's such a mindfuck, I think, for Americans to keep all of that in their heads at the same time.

Yes. They're all a part of this aggregate of genes you have identified.

It's not just me. This is such a team science effort. My former graduate student just is an author on the paper that I just finished. And if he's listening to this, he's probably like, "It was me doing all the stuff. I'm the one in the trenches." But I think a really great example is just one gene, and one gene in isolation has a tiny effect, but I I think it's illustrative anyway. It's this CADM2, it's a cell adhesion molecule gene. And if you look at what it's associated with, it's associated with having sex with more people and putting more salt in your food and smoking cigarettes and becoming addicted to alcohol. And what is it associated with? It's associated with doing things that bring you short-term pleasure, but you might have a voice in the back of your head saying, "It's not a good idea." that have potential negative consequences. That really troubles our sense of who we are to think that a gene could be involved in that.

It threatens our agency.

Why do I do the things I don't want to do?

But I think it would be a great time to educate people on— I think the colloquial understanding of genes is a little too simple, which is we like to think there's— they found the gene, the BRCA gene, and there are a handful of these genes, but there are 3 billion genes.

Well, there's probably not 3 billion genes.

Oh, okay. How many genes are there?

Well, I think we're estimating there's 20,000 genes.

Oh my God. I'm sorry. There's many base pairs. There's 3 billion ACGT on the DNA strand.

Yes. Humans have way fewer genes than we thought that we were gonna have. That was one of the big surprises of the Human Genome Project. It was like, we're so complex, we're gonna have more genes than anyone. There's species of apples, I think, that have more genes than we do. Whoa.

Okay. Okay.

And part of it is because there's a lot of our DNA sequence that used to be called junk DNA that regulates how the genes are read. And that seems to be where a lot of the action is in human uniqueness. Not what are the ingredients, but when are the ingredients combined? So yes, you're totally right. People think of the gene for— Nearly every psychological characteristic is what we call massively polygenic. So poly means many, genetic, which means that it's influenced by thousands and thousands and thousands of genetic variants, of genetic differences between people that are scattered throughout the gene, hundreds of genes, maybe thousands of genes. And each of these genetic differences makes the tiniest little bit of an influence. So for height, there's not one gene for height unless you have, like, Marfan's or dwarfism, Most people are taller or shorter because you got 1,000 slightly height-increasing genetic variants that increase your height by a millimeter. But you got so many of them that you ended up a tall person rather than a short person. In my first book that came out 5 years ago, I write about this NBA player who happened to sit on a plane next to a geneticist.

And the geneticist was like, "Why are you so tall? You're 7.5 feet tall." And he was like, "I don't know." And so they genotyped him. He didn't have any gigantism. There's no weird, rare thing going on. What it was is there's the gene that makes you a little bit taller than your siblings, and he just had 6 standard deviations above the mean in all of these tiny— If you're flipping the genetic coin, it just came up heads like 1,000 times in a row. And that's why he's so tall. Everything we're talking about when we're talking about addiction potential or likelihood statistically to be arrested for a crime, There's no crime gene. There's no addiction gene, just like there's really no obesity gene. There's lots of genetic differences, and so there's a distribution. But then every distribution, there's someone who ends up on the tails of that distribution, and that's where we see really big differences in their likelihood of developing one of these disorders.

Is AI going to completely make these correlations come rapid pace? Like, you must be using AI to go through all this DNA information.

I mean, So one of the big challenges now is we can find genes now that we have many people more rapidly than we can figure out what the heck they're doing.

Yeah.

There's still ambiguity sometimes as to, like, which gene this genetic variant is, because it's located next to this one and this one. What do we know about that? And then how do these combine to affect protein, to affect cells, in which part of the brain?

I guess I mean in that it's a pattern recognition machine. Yeah. I feel like they'll be coming hot and fast.

I'm very low confidence about my prediction. Projections for AI.

Okay.

Because I feel like the whole field is moving more rapidly than I'm comfortable prognosticating about. But it's done amazing things with protein folding problems, which are also really complex. And so how is our knowledge of the genome and the sheer amount of data that's available, plus the advances in AI, where are we gonna be in 10 years? I think where we are now would've felt like science fiction 10 years ago.

Yeah.

So I'm hopeful that AI will be particularly helpful in this. Okay, we have a gene, and then we have an outcome 25 years later, which is being arrested. What is it doing in the body, in the brain?

Well, now would be a great time to introduce the fact that this group of genes you and your colleagues have identified are most active in utero.

There's this idea that you sometimes get in psychiatry that some disorders are neurodevelopmental disorders. So you'll hear that autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, or schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder. And I'm always like, what disorder is not neuro and not developmental? Like, everything is neurodevelopmental. And when we're looking at this collection of genes that predict misdemeanors, but also predict more serious antisocial offending and more serious substance use disorder, we can look with reference datasets and be like, "Okay, well, where in the body and when in development are these genes most turned on, most expressed?" And it seems to be in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. So in utero, prenatal development is when these genes are most specifically active. That fits also with what we know from the animal literature on preterm birth, which disrupts brain development in utero, is associated with elevated risks of aggressive behavior in animals. Children who are born preterm are at elevated risk for ADHD and conduct problems. There's something about pregnancy and your brain being grown when you're being cooked that seems to be really important.

So much pressure.

And I think, again, part of the reason we struggle to make sense of this is we're so used to thinking about about adult behaviors as choices, but the person doing that choosing was created by a developmental process that begins in utero, and that all of the luck of who they came home from the hospital to is there, but that genetic luck starts affecting their brain development even before they come home from the hospital.

And then we get into the juicy philosophical element of this, which is we have come have appropriate toleration for someone with ADHD, for someone with autism, and these are neurodevelopmental conditions that started in utero, it would hold that we would have that same level of compassion and understanding for the other ones that developed in utero, which would be addiction and these other behaviors. But then philosophically, we have an interesting line between all of these.

Yes, people's intuitions about about what does it mean if you can show that someone's behavior is linked to their early genetic and environmental luck? How should that affect how we treat them? Those intuitions are really unstable depending on what the behavior is. So if that behavior is weight, we're like, well, there's nothing wrong with being heavier or skinnier. If that behavior is sexual orientation, we're like, of course, this is a difference between people. When it comes to addiction, I think we're kind of all over the place. Actually is a culture. But then as soon as there's harm to another person and there's violence, you're— wait, so they might have inherited a predisposition to violence, and that's supposed to make me more compassionate of them?

This is very Sapolsky Determined, that book. I was just thinking about this the other day. I think I'm a determinist. I really do.

Really? That's interesting.

Before you got in here, we were both saying we love Sapolsky, but we don't like determinism.

You You don't? Knowing all this?

I don't know if I'm a determinist, like, in the academic philosophy sense. So an academic philosopher would say a determinist and an incompatibilist is someone who says everything we do is determined by causal factors, our agency is an illusion, and having the freedom necessary for moral responsibility is incompatible with what we know about the determinist universe. I would say that I don't know if the universe is a determinist universe or not. That seems like a physics question that's beyond my pay grade. I don't know if we have free will in the way that a lot of philosophers, but I think that the practice of holding each other responsible is really baked into being human.

A social primate.

Yeah.

We are a social primate. I think Sapolsky would carry it to, we're not free, so therefore blame is never appropriate. Punishment is never appropriate. It's as useless to be mad at your husband who cheated on you as it is to be mad at the sky for raining. Whereas I think, I don't know if we live in a determinist world. I don't know if we have free will, but we're all on this planet and we still have to make decisions about how we treat each other. And I think holding each other accountable is not a supernatural condition, but a social one.

Do you want to hear my two arguments against that? Yes. Number one, I think because although I agree we could look back in time at any behavior we observed, we could look back and we could know every single thing that added up to that behavior. That is knowable. If we knew the location of every atom in the universe, we could see exactly why this affected us. Occurred. That gives you the illusion that we would somehow be able to predict what happens next. But my argument is, until you can predict, till you have data, till you have scientifically proven a prediction's possible, bullshit. Because just because you can see how things landed here does not mean you can look forward and predict the future, which would mean it's not deterministic. Secondly, we have this amazing dude on, Neil Theise, teaching us about self-organizing complex systems. And all self-organizing complex systems, of which we are one, they have to have divergence in them or they collapse. And divergence is innately non-deterministic. So there cannot be a system without divergence in it. Yeah.

So you're not a determinist and I'm not a, we need freedom in order to hold each other responsible. So we have two objections.

Okay. I'm not like a full, I'm not like I'm determined to pick up this cup right now and now I'm doing that. It's not that everything's already decided, but I can recognize it's easy for me to sit here and say, we have to keep that person accountable who behaved this way when I'm not behaving that way, even though I wasn't gonna behave that way.

You're not battling the desires.

Exactly. And if I was given the exact same situation, genetics, I would be behaving that way. No one's better than, and I don't know that we're making choices so much as living out, living out a program or living out a process that our genes have given us.

I think we're living out a very tricky probabilistic situation. We have a very high probability of doing certain things, which I agree with.

Yeah, I think that number is very high, actually.

For people who are listening who are already jumping to, well, no one's going to be held accountable. I want to make clear about Sapolsky's argument in Determined and your argument as well. I think by the time we get to the end of the book, is there is a huge difference between removing people who are dangerous from hurting other people. No one is arguing for no accountability. Yes, the argument is you can take people and remove them from other people so that everyone's safe without blame and without hatred and without being punitive. Many of the people in this country— and in this book, it shocked me to read it— like, 60% of Americans believe in hell. So if you believe in the notion of hell, 60% of us do, God believes you should be punished. So of course our criminal system should involve punishment and pain and suffering and atonement. And so, that's the division you and I, and I think Monica, would all like to see, which is probably you would've done the same thing in the same environment with the same genes. You're not better than anyone, so let's remove them and make everyone safe and make everyone accountable, but without any of the blame, hatred, and moral righteousness.

The hatred. I mean, I think in particular, the sense of, "You've done this." and therefore you deserve to be scorned. You deserve to be exiled. I'm entitled to be elated and happy and feel pleasure at seeing you suffer.

Talk about that study you were talking about when people get shocked. And please walk us through that.

Most typically developing humans, they come in and they show empathy at another person's distress very early in life. Like, if a baby hears another baby cry, They will start to cry. It's a really innately aversive thing to see a fellow human suffer. Again, we are a social primate.

Yeah.

So ordinarily, if you see another person being electrocuted, you see in the person who's observing that patterns of electrical activity in parts of the brain that ordinarily respond to being pained yourself, right? Like, I'm feeling your pain. Unless the person being shocked is first portrayed as being a wrongdoer in some way. They violated a moral norm.

So they've hooked people's brain up to a presumably an fMRI, and they're going to watch someone get shocked. And if it's a, quote, good guy that gets shocked, you're going to see empathy and discomfort.

And then if you see someone being hurt that was first portrayed as a wrongdoer, then you see brain activity that's more characteristic of pleasure, dopaminergic areas. Oh, and that I think is telling us multiple interesting interesting things. The first is that why do we feel pleasure at certain activities? Why do we have dopamine when we have sex and eat sugar and drink water and interact with people who like us and experience ourselves being esteemed and watch someone else suffer? That's indicative of how evolutionarily old and necessary to the survival of humans this consequences to violating the social rules is. And this is where I also, I think, differ from Sapolsky is I don't think we are gonna reason ourself out of that. Like, I think it's baked into the sauce. I think that telling people that they're gonna lay aside their retributive urges is like people advocating for total sexual abstinence and becoming a monk. Some people can do it, but not most people. And it's gonna go really against the grain of our nature.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

On the other side, all of our ingrained pleasures can be hijacked, and we can feed them really empty-calorie versions of it, right? It's like I'm evolved to like sugar, and someone can offer me Skittles. And I think a lot of our culture is basically like the empty calorie version of that retributive pleasure.

Well, again, we evolved to overconsume because when we found something in bloom, we were smart to overconsume, get some fat reserves because we would go long periods without. So now we live in a time of abundance where we have to imply morals on top of it.

Yes.

I felt this so acutely last week and I was aware of it. I'm watching the new Game of Thrones show, A Knight in the Seven Kingdoms. Have you watched it?

No.

Did you watch the first Game of Thrones?

I did.

Okay, so then you've already experienced this. In Game of Thrones, which is there's a battle scene, and there's a guy we fucking hate. And there was a moment where our hero was making the bad guy suffer, and we were watching it with two friends, and me and the other guy were going, "Let's go, boys!" Like, the elation of, "Make this motherfucker pay," was so visceral. And I was aware of it. I'm like, "Look at this thing." But then again, if you think evolutionarily, someone who is a threat to the group is a threat to the group. So if they are eliminated, there should be elation. The big threat to the group is gone.

There's other studies where it's like, at what point in time will children pay tokens or give up stickers or pay their money in order to see someone who's been portrayed as taking a ball away from a child, see them hit with a club? And it's like, by the time they're, I think, 5, they're like, here are my stickers, you know. You know, people pay to see those movies. So there's something so fundamental there with that retributive instinct. And then the question is, what do we do with that? Are we going to give ourselves all the Skittles we want because it feels really good? How do we recognize that that has evolved for a reason, exactly as you say, because we're social animals that are trying to enforce cooperative norms? There's no cooperative system that doesn't have enforcement. Out leaning into that so that primal retributive urge is the only thing that's, like, running the show. And if you have a theology that says justice is making people suffer eternally in torment in a lake of fire, and then you have this dopaminergic response to seeing a wrongdoer suffer, and you let both of those run the show— Yes.

You know, I think you end up with the system that we have now, which which is not just how do we protect people from themselves so that they can't do any more harm, how do we protect other people from them, but how do we make them hurt maximally? And not everywhere in the world does that. We have examples of doing differently, and those are really instructive in what if we keep the impulse behind the pleasure, which is we need to keep each other safe, without just doubling down on this juice of retribution.

I agree with you. We're always gonna have to step over our our evolutionary bias. We're gonna have to constantly confront these things that were serving us at one time but now don't serve us, and we gotta have tools in place. And I think that's weirdly the great tension of living in this modern world.

But also the great opportunity. I mean, I think that humans' superpower is our ability to flexibly decide how to live with each other. I mean, back to the anthropological perspective, there are so many different ways that we have ordered our lives and ordered what are we gonna do about the fact that we are messy, imperfect people who have to live with other messy, imperfect people. There's a lot of ingenuity and creativity that I also think is baked into being human. And so that's really encouraging to like, okay, well, what is the reimagining that people are doing or that we could do around this?

Because our systems are aspirational, they're what we hope to act as a collective conscience. Yes, they should be virtuous.

We can aim to be better in our institutions than we are in our worst moments.

That's right. And so when we evaluate some of our current institutions, they're operating very— however you'd say—

retributively.

Retributively. I'm proud of you.

Also, I also read things and I never hear them pronounced, and then I have to talk about the book and I'm like, I don't know if I'm pronouncing Am I pronouncing that right?

Oh, I want to talk about— well, first of all, I would urge people to go watch— you gave a lecture to, I think it was a college, and it just was, I feel like, made directly for me because you break down Hank Williams Jr.'s family tradition.

Oh, Brainbar! It's like an ideas festival in Hungary, and there were so many young people there just going to hear talks.

Yeah, I loved it. And in there, you talk about, again, to counter the determinist point of view, —what an ingenious study. I can't believe they have the technology to do this, but they have done studies where they make a dozen genetically identical rats. Will you talk about that?

Yeah, so there's so many different approaches to this where you're looking at genetically identical animals who are raised in identical conditions, and then seeing—this is, I think, back to your fundamental unpredictability of complex systems. If you have the same nature and the same nurture, to the extent that we can measure, does that mean you're necessarily gonna act in the exact same way? And the answer is no. Your behavior will be similar, but it won't be identical. So some of this is looking at inbred mice, where they're basically in a controlled breeding population. They're all very, very genetically similar. There's also studies of armadillos, because armadillos always give birth to 4 identical quadruplet armadillos. Wow! And then there's what is known as clonal fish, who are genetically highly homogenous. Misogynist. Oh, I won't leave out this one. There's also studies of cloned pets. So in Texas, there was a study of— there was a couple that was very attached to their pet bull. And so they had him cloned. Chance and Second Chance. So all of these are genetically identical. So in all of these studies, you're looking at if you have the same genotype and if you were raised in a similar or identical environment, are you behaving in the exact same way?

So Chance was a very docile bull. Second Chance gored his owners, I think, twice.

Maybe even more. When they were doing This American Life episode, they were interviewing him, I think, for the third time in the hospital where he had been gored the owner. And he said he's not giving up on him. But Chance is a little different because Chance came to them late.

Yeah. And they don't know the initial—

But the rats, when you put them together, that's fascinating.

Yeah. So in this case, it's not these mice, what they did is they have inbred mice, so they're all genetically very similar. And then they raised them in identical cages with identical food and identical handling, identical temperatures. And then at a certain point, they put them all together in these big mouse vivariums and see what happens. And there's digital sensors everywhere so they can see, you know, which mouse is moving where, when. And what you see is the emergence of mouse personality. Individual differences in which mice are dominating the exits and the access to food, which ones are moving around a lot, which ones are aggressing, which ones are very inhibited and don't want to come out when it's light. And you can't explain it with genotype, and you can't explain it with the cages that they were raised in. There's an unpredictable individuality to behavior that's neither one of those. And there's no way at a certain point for humans to have the same environment because we are each other's environments. As soon as they got in a social group, there was no way for every mouse to have the same thing because they had each other and these initial tiny differences in how that first interaction went.

And that could be initially chance, but then life builds on top of it. Chance. There's a path dependence to those initial things. My colleague at UT also does these studies where he has mice in a vivarium, and they establish a dominance hierarchy. And then he plucks the alpha mouse out and sees the power scramble that happens. And one thing that makes the alpha mouse is he pisses everywhere. He's, like, constantly peeing all the time. And so you see immediately genes involved in drinking water so that I can make pee— Oh my God! —like, get turned on within minutes of this. And so the plasticity of the nervous system to respond to social cues is amazing. And that's a mouse. Think about how much more complicated it is than a person. Sometimes what I tell my students is that if you're looking at a tapestry, if you're looking at a piece of fabric, like, you would never ask which is more important, the threads that go this way or this way, right? They're woven together, and that is what constitutes the fabric. It is nature and nurture being woven together, and the interface for that is often the epigenome that constitutes the developing person.

When we talk about how we can maybe make some changes where we still have accountability but maybe not this really punitive nature behind it, don't you think in order to do that, everyone has to see this as an issue? Yes. And I don't think they do. I don't think I don't think people are upset that people are punitive. Some of us are, but I think people like that there's—

Well, they were designed to, as we, you know. Right.

So like, I don't see how to fix that.

That's such a good question. And honestly, I think it's such an important question now. What we're living through politically, where people are being hurt on the streets and then other people are cheering for it. For it. What is that other than identifying with the punisher, identifying with the person that's like, I'm bringing the pain, and then inventing a class of wrongdoers to justify it? I think we're used to thinking of their sins, and then we get punished for our sins. But I've come to think of it as retribution can also be a sin in that it is another really primitive aspect of our biology that gives us pleasure. Pleasure that we can indulge in and overindulge in and indulge in regardless of how much it's hurting other people. Gosh, I wish I had a good answer for that question. How do you convince people that it's a problem to want to hurt other people or yourself?

Yeah, it's tough.

In that lecture, you were asked this. It turned over to the audience a bunch, and most people were along the same path. And I think probably a lot of people listening will have this thought, which is, okay, if we've identified this suite of genes, and we're entering into an era where either gene editing is more realistic, perhaps the epigenome, they're erasing chunks of it in mice. You have people who are about to do IVF can look at the embryo. I think people will be curious to know what you think about embracing these genes or wanting to eliminate these genes.

Yeah, I have so many thoughts about this. I'm so glad you asked this question. Okay, so the first thing is, But going back to all of these behaviors are, in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, massively polygenic. So they're influenced by thousands upon thousands of tiny genetic variants that have a tiny effect. And the implication of that for gene editing is that we're not going to be gene editing a 20th of your genome to make you slightly less risk-taking. So I think the applications for CRISPR-Cas9 which is our technology for gene editing, is going to be monogenic disorders. Like, you have sickle cell. Brenner syndrome is an example of serious antisocial behavior caused by one gene. The technological question that we're gonna have to grapple with is not gonna be gene editing, it's gonna be genetic selection. And so that's a technique in which people create IVF embryos. They might do this because they have fertility challenges and they were gonna do IVF anyways, but increasingly currently there's marketing doing this electively. So you could conceive the old-fashioned way, but you choose to conceive by creating a lot of IVF embryos. And then genetically testing those embryos, there's what people already test embryos for.

Is there aneuploidy like Down syndrome or trisomy 18? Is there a monogenic disorder? And then looking at a polygenic epigenetic score. So this would be your genetically predicted likelihood of that embryo eventually developing a substance use disorder or eventually scoring very highly on an IQ test. And this is not science fiction. There are ads on the New York subway right now that say, "Have your best baby." Hmm. Yikes. And it is an ad for preimplantation genetic testing of embryos. Scenarios. What I think is really important for people to know about this is, one, these genetic risk scores that we've developed— I've developed, other people have developed— they are not crystal balls. For the reasons we've been talking about, I can say that your probability of something is higher or lower, but that's totally different than, say, like Huntington's disease, where if you have this gene, you're gonna get disorder. So there's an uncertainty around the estimates that I don't think often comes through in the marketing for these techniques. Yeah. The second thing is the science is most applicable when it's applied to people who are genetically similar to the samples in the original research.

And most of those people are Northern Europeans. Right. So anyone who comes from a different part of the globe, virtue of having less genetic similarity to Norwegians or white British people from the UK, those estimates are going to work much less well, or maybe not at all. And there's no ads on the subway being like, have your best baby only if you're genetically similar to people from Northern Europe, right? Like, that's not part of the advertisement around this. And then the third thing is genes don't do just one thing. They're involved in lots of things, and there's no gene for risk-taking. And I have this thought experiment in my book, and I say, imagine if we had some eugenic dictator, and they said, no one gets to reproduce the old-fashioned way. Everyone's gonna do IVF-created embryos, polygenic selection. And we are only going to select select the embryos that have the least risk-taking genes. And we're gonna repeat that so that in every generation, we are only getting the most inhibited, puritanical, not risk-taking, not likely to use substances. Separate from a terrible dystopian lack of freedom, do we actually want to live in a world in which no one has that?

Thank you. Your last point is the one that I believe in strongest which is the nature of your study is we have criminal data, we have genetic data, we do not have data of overachieving, writing prowess. These are things that are hard to measure. So yeah, one that I love is I grew up learning dyslexia made you twice as likely to end up in jail, but over time what we've learned is dyslexia also makes you 2 to 3 times more likely to be CEO addiction. How many of our writers are addicts? How many of our poets? How many of our musicians? We're only looking at the pathological side. This is the inherent problem with the DSM, is we've observed these pathologies, but we're not really shining a light on, well, what's the upside of it? Yeah, there might be more upside than there is downside. This is a trade-off situation. So we're coming up with, quote, normal, and we're going to lose all this diversity.

And then You will have determinism. Variety is necessary to the richness of human experience. And I totally agree with you. I mean, if you look at who is most likely to be a successful entrepreneur by the age of 30, we can see this in the data. It's people who have social privilege, white men from middle to upper income families, and then men who experimented with substances and had a little bit too much sex and engaged in low-level delinquent behavior when they were teenagers. Teenagers. And what is that? That's risk tolerance. And society needs people who are very aware of risks and potential negative consequences, but we also need people who are willing to go for it and are more risk tolerant. I think that everyone's strength can also be their weakness, but also everyone's weakness can also be their superpower.

I mean, there'll be no technological developments, there'll probably be no art, there would be so many things missing.

We'll just freeze right here.

Yeah. There's another study where they look at people who are very high on genetic risk scores for schizophrenia, which again, people can select against now in their embryos. If they're not patients with schizophrenia, they're more likely to be artists, they're more likely to be musicians, they're more likely to be in creative professions. Oh God, that's so hard though. If you think about a distribution and the top 1% is this, But this zone, in the, like, 75th to 99th zone, are the people who are having so much imagination and openness to new experience. How can you say that gene is a good gene or a bad gene? It's an all of the above gene. Yeah. I have a chapter in my book about this. It's called Variety. And it ends with this observation from Durkheim, who's a founding sociologist. And he had a patient paper where he said some level of crime is necessary to society because a crimeless society is one in which everyone thinks about things exactly the same and no one has any differences in moral imagination. And if we look back in time, many of the people we now think of as moral pioneers were criminalized in their time.

So I don't want to underplay serious antisocial behavior Evolution has costs. It hurts people. But I don't think that we can sin then say, "So let's get rid of the genes." People can do bad things, but that doesn't mean the genes are bad genes, because those genes are doing many different things in the human body. Diversity is grist for evolution. There's no evolution without mutation. There's no evolution without diversity.

Yeah, Galileo was a criminal. Socrates, Jesus. Yeah, a lot of criminals. Gandhi. Okay, "Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Evolution." The Nature of Forgiveness. Radical book. I do applaud and love how personal and memoir-y it is. Thank you. In addition to being chock-full of yummy scientific research. I appreciate that. Yeah, it's wonderful. Thank you so much for coming. Everyone check out Original Sin. I hope you'll come back when you have another book. I would love to.

Thank you for having me. This was a delight.

Oh, good. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

Rob brought us coffees today. So nice. Exciting and nice.

I agree. Excited by it, and I think it's nice.

I agree. And because, as you know— are we recording, Rob? As you know, I— oh wow, okay.

Uh, well, because we talked about it.

For the listener, Dax is wearing his sunglasses that he just got that he's obsessed with.

The A4 mentioned sunglasses.

Previous episode, go find it if you missed it.

Do you ever watch people at like award shows who wear sunglasses and they pull it off? I'm a little jealous of them. I know people would be like, what do you— what are you doing? I can't pull that off. It's not similar to how you're feeling right now, you know?

It's not about pulling it off, it's just like, oh, why?

Cuz it's a nice little safety blanket. I know, you know, it's like a little arm I think if you started doing it, I think people might be like, he relapsed.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

That would be like the number one.

They'd say that first.

Yeah. This guy's going—

I'm losing my touch because I hadn't even thought about that. Don't get any ideas. And then two, I think they'd be like, oh, he has an eye issue. A sty, or pink eye, glaucoma. Exactly.

Macular degeneration. And now another pair that I have, just look how gorgeous these are. The other pair I have are black frames, but they're kind of a light pink lens. And that I think I can wear inside because it really kind of looks like a reading glass.

Okay. And so you're interested in wearing them inside?

I don't know what it is about these. I prefer to just be in them.

Wow.

Isn't that something?

Yeah, because I don't think you're the high— I don't like them. No, I just don't think you're the type that needs like a shield. You're just not really that type.

That's totally—

You really put yourself out. You're the opposite of someone who's, who's needing a shield.

That's fair. Yeah. I think like there are people with a lot more social anxiety. Yes. But I will say I've had moments at those things where it's like either I want to look around and rubberneck. Sure. But I don't want to be caught doing that.

Okay, hold on. Put your glasses on. Okay.

They're going—

for the listener, Now I want Dax to look at— like you're trying to look at somebody, okay? And I'm going to see if I see what you're doing.

I'm also highly lit from the front because of the nature of the studio.

You're looking that way. Oh, and you're making sexy faces.

That chair, the old yellow chair.

Yeah, that is a sexy chair.

Well, if I thought you couldn't see me— I know. I'm moving your mouth. My whole eyebrow. Okay. Okay.

So I tend to walk and travel travel, even when I drove here way back when, uh-huh, I don't take to-go cups. I just bring my mug open carry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that you're calling it open carry because that is—

that is what it is. It's illegal if there's alcohol in here, but there's not. It's just tea. Uh, and I saw on Instagram someone writing about people like me who open carry their coffee. They have an opinion about that. Yeah. And they said those people have chaotic and I wonder what you think about that.

Well, I bet what they're inferring is that someone has scrambled to leave the house and they didn't either have time to transfer it to a to-go— sure, travel mug— or they're just like so skeddywampus leaving they don't even know what's in their hand. Yeah, I know. I don't think I would lead to any of those conclusions, but I see the logic underlying the theory?

Well, they said that it reads chaotic energy, just truly deeply. I don't give a fuck.

So kind of cool as well.

Well, yeah, it ended up being a positive review of these types of people. Yeah, me, which I appreciated. But also, like, I don't think it means I don't give a fuck. It actually means there's no to-go mugs that are as cute as my mugs.

Yeah, you're a mug collector. Yeah. Connoisseur. A curator of mugs. Yeah.

So it's actually more about that mixed with rats. Rats in water bottles.

Now you're afraid to have a closed, closed carry.

I just don't think you can ever get those that clean. I know.

I do hate— In fact, this is one. I have these little annoying habits as a family member. I think I do a lot of the dishes.

Okay.

Yeah. And I— They drink from my family members drink from certain water bottles that are impossible to clean.

I know. Yeah.

And I do get a little— I will clean like 600 dishes and I will sometimes leave these 2 or 3 things because I'm like, they can't be clean. It's on— if you want to drink out of this impossible to clean thing, you got to clean it. I'm with you. I get a little stubborn about that. Sure. And I should just clean them. And most of the time I do just clean them. And I like myself more if I just clean them. Of course. But I am annoyed when someone makes a choice that's going to be harder for me.

Yeah, I hate that about life.

I could make a whole Greek tragedy about the dumb little tiny wars that go on in a house, in a family. Silent war. Yeah. Another one that's going on, which is hysterical, is Kristen's very, very conscious of microplastics. Yes. I have surrendered to that. They're everywhere, right? So I'm going to I'm gonna try. And so there's two different kinds of paper plates. One is covered in a little bit— I would have thought like some kind of a wax, you know the type. Yeah, I do. And then there's just the raw paper ones.

The one you're talking about is classic.

It's what most people are eating off of, and it is covered, I think, in a thin layer of plastic.

It does goo. Yeah.

Um, and if you don't use it and you put like a steak on it, all the sauce gets absorbed into the paper. If you use a natural kind. Yeah, yeah. Or anything you would have with moisture, once you put it on there, it just sucks it out like a sponge. So I can't stand those plates. Sure, if I were having like a piece of toast, fine, but I generally feel like I'm putting something with some moisture. Yeah. And so there's two different stacks of them. Okay, basically his and hers. Yeah, sure. And this battle of which one's on top. So it's like, I had seen the paper ones, and in my mind I'm like, none of us like those paper ones except for you. The kids and I like this other one. So I put that on top, and then I noticed— then I came in the cupboard and I noticed there were her big stack of raw ones, my stack of plastic-covered ones, and then now a new stack of paper. Different kind? No, the ones that were on the bottom. But now we've just added— sandwiched— kind of like the game you play where you put a hand on top of each other.

And I was like, oh my God, this is hysterical. Look at us, like, working out this plate thing in the cabinet. I know, both making our adjustments. And then I was like, I mean, the solution here is a two-state system. Like, two Separate stacks. There should be two different stacks, but somehow we've designated one area for stacking the paper plates.

I have a detailed question. It does matter though. Okay. Are the plates the same size?

They are, which they generally aren't. So that becomes another issue.

Well, yeah, because if they're not the same size, I think feng shui—

The smaller diameter should go on top. Correct. And by the way, we're in an interesting phase right now because somehow they're the same size. But traditionally, historically, Yeah, the plastic covered ones are a little bit smaller. Oh, really? And then when I see the bigger ones teetering on top, I'm like, it makes me feel uncomfortable. And then you add in my, um, just wanting to use those. Sure, sure. But all these hilarious little subtle, quiet dramas that are going on in households is really funny. Or another one is, and I found that this is kind of a common thing that happens in marriages, and it tends to also line up gender-wise. I cannot stand the dishwasher. My take on the dishwasher is you have to wash it to put it in the dishwasher, and people are like, no, you don't.

Yeah, you don't.

And then I'm constantly pulling things out of the dishwasher that need to be rewashed, particularly silverware. I'll find a knife and I'm like, someone needed to scrub that before you put it in there. The dishwasher is not going to scrub. So it's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna clean it, right? And then I mean, they're gonna go put it, bend down and put it in this box that I then have to go later and bend down and pick it out of the box. I hear you. Or just put on the rack, to me there's an extra step. I know. And it's this endless battle, and everyone, you know, the people that are in the dishwasher camp think they get the dishes clean enough. I don't. It seems like an extra step. I'm like, just wash the damn thing and you're done with it.

Can I input here? Yeah.

Oh, I gotta add one more grievance. Okay. What also happens is, in my circle, a lot of the people that prefer the dishwasher, they want it to be full to run it because they don't want to waste, and that's admirable. But what ends up happening is the things everyone uses a lot end up in there, and then you're out of— it's always the bowls are gone, we're out of bowls, and then we're out of fucking silverware. Now I got to go into the washer and rewash the whole thing.

That part I get. I get that.

Okay, so I've aired all my grief.

Now I want— I want to weigh in on the dishwasher because I have a, um, very, very rare and unique perspective. Oh, okay. Okay, so I grew up as dishwasher being my chore, like, uh, loading and unloading. And I hated it so much, and I fucking hated the dishwasher, and it was my nemesis. Then I have lived without a dishwasher for the last 15 years. Yes. And I started to to hate myself. Like, I hated not having it. Having to wash every dish was so hard, especially when you're cooking, because then you have the big pots and pans and the little dishes. And then if you're— if you're cooking for a lot of people, oh my God, that— that I started to just— I would walk into the kitchen after everyone left and I would just look around and I was like, I— I'm walking out. I'm gonna move out. Yeah, I can't. I'm burning this place down. I don't know what to do. I mean, hours hours. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Um, so now back full circle, I have my— I have a dishwasher and I've had one for a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I love it. You love it? Oh my God.

And you just pitch a bunch of dirty dishes in there?

I put clean ones in there just for fun. Okay, okay. No, I, I— yeah, I use it. I don't mind loading and unloading.

Do you wash the stuff before you put it Rinse. I do.

I— you, you have to rinse.

What if there's cheese stuck to like a knife or fork?

You got to get that off. But you push that off, you scrub it with a, a, a, a sponge.

I've never—

I, I don't scrub anything with the sponge before it goes in. I do rinse it, and sometimes I'll use my hand to like get something hard off of it. Yeah, but I don't do any scrubbies.

My breakfast every single morning, as you know, is oatmeal. Bob's trusted brand, 2 scoops of protein. Everything's sticky. Protein is sticky. Oatmeal's sticky. If I were to rinse that bowl off, forget it, all that stuff would be stuck to it after the dishwasher. And then the spoon itself is also covered with very sticky stuff between the oatmeal and the protein powder. It's like sticky. So I have to wash it with a scrubby sponge to put it in the dishwasher, but at the point it's clean—

well, hold on, can you just put it in the sink? Yeah, put the hot water immediately. Like, you finish, you put it in the sink, hot water in the bowl, then you leave. Right? So it's sitting?

No. Well, first of all, no. Then we might have dishes soaking all over. That's unacceptable. We have a bunch of stagnant water. Mosquitoes may lay their eggs in there. Um, it will not just fall out. It's going to require scrubbing, period, because it's that sticky. The— this— it's like a cement.

Okay, okay, okay. I'm gonna add another one that'll just make me vomit.

Yeah, it was when you were talking about cooking. So, and I'm recognizing What a— I'm so— it sounds very controlled. I'm sorry. Yes, this is like the most Type A side of my personality, and it's probably terrible. My kink, my proclivity, and I keep waiting for someone to notice now for 20 years, and no one's ever noticed. When I cook my big spaghetti dinner, it's involved, there's lots of pots and pans. What I pride myself on is that I'm cleaning while I go, and that by the time I put the stuff on the table, there's no dishes. I know. And I'm waiting for someone to clap their hands for me. You say it all the time. Well, I'm trying to get my kids in. You can clean while you're cooking and then you don't have this big thing to do because there's all these 5 minutes downtime when you're cooking, right? I got to let that simmer for this. Well, that's a great time to clean this. Trust me, I know all— Natalie and I fight about that all the time. Cleaning while you go. Yeah. And you're a what? Clean while you go guy?

Yeah, because we're cooking together. Yeah. Listen, we should move in together.

Hold on. Stop this. Everyone wants to be— tries to be a clean while you go person. Okay. Normally, if I'm making it, like when I make MomsGiving, yeah, for most of it I'm cleaning while I'm going. I'm like, oh my God, this is great. And I don't have any dishes. I don't have any dishes. All of a sudden at the end when things are—

the system breaks down, it backs up.

All of a sudden you have so much crap and like there's a logjam somewhere. There's nothing you can do about it. Then even if you do, even if you clean completely while you go, yeah, then you serve everyone. Uh-huh. All the dishes that had the food are dirty. All the dishes that people are eating off are dirty. The utensils, it's dirty. Again immediately. There's so much to do.

There is, but then why add in all of the heavy-duty stuff? The cutting board, the knife, the things, scrubbing that you gotta do.

Cleaning while you go is definitely the way, but you can't—

and we're making a meal, pun intended, out of this. But of course now you just— so spaghetti is a great example. I'll watch Kristen warm up a plate of spaghetti bolognese on those raw paper plates, and I'm like, oh my God, how Could you do this? Well, you need a non-absorbent— it's like a sauce, right? And then those things are like thick with saturated spaghetti. It's almost going to break through the bottom, it's so waterlogged. She loves it. She loves it, and she's doing just fine. And she did fine before me. Exactly. And she would do fine after me. You got to constantly tell yourself this.

Everyone's so different. I mean, Even because you put your paper plates in the microwave. Oh yeah, I love it. Yeah, I don't put any paper in the microwave. Why? I'm against that. Tell me why. Similar. Well, sort of similar to what you're saying. Like, then it's like in the plate. And even though it has that goo, I just don't like what ends up happening.

And well, you probably shouldn't microwave the kind of paper plates I use because that's probably when you get a lot of chemicals.

Leaching. That's also part of it. I'm like, I don't think this paper is supposed to be heated up like this. So I heat glass. Okay. And ceramic. Yeah. But everyone's different is all I'm saying. Absolutely.

And also, like, another thing I'm aware of is like, we all think we don't waste or like we all have a commitment. And but what I realize is it's like it's such specific categories. Yeah. Like, Kristen's really, really dedicated and great at not wasting.

Yeah, she cares a lot about that.

But then there are these things that I don't waste on, and I realize, oh, she's wasting up a storm. So, like, as good as you think you are, there's just stuff you don't even see.

You would hate living with me. I waste so much, and I don't care. And I think it's—

you don't have any kind of ethical hangover?

No. And actually, my parents are just here. You're liberated. I am, but I wonder if it's because my parents care a lot about waste. Uh-huh.

And you're rebelling.

I think it's their frugality. Yeah. And like, even so, my mom—

That's kind of what I'm stuck with is the like trying to get way too many uses out of things. Yes.

And I think I've rebelled because I'm just like, oh, I didn't— my parents were here when my Farmbox came. Okay. I get a Farmbox once every 2 weeks. Delivery of produce, right?

Yeah. From the farmer's market.

Uh-huh. And it's a one-person box, so there's not like that much stuff. Stuff in it, but it's exciting. I love it. Yeah. And it came, and my dad was like, oh cool. And then he was like, what are you gonna do with all this food? And I was like, well, I mean, I cook stuff.

And he's like, well, I'm gonna eat 30% of it. What do you mean? Yeah, what do you mean am I gonna do it?

I was like, no, I either like, maybe I'll give it to someone, I'll throw it out, or— yeah. And then, and like, he— they hated that, you know. My mom made spaghetti one day.

But really quick, did Did they hate, 'cause these are two much different categories, did they hate that you're wasting your money or did they hate that the food's being wasted? Both. Both? Yeah. Double whammy.

Yeah. Okay. It's not even like, they're not thinking it through like, oh, wasted food 'cause other kids don't have food. It's not like ethical like that. Yeah, yeah. It's just like, as sort of you would say, like, I'm not a good steward of things coming my way. I'm not like, oh, then how will I use this, make this last for two weeks or whatever? Yeah, yeah. You know, my mom made spaghetti one night and then, And she was like, you know, then they were both obsessed with like eating the spaghetti. When are we gonna eat the rest of the spaghetti? And when is it? And I was like, we're not gonna eat it. I'm gonna throw it away. Like, enough with this. Like, you spending all your brain power on figuring out when to eat the leftover spaghetti on your vacation.

Yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle of you two.

Yeah, they're my parents. They're gonna like— anytime I spent my, like, any money, they're worried.

Still worrying about how you're going to turn out. Like, I don't think a parent can turn that off. It's like, bitch, she turned out. She's 38. This is who she is. And I know I'll probably be fighting that with my own children, but it's like at some point you're like, there's no more, you know, how they're going to turn out.

They're out. I know, but it's scary. It's scary when you have these little people walking around and living their lives and they came out of your body and they came out of your egg and your sperm. Like, it's too scary. Even so, they left this morning and, you know, they were walking. They just— they're just so funny. They just think everything through so many steps. You know, it's so like my dad was like, okay, well, the Uber, I guess we'll just walk to the—

He's probably worried about how they're going to get in the game.

Exactly. Like, how are they going to— I was like, well, it's fine. Fine, because we'll just give them the code that calls my phone. He was like, yeah, but your work— they have to call your phone. I was like, okay, whatever, just—

I guess do whatever you're gonna walk to the airport. I know, it's so—

it's so funny. But yeah, so then they walked out of my house and they were walking to the gate and waiting for the Uber there. I heard, you know, he was walking out, I heard somebody else walking up, and I heard him say to my parents, do you live here? And they— and then my dad said, no, our daughter lives here. And I was like, oh, that's so cute. That is.

But think how funny they look walking through our neighborhood with rolling bags. I know, I know.

But like, I thought that was—

they really don't look like Rob or daughter. They could be carrying television sets out of a house and I would not think they were the opposite of Robert.

Yeah, look-wise, they'd be great in that way. They'd be great.

They should be jewel thieves.

Yeah, yeah, jewel heists. Yeah. So it's cute. It's cute to have parents who care about their daughters and their sons. Yeah, it's really sweet.

But also I'm like, okay, just get out of here. Yeah, I'm gonna throw everything away.

Speaking of daughters, you wanted to tell me something.

Oh, just that I had a dream day with Lincoln. She had the day off of school. And so I said, what do you think about going out to the beach and riding bikes along the Strand, the paved bike path?

Santa Monica?

In Santa Monica, which if you don't live here, I would imagine you'd think, well, people must go out to the beach a lot. You don't. It's very far.

Unless you live there.

Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's like an hour. To drive generally, even though it's 18 miles away. So yeah, we loaded up the bikes in the truck and we went and we rode bikes for like, I don't know, 6, 7 miles. We got to look at some of the fire damage in the Palisades. You can see it from the bike path. And then we went to my very favorite restaurant from when I lived there for 10 years, uh, Frito Bisto, and sat down inside and ordered. I tried to talk her into the pink sauce. She didn't want it, but then my pink sauce came. She had it, and we got a side of pink sauce and fixed it. But, um, yeah, she actually loved it, which is great, because most of these things I share with them that I'm so excited to share with them, they could take it or leave it, you know. Ouch. You're also doing this thing, and I'm aware of it, but I still do it, which is like, I want them to— I guess it's— I probably— I just want them to be interested in me as a person, independent of— right?

Yeah. And so, like, when we were getting off at the, uh, the highway, or right before we got off I was like, oh, that was my exit for 10 years. Uh-huh. And of course she doesn't care. Yeah. I was like, even as I'm saying this stuff, I'm like, she doesn't even care.

Did she say, oh, did she? Yeah, she like feigns.

But I, I know, I know. I'm just picturing like my dad told me he got off an exit. I wouldn't care. It's just the nature of it.

Okay. I don't know.

Well, so it culminates in— I never— I'm rarely in Santa Monica, but I did live there for a decade. We leave Frito Misto, and of course I I always have to drive by my old apartment. I can't go to Santa Monica. We were in a hurry to beat traffic. I was like, I'm turning right on you, kid. I gotta, I gotta look at it. Wow. Okay, okay. Um, so we're driving. I don't even stop. I know better than to stop. Well, I would have liked to have stopped and stared at the building for 5 minutes. Oh, that's where the gang came up my stairwell.

That's— maybe that's what they're worried you're gonna start talking about.

About that. No, but, um, we look at the place and, and also, okay, then the, the subversive thing I'm hoping trickles through is like, hey, we didn't always have money, look how far we've come, and look how I lived for a decade. Yeah, and, and you may have to live that way for a decade too, you know. There's some— and that maybe they won't, whatever.

We know they won't. We just have to be realistic, right?

I don't know. I could definitely see Lincoln having the same pride that I had, which is I can see her deciding, no, no, I want to have my own place. And she wants the pride of it being her own place and her pay for it. Yeah, that is very foreseeable for her.

I could 100% see that.

And in which case it'll be something similar to the thing we're looking at.

Yeah. But don't you think— and maybe this is not— maybe this isn't true, I don't know. And there's no way for us to know, but I feel like there is a difference when you know at the end of the day when push comes to shove, you can call your parents and you can get some help. By the way, I have that. I had that, right? Right, right. I was working at SoulCycle. I did not have, I was making $13 an hour. It was tight. It was hard. But you weren't panicked. I wasn't, I, I was like, I was stressed a lot, but I wasn't like deeply in my soul panicked because I knew at the end of the day, one, they could probably help me in a jam. Yeah. And two, I can always go back there if I had to. I could live in their basement if I had to. Like, they, they could support me, right, in that way. Even though they told me over and over again not to— like, don't depend on that. Yeah, yeah. Like, we, we need— like, you know, they were trying to scare me. It didn't work.

It didn't work.

Why don't you come back? Well, you're not allowed to come back. Yeah, you need to proceed as if you can't come back, but of course you can't come back.

Exactly. So, you know, that, that's a little different. But I agree with you. I think she— I'm sure she'll want.

She's something of her prideful in the same way I'm kind of prideful. So, but yeah, so we're just— and I'm also like, I'm aware, I'm like, she's just looking at a random building. Like, that building means so much to me, but that is just— there's no difference between that building and the one next door. It's just a building. And she did go— she gave me a like, oh, wow, that's pretty, like, cool that that—

where you started and where we're at. That's nice.

That was nice. Yeah.

And then she, like, looked up on her phone. Yeah.

I was like, ChatGPT, what to say to your dad and he's trying to feel proud of himself and instill a lesson into you somehow.

It's also probably, it's different because I, maybe in Michigan, if you're driving by your old house in Michigan, they probably will feel, they would feel different. It's some, they live here. Yep. I think that's different. Probably.

Yeah. But I do wonder, yes, if we were ever in Michigan, cuz I very much want to do that. Yeah. I wanna take 'em on a tour. Of every place I lived.

Didn't you already do that? No, I do that.

I did that with my dad when he was alive.

You did that with Aaron.

Aaron and I always go back to Milford and we look at his house and my house and our junior high and a couple other places we hung out. And we can sit there forever and just look at it. But yeah, no, I drove with my dad around and looked at every single place I lived because I wanted to take pictures of it. Yeah. Of which I don't know where they are now. 'No, but I had this.' But I, I doubt they would be terribly interested, but they would be nice enough to act interested.

But I think they, they'd be much more interested in that. They're just a thing, you know.

They're, they're, they're given. You're not interested at all in them?

It's like, in some ways yes and in some ways no. Obviously the older you get, you become more and more interested because you start seeing, you start understanding that they're you, that you come from that.

Like, would you— I would love to see you were a show.

Yeah, that I That I love. And I have, I've been there. I, when I was little, we stayed there and like, I love that. Like that, that's our family history. That's what I mean. I think part of it's the location. Obviously seeing something in India. I mean that really, like he grew up in a village.

I know, you don't even have to say anything. He's just like, here you go.

Yeah. And that's cool. But even like, even in Savannah, I feel like we would go by sometimes times the first house my mom lived in. Uh-huh. And I thought— I think that's cool.

Okay, okay, good. But I've been increasingly embarrassed about my self-indulgence.

Okay.

Yeah, and it's pretty self-indulgence. Like, well, well, you can just go by yourself.

Maybe you just don't need to bring her.

I would have gone without her. So yeah, yeah, I go. Yeah. And I generally— what she got spared is I also drive down the alley and I pull into my old spot. Oh, you do? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yes. Yeah, that's funny. You know, I was very superstitious about that apartment because, again, I lived in it for a decade. Yeah. At the time I left, I had lived in it for more than a third of my life. Yep. And we moved so much as kids that, like, I came to, like, just love how permanent that was. Yeah. And I was so afraid to move into the house here in Los Feliz. I just thought my whole world was going to unravel. Yeah. And I had this fantasy that I was going to, like, rebuild it in my garage. Identically.

Oh my God.

So that I could go like sit in it and remember the hunger and write in there maybe. Yeah. And, and, and I still have so many recurring dreams about that apartment.

That is weird because we were just talking about— I don't have it with that house. Yeah, we were just talking about it with the house where you're just like, I don't care. I don't care to be back there.

Well, I think a lot of it is like, I think where you cement your identity. Like I cemented so many parts of my identity in that 20 to 30, in that apartment. Yeah. That I still kind of define myself as. Yeah. And that I kind of came to this house already baked. Sure. Interesting. The kids are the new addition there.

Yeah, that's a huge thing.

And the only part I'm nostalgic about, as I was saying when we talked about it, is like I see pictures of when the kids played there. Yeah. That kind of gets me emotional.

I'm very nostalgic for that house. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Very. Like, we did so much. I mean, I guess so much of all of our relationships were built there.

Yeah, yeah. The movie room, how many shows we watched. We watched so many shows. Tiger King.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We played so many games. Yes, at the booths. We were outside all the time.

Yeah, it was a very good patio to hang out.

It was great. And yeah, and the babies and like, I have a lot of nostalgia for that. House. Sometimes on Halloween, because your sister lives there, on Halloween we'll stop by there for candy. And almost always the group is always like, God, remember? Everyone's always like, God, we were just here all the time. So I have some nostalgia for that. But maybe also because it's still in your family, that might make a difference. Yes, it's not gone. Exactly. Yeah, that's funny because yesterday I had had dinner with my parents on Fairfax. And so we were blocks away from Anthony, where Anthony and I lived. Yeah. Which I guess I would say, like, I'm trying to think of what I'm the most nostalgic for space-wise. Yeah. I mean, it's gonna be the apartment I was just in. Yeah, for sure. Uh, but probably that one on Gardner, the one that Kristin also lived in 10 years before that, because I think I brought this up recently, and we did improv practice there, and we played running shoes. We had no money. So I am nostalgic, but I didn't feel like, oh, let's drive by Gardner. In fact, I'm kind of like—

I don't ever want to see it.

Yeah. I kind of just like it in my head, and I don't want to see that again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, weird.

Last thing I'll add is I also, in the continuing updates on the movies, I decided to show Lincoln The Prestige. I invited you and your family. That's right. Great movie. It's better than you remember. Wow. It is a flawless movie. It's so fucking good. And Lincoln was blown away. The end, the twist at the end is so juicy. She was so rattled that at the end I looked at her and I said, I have to tell you I'm also an identical twin. And she goes, she screams, "Daddy, don't say that!" Like, the movie affected her so much. It was just so fun to watch the power of a movie when it's great. She was like, she hated the thought that there were two of me, and she didn't know which one she had memories with. And I had to convince her I wasn't a twin.

See, you had to walk it back. I did, big time. Um, okay, okay, let's do some facts.

Let's do facts.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Did you have dairy?

No, there was some in my salad last night, my little gem salad. Okay. At Carra. It had been a minute.

Nice.

I avoided as much of it as I could. And I hated pushing aside that yummy Parmesan. You know the salad, right?

Oh, it's so good. The cheese is so good on there.

It's phenomenal Parmesan. And I hated— I wish I had asked for no cheese because I hated seeing—

Yeah, that's tempting.

And I felt like I was wasting money too. Oh, wow. Like, where's this going? This is expensive Parmesan that I'm not eating.

Yeah, it would be very tempting to see it there and not have it in your bite.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had some, um, truffled fries though. That's yummy. That hit the spot.

Is there parm on that? I think there is a little bit, so, you know, it's a little scattywampus. Okay, that's okay.

I mean, minimally it's a reduction.

Yeah, that's—

and then someone in the comments suggested I take an enzyme called DAO. Okay, this is a ding ding ding. It was like, hey, there's this enzyme I take before I eat, and it's like a kind of a histamine blocker, and my nose runs after every time I eat. And I was like, mine too. Oh, my mom. So I ordered it and then it went out to Cara. And then Hannah said to Kristen, did you take your enzyme? And she goes, no, I forgot it. And I go, wait, what, what enzyme? And Hannah goes, I was suggesting that Kristen take DOA or DAO for histamines so she doesn't get itchy. I've been using it, I like it. And I was like, well, this is crazy, cuz I just heard about it in the comments and ordered it and it comes tomorrow and you guys are already hopping popped up on it.

That's Sim. Sim. Very, very Sim. Okay, this is for Catherine Paige Hardin. So, did I go to Collierville Elementary School? No.

I had to ask my mom this. Oh, this is the Memphis period?

Yes. Yeah, yeah. She said Collierville Elementary and I said, and I think I said, yeah, but then I was like, I don't think that's right. I texted my mom. She said I went to Farmington Elementary. She remembered. Nope, she said she had to look it up.

Okay, she's like, Because that's impressive. Yeah.

And then I was like, oh yeah, Farmington.

Although I have a hunch I'll remember my kids' names. I don't want to say it out loud, but I'll remember the name of my kids' elementary. You will.

But you were there briefly. Yeah, I was at— I went to 5 elementary schools.

You did? Why? You only had one big move, right?

Well, first school, Peachtree Elementary. Classic. Yeah, kindergarten, first grade. Then we moved to Collierville and went to Farmington for second and third grade. Okay, then we moved back— oh, sorry, I'm wrong, I went to 4 elementary schools. Okay, so we moved back, um, and I went to Berkeley School of Music. Yeah, I was a savant. Um, I went to Berkeley Lake because we, we rented a house. Okay. And then we bought a house. That is still the house? That is still the house. And that— then I went— so then I went to Chattahoochee Elementary, my 5th grade.

Wow. We don't talk about this. Yeah, I moved a lot. I feel like this is even more significant than your ethnicity.

It's all in the stew. Yeah, it's all in the stew.

Yeah. I mean, you really had to start over. I moved a lot. Was there any people from Peachtree in in the final elementary? No, no. So brand new start in 5th grade?

Well, no, so brand new start in 4th grade. Okay. And then brand new start again in 5th grade.

Okay, right. So 5th grade, and then you stuck with those kids for junior high?

Yeah, well, then it was very fun is then in 6th grade, some people from 4th grade, you know, like then people came back into the fold, which was cool.

That would have happened to me had I gone to Milford High and not switched districts.

Well, you know, one of my first Simist moments was, um, there was a girl in my fourth grade class, Ashley, and she was so popular and so cool and pretty, and I wanted to be her pretty badly.

Which was— really quick, let's pause. When you think about the ability for one to be super cool in fourth grade, it's not even really thing. Like, I'm looking at fourth graders.

I know, but like the way they eat lunch and stuff's just cooler. Okay. Yeah. And she was also really nice, but she was— she didn't have to be as pretty. No. Yeah, good for her. Her name was Ashley, and I was like kind of trying to, you know, I was like trying to be her friend, but you know, um, we weren't really good friends. But I do think I was invited to her birthday party. She had so many Beanie Babies. Um, her, like, her mom was into it.

Sure.

And so she had so many and they were like in cases and stuff, not like fucking Valentino and Liberty. Just like I wrote all over them and stuff. I didn't know what I was doing.

Do you think moms in the South were more into Beanie Babies than moms in the North? I do. For some reason. I mean, yeah. Okay. Yeah. My mom was real into Beanie Babies though. Oh, my sister.

Was she like getting them for her and bringing them home? Like, we got Truffles. Yeah.

Yeah. They had a whole bin. Yeah.

I was always trying to get my mom to be like that. Okay.

But driven by your sister. Yeah. Okay. I know it's a little, it's a little, yeah. Like there's women who collect dolls and it's not cuz they have kids.

No, no. Also no, the purpose of this is like ultimately to like have a billion dollars. I know, I know, I know.

I don't even wanna comment on that.

Okay. Yes. Anyway, so, so then I moved and then I went to 5th grade away from Ashley and then And in 6th, I thought about her. And before 6th grade, I was like, oh, like, I wonder if like Ashley will be there. Like, and on the ride home, the bus ride home on the first day of school, guess who's on my bus? Ashley. And guess why? Her parents got divorced and her mom moved into my neighborhood. Oh my gosh. And we became besties. Best. Oh wow, best friends. I— we lived— I mean, I lived at her house. I— she didn't live at mine. Um, but yeah, get off at her stop. One time my dad got really mad because we got lost in the neighborhood and he couldn't find us, and he like really panicked. And we— all we were doing was jumping on someone's trampoline. But anyway, um, so we were best friends, and, uh, we were best friends for a long time.

She What grade?

Was my cheerleading squad. Oh, she also a fellow double state champ. Oh my goodness. Okay. We still talk. We texted recently. Yes. I love her. And we were boy crazy and we wrote in each other's diaries. Did she stay like on top of the heat?

Yes. Oh, she did. Yeah. Some people.

And she deserved it. She deserved it. She really deserved it. She's a great, great lady.

She's a great leader of women. Yeah.

Yeah, she is. Anyway, yeah, I did a lot of moving, so. Farmington. Now, is it pronounced Pelagius or Pelagius? Unfortunately, it's pronounced Pelagius. I don't— you didn't like that. And she's Pelagius more. I know, that's what you said.

Oh, I did then? Okay, good. I'm consistent. Sometimes I worry I'm not even consistent. And she—

because she was saying Pelagius. That sounds nice. Yeah. And you were like, yeah. And she was like, I don't know, some people say Pelagius. And you said, I like Pelagius. Yeah, but it's Pelagius. Yeah. How many genes do humans have? Remember, we were— we were— I was—

I'm so embarrassed still. Well, I was talking about individual ACGTs in the DNA strand, which is in the billions, but it's only 20-some thousand. Yeah, she said around 20,000.

Yes, humans have approximately 20,000 to 25,000 protein-coding genes. Fuck. God, that was—

I mean, what a fact. Factor I was off by.

Um, it's a low number, similar to that of many organisms, which is embarrassing for us.

What I walked away with from this, and I've already been in a couple conversations because it comes up all the time, like, oh, they found the gene for blank, they found the gene. And I go, you know, I just had this expert on, I was like, almost nothing isn't polygenetic. That's right. Almost nothing is one gene. Exactly. Which is encouraging.

It is. Yeah. It's like, it's hard to get some of this stuff.

Yeah. I gave the example she gave about height. It's like 200 genes that you could be one standard deviation above, and that's going to result in 7 feet tall.

I know, but there are some. She's like sickle cell.

I've had this great curiosity of how people are keep getting taller, like their parents. Like, how are they getting so much taller? So many people that I look around, they're all— their kids are always taller than them. Aaron's kid, I think about it all the time. Like, wait, is 6'3" or 4"? Yeah. And his ex-wife isn't tall. And Aaron's 5, 6 foot. Yeah. But like, what, where does that come from? Who had the gene? Well, it wasn't.

It wasn't the gene. I know we're learning so much.

The only thing I'm bummed I didn't have any boys because I would like to see, like, would I get a 6 foot 5 boy? Because I exceeded my father. He had exceeded his. That's true. Presumably I might have a weight on my hands.

Well, the girls will probably be taller than Kristen. Yes.

Yes. Although Delta is tracking much more Kristen-wise. Yeah, yeah. But bigger than her at her age, right?

Exactly. Yeah, because like Lincoln's already taller than me, I think, or at least my height. She's probably your height. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, and Delta's getting there.

She's getting there. She wants to get there faster. So cute.

No, it's so cute.

Like, she lost a tooth the other day and she was ecstatic. She called me bloody, still actively bleeding, ecstatic. She wants to get rid of those babies.

I know. She hates them. She did tell— she's like, I lost my tooth. And I had known that this was a big deal. Yeah. And then she brought it up again later. Did I tell you? I was like, yeah.

Well, you know, when she went to the dentist and they x-rayed her mouth, she started bawling when they said it's going to be a while. And she was devastated. Yeah. I don't remember having any thoughts about my teeth. They probably just all fell out really quick. So I—

I know. I don't remember caring about that. But yeah, I must have been on par. It's hard, it's hard when you're— everyone else is— it's happening and you get worried.

Um, oh, another pronunciation.

Retributively. Retributively. Oh, how many times did Second Chance attack his owner? I really got a kick out of the fact that his name was Second Chance. Have you— the This American Life? Yeah, I did a long time ago, but I don't remember it.

This American Life for a minute had a video show, but, um, I watched that.

Yeah, yeah. Um, it's called— on This American Life, the story is called If by Chance We Meet Again. Very nice. Very— such a good name. So elegant. Um, yeah, Ralph and Sandra Fisher, who run a show animal business in Texas, had a beloved Brahman bull named Chance. Chance was the gentlest bull they'd ever seen, more like a pet dog than a bull. They loved him. Kids loved him. He had a long career in movies, on TV, performing at parties. And when he finally died, Ralph and Cindy were devastated. Around that time, scientists at Texas A&M University were looking for animal subjects for a cloning project. They already had some tissue from Chance because they treated him for an illness. So Ralph and Cindy offered up Chance's DNA for the experiment. Second Chance was born, um, and he was eerily just like Chance, except he wasn't, which they found out the hard way. Um, but I looked up twice. It was twice, but it was Those horns, bad.

Um, I wonder where we're at now. I mean, that, that story was, yeah, 12 years ago. I wonder if there's been subsequent—

Do you think? Wow. Yeah, I hope he's so far. First occurred on the bull's second birthday. I mean, 2-year-olds, you know, tantrums. Yeah. Where Fisher barely escaped, and a second more severe attack happened about a year later, resulting in significant injuries to Fisher, including a fractured spine.

Oh, fuck. I can't imagine how terrible it would be to be attacked by a bull. Oh my God, the huge horns and that strong neck. You see, they pick up cars and stuff when they want. They're, they're insanely strong.

I don't think the eye thing would necessarily work for them. Maybe if they were out cold.

Yeah, I would try to get its horns lodged in the cage. Are you going to put your—

you think the fingers in your butt thing is going to work?

Might as well. I mean, it's free. Always do that as your setup.

Um, okay, these The exact figures on the dyslexia numbers are, yeah, 2 to 5 times more likely to be in leadership roles compared to the general pop. It also says dyslexia affects roughly 10 to 15% of the general population, 25 to 35% of entrepreneurs according to surveys, and 20 to 40% of self-made millionaires show signs of dyslexia.

I think increasingly they're starting to look at if dyslexia is a thing or if it's just ADHD, by the way. —Oh, go ahead. Okay.

So yeah, people with dyslexia are 2.4 times more likely to drop out of high school without proper intervention. They are also up to 3 times more likely to be identified with ADHD, as 35% to 45% of those with dyslexia also have ADHD.

Boys are 2 to 3 times more likely to be diagnosed with dyslexia than girls, which would be consistent with what our ADHD experts said, that boys get labeled ADHD at 7 or 8 years old and women at 30 '36, right? And so yeah, that all kind of holds. Yeah, I—

that's it. That's it for Katherine Page Harden.

Oh, I liked it because it was a great philosophical question. When I think of it in terms of myself, it— without any testing, it would seem I am of one of these packages she's talking about.

Yeah, I would— I would agree.

And I also have other stuff to offer, and it's very interesting.

Well, you haven't, you know, killed anyone that I know.

I haven't killed anyone, but I have had moments of aggression towards other men, right? Other men have been hurt, sure, by me in battle.

Rob, have you ever punched someone in the face? I don't think so. Me either. Yet. Yeah, not— I'm not ruling it out. It doesn't seem fun, I have to be honest. Like, it doesn't seem even fun. Like, the feet— like, the— seems— first of all, it seems like it hurts really bad to the puncher. Like, to even on my hand, it seems like that would hurt really bad. Yes.

Well, you know, I have broke my hand. Yeah, I have missed knuckles that are submerged from it. So yeah, but I'm— I try to make this case to other— you don't feel anything.

Oh right, there's no—

there's no pain whatsoever. Whatever. The next day you might feel sore. But that's what's funny is I think when you're a boy, you're so afraid of how much it's going to hurt. And then come to find out it doesn't hurt at all. None of it hurts. Your brain goes straight to its primitive knows what to do state. The fun isn't the contact. It's the— I took something. Oh, I'm not going to get hurt. That's what it is. Like, oh, I landed. Oh, I'm in charge. Oh, I'm not going to get hurt. That's like the elation in a fight is if if you're in charge and control, right?

But it's also like, you know, you're safe, like, kind of, for—

I think, like, yes, but I think once it kicks off, I think just all this primitive wiring happens, right? And it's really just like, oh, I have to maintain the upper hand or I'm gonna get really, really hurt. And as so long as you're in control, there is this elation of like, oh, I'm gonna get out of this, I'm gonna win this, I'm not I'm not going to get hurt.

But when people start fights, that's all pride and ego. Yeah. There's like, it can't be about that because they've decided, right? So like, that is about— for sure.

And when I have like stood up to the dickhead at the bar, I have this for sure charge of justice.

Right, right, right, right.

And pride of that. I will—

I'll be the one.

I'll be the one to shut this down. Yeah. But then once the action starts, starts, this full other mindset starts. All right, that's it. Crazy note to end it, but I guess it was apropos.

It was, it was all part of it. I love you.

Love you.