Kathryn Paige Harden (behavioral geneticist)

I'm Dan Shepherd. I'm joined by Monica Padman.

Hi. Today we have Katherine Page Harden. She's 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 in 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 U.S. home of Formula One. Starting March 7th, you can watch complete all-axis 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.

Which is that I brought you the UK copy of the book because it has a much cooler cover. Oh, I'll say it does. It's reminiscent of Bea Wolf. It's a "Boars 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.”

And also just thinking about in what ways are we animals? You know, in what ways are morality connected to the animal world? Yeah. I sent them a whole mood board and my U.S. publisher was like, all of these look like novels, or poetry collections, it does their resize out of fiction.

And then my UK editor was like, let's go. That's part of something weird. Yeah, what are the known differences in how UK publishing in the U.S. publishing differs?

I don't think I know because this is my first role in the research.

So fascinating, aren't they? Yes. I think they're darker and twicier. I'm more repressed. Because they're, yes, exactly. They're repression, the gaps, more perversion.

I totally agree. It's a Freudian analysis of the British culture, but I believe that. Do you sneak in? I'm so sneaky. Hi, hello.

It's so nice to meet you. Thank you for inviting me. This is such a surreal treat. So let's start. Did you just find for Austin?

I married last night. Huh? You teach at U.T. right? I teach at U.T. Where did you go to undergrad?

I went to a firm in university.

Oh, I did. Did you see her? I have. My friend's mom went to firm in. Back when it was Baptist.

Probably. Probably. Yes. So it's a smaller 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 evangelicals. So how does that drive 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 firm and paid for me to go.

So that's how I ended up in Greenville. Where part of Texas, you grew up in? I grew up in Memphis. Oh, you grew up in Memphis. Yeah.

Oh, you just live into, I got Kim. 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 excerpts of been colorful. I lived in Collierville for two years. Are you serious?

That's wild. 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 we left. My mom called your Ville Elementary School. Did you go to public school? I did it.

I went to. I think it was Miss Zeman. That's your name, okay. No, I got to finish. Cultural overlap.

Yeah, 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 house. I mean, I want to go now. Is this the it as an adult?

Yeah, you could still know it. If you remember your address. It's still away. But it's an upscale area. I was just at either a sprouts or a food.

And we'll are. It doesn't matter. Remember, I did a stop outside of Memphis. And one of the gals who was visiting said, you know, there's where Monica lived.

That is wild. It's kind of nice, right? Yeah, we moved there in like the mid-80s. So it was a 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.

Yeah, so funny.

OK, so you graduated from there.

And did you do graduate school summer? 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. 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.

“You know, I think I made $12,000 a year when I was a graduate student.”

And I still live there, and I was very happy. And that college was famously designed by Jefferson. UVA was Jefferson's academic village. And so he designed the rotunda, which is this palladium 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, Monochello. Oh, you can. So it's very Jeffersonianly influx it. And how do you kind of pump to it? Because it's a bit different.

And you got your PhD in clinical psychology. What's the transition from that to them 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. So I had this one year in Boston, where I worked

at McLean Hospital, which is outside of Boston and Belmont. It's where have you seen or read girl interrupted? Oh. Suzanne, a case, and that's McLean. So it's kind of the stored place in Americans

like Yashra, history. So it was a stranger of my life where I went from doing a lot of research and a little clinical work to one year full-time in patients, psychiatry, eating disorders, psychotic disorders, personality disorders.

Yeah, so it did. 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 you're offices. Oh, 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. Are there any people going there to rest? That kind of vibe? No, you're really hard to go to a psychiatric hospital to rest. Yeah, no.

Well, rest is in quotes. Like, they would say they're going to wait a rest. But really they're having a psychotic episode. The forest probably pretty. You got to be showing.

Yeah, you still have to be even self-pay patients, which are very privileged minority. I mean, 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 saying kind of residential or inpatient in the psychiatric hospital. And did you have any kind of awakening during that clinical work where you're interested shifted or you thought you were going to do one thing but this experience clinically changed you?

Yes, I know. So I knew when I was a college student that I wanted to be a scientist and I wanted to be a professor. And now it was my goal. So I knew even on internship that I wasn't going to stay in full-time clinical care,

that I was going to pivot, try to get a faculty job, start a lab. My primary life activity professionally was going to be doing science. I think what working in an inpatient facility impresses upon you is that psychiatry is not a solves 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 in someone's leaving hospital, where are they going? What's that?

For where are they living with? Who's going to make sure that they can get to appointment? How are their medication going to be filled? Even for people with resources, that is an incredibly difficult thing to manage. So just as 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, 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.

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 make your life better unless distress today. So this kind of ruthless pragmatism of we can't make your brain different totally.

But we can make you less distress 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 our 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 shop girl.

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, I wanted to stay thinking about genetics, thinking about the brain, thinking about addiction, anti-social behavior, but not in mice. I don't want to work with rodents anymore. So I ended up in the clinical psychology program, which is about those same problems

but in people. And then I went to a claim 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 an eating disorders unit, which was all adolescent girls. And not really solidified my interest in adolescents, 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 adolescents. And what's kind of nature and nurture of those things? So it's trying to pull together those different threads into one research program. And would you agree from 98, did you say when you started calling?

I started 99. 99. Till now, even that statement nature versus nurtured, then was kind of an iron-clad dichotomy, which now no one who's hip-to-it thinks those are different things in a lot of ways, which will 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, and 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 at it. Yes.

And do you think her kind of openness about that? Liberated you for the rest of your life and being not a presentation or 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. We didn't know that about that. She hadn't just closed 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 Grizzell.

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 state homoms, didn't work outside the home. So I just hadn't seen many adult women who were running labs and doing research and being the best researcher. 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 atticy already. That really made me be like, "What is this?" Like, "What is this?" Like, "What is this?" And so I worked for her and then I took a biosycology 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,

Prior to that, I'm sure what you learned in your day-to-day life is a kid in Memphis in a

evangelical home. As like, addiction is a failure of willpower and morality. It's a character flaw. Whereas this laboratory was demonstrating, "Oh, and you give these mice, opiates, their brains immediately adapt, requiring a larger dosage. They are 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, a tone-mit 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. 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 and

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 saw 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 were 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 interest or 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

enablaming mind-set, you're in this judges mindset, then everything that you see is filtered through

that lens and that prevents you from seeing it. Or discuss, like that's a very powerful one too.

Gosh, too. Okay. So your book starts off. You about to take a trip with your boyfriend to go do LSD in the desert and West Texas. Yeah. You're going to have your kids go to their house for the weekend. And we quickly learn that, you know, you've done LSD once before and that your boyfriend was like, "Let's not fuck till after." We're coming for a professor. I'm like, "I love it." Or you see it falling. 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?" 100%. I have a thousand students in my interest 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. Right. 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. Yeah. A little bit different. I love it. Your starting off is we were talked about

Yeah. So tell us about the acid trip and how you 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 Saint Augustin and the church who came up with this idea that out of an Eve sinned in the garden, and that original defiance of God is inherited over generation to generation such that what you inherit would not just predispose you, but actually condemn you, damn you make it inevitable that you're going to haven't 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 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 last

“damn nimble and makes you more damn nimble. 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 Augustin, we live in a culture that shapes 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 to each other? If we have cells and we have a big delight, 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 letters to the Romans,

were 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,

“the things I don't want to do, I keep on doing. So we can think about why do humans do things that”

they don't want to do? And that's a fundamental problem. And we can come at that from an objective perspective, a scientist, as philosophers, as scholars. But the reason why that question is pressing is because we all have lived that experience internally. We have an subjective experience. And anyone who has looked in a food pantry has experienced that, what I should do and there's what I want to do. Exactly. So I didn't want to 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 a lot of 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 have a memoir that's also a serious book of ideas? So that was my goal. And his intellectual adversary was, how do you say?

I think it's Pelagius, but then people say Pelagius. So Pelagius was coming from the opposite point of view and this was a grand debate in Christianity. 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 as he thought, well, there's no possibility of having good sex”

because every time you procreate, you physically pass on this. 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 its morality. Yeah, the framing is if it's nature, that's not choice and only choice, yeah. 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, wait, about sex, about drugs, about addiction,

you see these two perspectives. And they don't say, I'm siding with this third, fourth,

this century church father when they do it. It's secularized. I think it's interesting to think

another option? Well, it's a sex act. 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 horseshoe. Right? So that's my knee jerk. But then weirdly, as we understand behavior in genetics, role in behavior, again, on a big spectrum, that's also true. We do inherit things, whether I'm going to label him 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. 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 are 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, you know, there's a contagion there. So I think there's several things about the 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 he could talk about it with me and his friends and his parents and his therapists. 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 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. It was absolutely convinced that there was no way he could have not done it. Every time he had 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% damn nipple. 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 that. Yeah, I think it opens the door to a really compelling thought process, which is blame in itself. You give the example of Adapis who sex with his mom and pills his father. I think Adapis is on Isaac. 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 his blame relevant if the person had no idea.

There are schools that thought that yes they are and there are schools that that no. So let's talk about blame a little bit. Yeah, okay. So just what is blame? Part of blame is an emotion. Blame is this feeling of I am outraged and I'm entitled to be outraged. I'm resentful and I'm entitled to be resentful because you've done something that violates some moral norms, some social norms, some legal norm. The philosopher Peter Strausson, 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 nodding to you in a way that makes you sometimes really pissed off at them because they 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 baby 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

and she 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, I know. 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 outraged in resentment at you. There's accountability half to be that. And that was a big intellectual growth and personal growth for me over writing the book. It's trying to pull those ideas

apart in my mind. 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're 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 you knew it was a sin or not,

“it's the same. It's still blameworthy. Yeah. So it's like we already have kind of two radically.”

There's a lot of different ideas that we can realize our contradictory in our collective sort of cultural unconscious that are pulling on our intuitions in different ways. Stay tuned for our share expert. If you dare. Thank you to our presenting sponsor Apple TV, the new US home of Formula One. You can now watch complete all access live coverage of every Grand Prix including practice qualifying and sprints all in one place. I will be consuming all of

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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 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

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 act of choice or no. And it just has to be an act either way. You say your favorite definition of it is from Francis Spofford? 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 in our own well-being and other peoples. 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 inherits sin, you're not inheriting doing something,”

you're inheriting a tendency to do something. When you're thinking about, are you to blame for what you've done and then 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. What 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 a sort of 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 increased 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 skin naivians, right? Let's give you a shot. They have got to pop up. Yeah. Iceland UK bio bank, which is in the UK and then 23 me customers. So it's a lot of people that are white British 60 year old to spend into a tube and given the British government so much information about their lives. And also in the skin and navy, the medical records are public, although the identity is obscure. So you can do this enormous epidemiological study.

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, 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 three million kids who have been vaccinated and then a million that had not,

and they could immediately show there's no difference. There's no difference. Yeah. So that's where it's like a 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, addressing against other people, maybe addressing it as 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 poll

what genes are associated with all of them. So we were looking at ADHD symptoms and childhood,

we were looking at sexual behavior, age for 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 a cigarette? Are you engaged in problematic alcohol you? 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 anti-social behavior. Like having sex in 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 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. Is it like this tomorrow?”

Yes, 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 side of genes that also project felonies. Oh wow. Like literally project your likelihood of ever being arrested, of ever pulling a knife or gun on someone, of engaging in much more serious anti-social behavior. It also projects if you've ever attempted suicide. So it also projects kind of this harmful

disinhibition against the South. Yeah, and in this paper you established that this group, the people who share this cluster of genes are twice as likely to be arrested. So that's a pretty significant

fact. Yeah, exactly. And I'll add to it's not the case of one in one million versus two in one

million. And this is like 20% versus four versus seven. Pretty precise. 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 a very significant increase in risk. And it's the significant increase in your risk of

developing an adjective 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 behaviors? Well, I think the adoption studies are really interesting. That's”

another great resource, right, to establish a genetic predisposition to some of this behavior. So tell us about what we discussed. 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 college and a need or hiser 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 a adoptive parents in a close

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 were more likely to develop those same things. Three 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 that's as high as three, sometimes it's one and a half 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. A adoptive children who never

live with their biological parents are three times more likely to abuse drugs if biological parents abuse 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 Tinker Pullderman and 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 intuitions because we are now so used to

environment interactions, of course you have some agency but also a limited amount of at least

that's your experience of it. And your set point that you inherited from your parents that maybe got canilies 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 addicted to alcohol?”

On the other side of the scale, the addition we can kind of get there. Violence. We don't want. We don't want. We don't want. Let anyone off the hook for that. Yes. Because violence has a clear victim other than the person doing the 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 plagianism of it's either biological nature or moral. And we're

asked to choose. For body weight we can be like, okay let's re-classify this as biological instead of moral. With addiction there's like, I don't know, 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. And then we're saying we're not going to 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 mind fuck. I think for Americans to keep all of that in their heads at the same time. Yes. They're all a part of this aggregative gene gene who are identified. It's not just me. This is such a teen science effort. My former graduate student just is an author and the paper I just finished. And if he's listening to this he's probably like, it was me. I don't know what in the

choices. But I think a really great example is just one gene and one gene in isolation has a tiny effect. But I think it's illustrative anyway. It's this. C-A-D-M-2. It's a solid hegean 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 I think I'm going to take this into 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,

they'll block a gene. And there are a handful of these genes, but there are three billion genes.

Well, there's probably not three billion genes. Oh, how many genes are there? I think we're estimating there's 20,000 genes. Oh my god, I'm sorry, there's three billion A-C-G-T-A on the DNA strength. Yes, humans have way fewer genes than we thought that we were going to have. That was one of the big surprises that the humans genome project. It was like, we're so complex. We're going to have more genes than anyone. There's species of apples. I think that

have more genes than we do. Oh, 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 red. 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 genic gene,

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 more fans or dwarfism. Most people are taller or shorter because you got a thousand 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

five years ago, I write about this MBA player who happened to sit on a plane next to a geneticist. And the geneticist was like, why are you so tall? You're seven and a half feet tall. And he was like, I don't know. And so they genotype them. He didn't have any gigantic, there's no weird

And he just had six standard deviations above the mean and all of these tiny, if you're flipping

“the genetic point, it just came up heads like a thousand 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 likely hoods 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 in 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. 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. They're still ambiguity sometimes 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. I feel like they'll be coming hot and fast. I'm very low confidence about my predictions for AI. Okay. 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 going to be in 10 years? I think where we are now”

would have felt like science fiction 10 years ago. 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 and the brain? Well, now it would be a great time to introduce the fact that this group of genes you in 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? Right.

And 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 disorders, we can look with reference data sets and be like, okay, we'll wear 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 just rocksprane development in utero, is associated with elevated risks of aggressive behavior in animals. Children who are born preterm or elevated risks for ADHD and cognitive problems, there's something about pregnancy and your brain being grown

“when you're being cooked. That seems to be really important. And I think, again, part of the”

reason we struggle to make sense of this is we're so used to thinking 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 lock of who they came home from the hospital to is there. But that genetic lock 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 to have

appropriate toleration for someone with ADHD, for someone with autism and these are neural developmental 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 neuro, which would be addiction and these other behaviors. But then Phil's obviously we have an interesting line between all of these. Yes. People's intuitions about what does it mean if you can show that someone's

behavior is linked to their early eugenetic and environmental lock. 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

to addiction, I think we're kind of all over the place actually as a culture. But then as soon as

there's harm to another person and there's violence, you're weight. So they might have inherited a predisposition to violence and that's supposed to make me more compassionate of them. This is

“very supposed to be determined that book. I was just thinking about this the other day. I think”

I'm a determinist. I really do believe that's interesting. Before you got in here, we're both saying we love supposed to be but we don't like determinants. You don't? Knowing all this, I don't know if I'm a determinist. Like in the academic philosophy sense, so the academic philosopher would say a determinist in an incompatibleist as someone who says, everything we do is determined by causal factors are agency as 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 hatred. 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. We're 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 in 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. Joining in my two arguments against it. 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 noble. If we knew the location of every atom in the universe, we could see exactly why this effect 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 predictions 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,

this amazing dude on Neil Fees teaching us about self-organizing complex systems and also

organizing complex systems of which we are one. They have to have divergence in them or they collapse. And divergence is in mainly non-deterministic. So there cannot be a system without divergence in it. 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 fool. I'm like I'm determined to pick up this quote 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 going to behave that way. I'm not 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 of program or living out of process that our genes have been done. I think we're living out of very

tricky probabilistic situations. We have a very high probability of students certain things, which I agree with. Yeah, I think that number's very high actually. For people who are listening or 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 end the book is there is a huge difference between removing people who are dangerous from hurting

other people. No one is arguing for no housing. 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 have done the same thing in the same environment with the same genes. You're not better than anyone. So let's remove them and

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 the 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. 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. Like I'm feeling your pain. Unless the person

being shocked is first portrayed as being a wrongdoer in some way. They've 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 good guy, they get 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. Dopa-manergic areas. And now I think it's”

telling us multiple interesting things. The first is that why do we feel pleasure at certain activities? Why do we have dopamine when we have sex in each 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're going

to reason ourselves out of that. Like I think it's baked into the sauce. I think that telling people that they're going to 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 going to go really against the grain of our nature. Stay tuned for our mature 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. 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 over consume because when we found something in bloom, we were smart to over consume 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 night in

“the 7 Kingdoms if you want to know. Did you watch the first game? 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 in me and the other guy we're going, let's go boys like the delaying of this mother fucker pay was so visceral and I was aware of it. I'm like look at this thing but then 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 a nation. 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 five they're like”

care of my stickers 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 schedules 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 without 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

dopamine emergency response to seeing your wrongdoer suffer and you let both of those run the

“show you know I think you end up with the system that we have now 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 yeah maximally and not everywhere in the world does that we have examples of doing differently and those are really instructive and 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 going to have to step over our evolutionary bias we're

going to have to constantly confront these things that we're serving us at one time but now don't serve us and we got to 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 going to do about the fact that we are massian perfect people who have to live with other massian perfect 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 kind yes they should be virtuous we can aim to be better in our

institutions and we are in our worst moments that's right and so when we evaluate some of our current institutions they're operating very root how it over you're tributably retreated I also read things

that I never hear them pronounce and then I have talked about the book and I'm like no I don't know if

I'm 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 William Jr's family dress it's a very bar it's like an ideas festival and hungry and there's 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 we talk about that 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 going to 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 in bread 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 four identical quadruplets armadillos and then there's what is known as clonal fish who are genetically highly homogenous oh I won't leave out this one there's also studies of cloned pets so in Texas there is 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 identical environment are you behaving in the exact same way so chance was a very docile bull second chance gord 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 gorded the owner and he said he's not giving up on him but chances are a little different because chance came to them late yes and they don't know the initial but the rats when you put them together that's yeah so in this case it's mice but they did as they have embroidery 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 and these big mouse by variance and see what happens and there's digital sensors everywhere so they can see you know which mouse is moving where and what you see is the emergence of mouse personality individual

around a lot which ones are grassing which ones are very inhibited and don't want to come out when it's light and you can 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 others 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 and how that first

interaction went and not could be initially a chance but then life builds on chance there's a path dependent to those initial things my colleague at UT also just these studies where he has mice and a vivarium and they establish a dominant hierarchy and then he plugs 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 paying all the time and so you see immediately genes involved in drinking water

so that I can make peace 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 we're complicated it is in 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 nurturing 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 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 people are upset that people are punitive some of us are but I think people like that there's well they're designed to as we you know right so like I don't see how how

“that's such a good question and honestly I think it's such an important question now what we're”

living through politically or people are being hurt on the streets and then other people are cheering 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 aspects of our biology

that gives us pleasure that we can indulge in and overindulgent and indulgent regardless of how much it's hurting other people gosh I wish I had a good answer now question how do you convince people that it's a problem to one 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 be curious to know what you think about embracing these genes are 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 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 cast nine which is our technology for gene editing”

is going to be mono genic disorders like you have sickle cell brother syndrome as an example of serious anti-social behavior caused by one gene the technological question that we're going to have to grapple with is not going to be gene editing it's going to be genetic selection and so that the technique in which people create IVF embryos they might do this because they have fertility

electively so you could conceive the old fashion 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 an employee like down syndrome or trust me a teen is there a mono genic disorder and then looking at a polygenic 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 in the New York subway right now

that say have your best baby and it is an ad for pre-implantation genetic testing of embryos

“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 as higher or lower but that's totally different than say like Huntington disease where if you have this gene you're getting at that disorder so there's a uncertainty around the estimates that I don't think

often comes through in the marketing for these techniques 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 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 we had some

eugenic dictator and they said no one gets to reproduce the old fashioned way everyone's going to do IVF created embryo's polygenic selection and we are only going to select the embryos that have the least risk-taking genes and we're going to 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 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 two to three times more likely to be a CEO addiction how many of our writers are addicts how many of our poets how many of our writers are all 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 there might be more upside than there is downside this is a tradeoff situation so we're coming up with quote normal we're gonna 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 we look at who is most likely

to be a successful entrepreneur for the age of 30 we can see this in the data it's people who have social privilege right men for 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 to link with behavior when they're a teenager 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 developmental probably be no art there would be so many things missing 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

professions oh god that's so hard though if you're thinking about a distribution and the top one

“percent 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 all of the above 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 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 we're criminalized in their time

so I don't want to underplay series and a social behavior has costs it hurts people but I don't think that we can send them 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 the genes are doing 90 different things than the human body diversity is grist for evolution there's no evolution without mutation there's no evolution without diversity yeah Galileo is a criminal soccer cheese Jesus yeah criminal yeah okay original sin on the

genetics of vice the problem of blame in the future of forgiveness radical book I do applaud and love how personal and memory it is 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 when you all be going join this episode unfortunately they make some mistakes

“rubbrad is coffee is today very 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 um book as we talked about it for the lesson our deck is wearing his sunglasses that he just got that he's obsessed with the aforementioned some previous episode go find it if you missed it do you ever watch people at like award shows who wears sunglasses and they pull it off yeah I'm a little jealous of them I know people would be like what do you do I can't they be like why 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? because it's a nice little safety blanket I know you know it's like a little armor I think people 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 guys I'm losing my touch because I hadn't even thought

“about that uh don't I'm not gonna any ideas and then too I think they'd be like oh he has an eye”

issue a style or pink eye he's like my exactly that killer deep generation yeah now another pair that I have just look how gorgeous he's a um 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 you're interested in wearing them inside the lot I don't know what it is about these I prefer to just be at them wow is that something yeah because I don't think you're

going to go high high 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 at you're the opposite of someone who's who's needing a shield that's fair yeah I think um like there are people with a lot 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 in rubber neck that I want to be caught doing that okay hold on put

your glasses on okay if they're going for the listener they're going back on they're going back on the listener now I want that to look 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 then you're looking that way oh and you're making that chair oh yeah yeah that is a sexy chair but if I that you can't see me okay okay so I tend to walk and travel even when I drove here way back

when I don't take to go cups I just bring my mug open carry yeah yeah yeah yeah I like

in here but there's not it's just tea and I saw an 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”

energies and I wonder what you think about that well I bet what they're inferring is that someone has scrambled to leave the house hmm and they didn't either have time to transfer it to a to go travel mug or they're just like so skatingwampus leaving they don't even know it's in their hands yeah I know I don't think I would leave tending 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 that yeah ended up being a positive review of these types of

people yeah yeah me which I appreciated but also like I don't think it means I don't give a

fucking actually means there's no to go mugs that are as cute as my mugs yeah you you're a month collector yeah kind of sore a curator of mugs yeah so it's it's actually more about that mixed with rats rats in waterbox you know you're afraid to have a close and close carry I just don't think you could 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 and I do get a little I will clean like 600 dishes and I will sometimes leave these two or three

“things because I'm like they can't be clean it's on if you want to drink out of this impossible”

the clean thing you gotta clean it I'm with you I get a little stubborn about sure and I should just clean I'm in most of the time I do just clean them and I like myself more if I just clean it of course but I am annoying when someone makes a choice it's gonna be harder for me 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 I have surrendered to that they're everywhere right I'm an England 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 go yeah 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 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 place sure if I were having like a piece of toast fine but I generally feel like I'm putting something with some moist strawberry toss yeah and so there's two different stacks of them

okay basically his and hers yeah sure and this battle of which ones 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 cover so 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 bottom and now we've just added it kind of like the game you play we put a hand on each other and yeah there I was like oh my god

this is hysterical look at us like working out this plate thing in the cabinet I know make make 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 it 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 I 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 but traditionally historically the plastic cover ones are a little bit small 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 just wanting to use those points but all these hilarious little subtle

quiet drama that are going on in households is this 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 you don't you don't constantly pulling

and I'm like someone needed to scrub that before you put it in there the dishwasher's 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 but I just put on the drying rack to me there's an extra step and it's as 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 deem thing done with that can I put 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 so they don't want to waste and that's admirable so what ends up happening is the things everyone

uses a lot end up in there and then you out of it's always the bowls are gone we're out of bowls

“and then we're out of spucking silverware now I got to go into the washer and re-washed the whole”

fat part I get to you I get that okay so I want I want I want to weigh in on the dishwasher because I have a very very rare and unique perspective okay so I grew up as dishwasher being the my chore like loading it on loading 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 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 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'm walking down yeah I can't I'm burning this place down I don't know what to do I mean hours hours so so now back full circle I have my did 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 and they're just for fun no 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 have to”

rinse what if there's cheese stuck to like a knife or for you got to get that up and you got to push

that off yeah scrub it with a spoon I never I don't scrub anything with the sponge before it goes in

I do rinse in sometimes I use my hand to like get something hard off of it yeah but I don't do of any scrubbies my breakfast every single morning as you know is oatmeal bobs trust plants two scoops of protein everything sticky protein sticky oatmeal 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 put the hot water immediately like a finish you put it

in the sink hot water in the bowl then you leave right so it's sitting now well first of all

no then we may have dishes soaking all or that's unacceptable to have a bunch of stagnant water mosquitoes might lay their eggs in there it will not just fall it it's gonna require scrubbing period because it's that sticky the this it's like a cement okay okay okay yeah it was when you're talking about cooking so and I'm recognizing like what I'm so too yeah this is like the most type aside of my personality and it's probably so my king 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 then by the time I put the stuff on the table there's no dishes and I'm waiting for someone to clap their hands for me you can clean while you're cooking and then you don't have this big thing to do because there's all these five 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 now and I fight about that all the time clean while you go yeah and you're a what clean go while you go guys yeah because we're cooking together yeah listen we should move on together oh not stop here everyone wants to be flush tries to be a clean while you go person okay normally if I'm making it like when I make

and I don't have any dishes and I've been just all of a sudden at the end when things are

“system breaks down it backs up all of a sudden you have so much crap and like there's a logger”

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 all the dishes that had the food or dirty all the dishes of people are eating offered dirty to 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 but things are scrubbing that you got to do cleaning while you go is definitely the way but you can and we're making up meal pun intended out of this

but of course now you just so it's figured he's a great example I'll watch crystal 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 an absorbent it's like a sauce right and then those things are like thick with saturated spaghetti says almost gonna 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 gotta constantly tell yourself this everyone's so different I mean even because you put your paper plates in the microwave oh yeah love it yeah I don't put any paper in the microwave why

I'm against that tell me why um 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 well you probably shouldn't microwave the kind of paper plates I use because that's

probably when I get a lot of particles but leaching that's also part of it I'm like I don't think this paper's supposed to be heated up like this so I I heat glass okay um and uh ceramic yeah but everyone's different is all 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 but what I realize it's like it's such specific categories yeah um like prisons 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 start so like it's good as you think you are there's just stuff you don't

“even see you would be living with me I waste so much I don't care and I think it's you don't have”

any kind of ethical hangover no and actually my parents are here I am but I wonder if it's because my parents care a lot about waste uh and your rebelling and their frugality 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 I think I've rebelled because I'm just like oh I didn't my parents were here when my farm box came okay I get a farm box once every two years delivery of produce yeah from

the farmers but it's a one person box it's not like that much stuff and it but it's exciting I love it and it came and my my dad was like oh cool then he was like what are you going to do with all this food as I was like well I mean I cook stuff and he was like well I'm going to get 30% of my what do you mean yeah I either like maybe I'll give it some amount of throw it out or yeah and then

“I think they hated that you know my mom made spaghetti but really quick did they hate because these”

are too much different categories did they hate that you're wasting your money or did they hate that the food's being wasted both yeah double-waming yeah okay it's not even like they're not thinking it through like oh wasted food because other kids don't have food it's not like ethical like that yeah 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 you know my

mom made spaghetti one night and then she was like you know then they were both obsessed with like eating the spaghetti one or you need the space rest of the spaghetti and one as it did and I was like we're not going to eat it let me throw it away you're spending all your brain power on figuring out when you get the leftovers spaghetti on your vacation yeah I'm somewhere in the middle of you too yeah they're my parents they're gonna like anytime I spend like like

they're probably still worrying about how you're going to turn out like I don't think 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

walking around and living their lives and they the came out of your body and they came out of your

egg in your sperm like it's too scary even to they left this morning and you know they were walking they just they're just so fine they just think everything through so many steps you know it's so like my time was like okay well the Uber I guess we'll just walk to the he's probably worried about how they're gonna get in the game exactly like how they're gonna I was like well it's fine because we'll just give them the code that calls my phone he was like yeah

“but you're I think I have to call your father okay whatever just I guess do whatever you're”

gonna do they are but I know 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 and I heard somebody else walking up and I heard him say to my parents "Do you live here?" and they's and then my dad said no our daughter lives here and I was like oh that's so cute that is but think of funny they look walking to our neighborhood with growing bags I know but like I thought that was they really don't look like all over the daughter if they could be carrying television sets out of a house and I would not think they were

their opposite or eyes they'd be great and that way they'd be great yeah so it's cute it's cute to have parents who care about their daughters and their son it's really sweet but also

“I'm like oh great just get out of here I'll be in here yeah I'll throw everything away”

thinking 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 well what what what do you think about going out to the beach and writing bikes along the strand the paved bike path Santa Monica and Santa Monica which if you don't live here I would imagine you'd think well people must go up 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 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 six seven miles we got to look at some of the fire damage and the palisade you can see it from the bike path and then we went to my fairy favorite restaurant from when I lived there for 10 years free from me stall 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 when we got a side of pink sauce you know but 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 that they could take it early you know 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're 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 uh of course she she's like she's like she's like I was like you know same stuff I'm like she doesn't even care did she say oh she's like fanes but I I know I know I've just been drinking like my dad told me he got off an exit I wouldn't care it's just the nature okay I don't know well so it culminates

and I never I'm rarely in Santa Monica but I did live there for a decade we leave freedom

me still and of course I always have to drive by my old apartment I can't go to Santa Monica now we're in a hurry to beat traffic I was like turn I'm turning right on you because I got I got to look at yeah okay um so we're dry I don't even stop I know better than to stop well I would have liked to stop and stare at the building for five minutes think all these things all that

“for the gang came up my share well it's maybe that's what they're worried you're gonna start talking”

about like I don't want to know 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 live for a decade 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 to pride of it being her own place and her pay for it yeah I think that's very foreseeable for her I got a hundred percent see that and then in which case it'll be something similar to the thing

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 I was wearing that soul cycle I did not I was making $13 an hour it was tight it was hard but you weren't paying I wasn't I was like I was stressed a lot but I wasn't like deeply in my soul panic because I knew at the end of the day one they could probably help me in a

jam and too I always go back there if I had to I could live in their basement if I had to like they

could support me right in that way even though they told me over and over again not like don't depend on that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we we need like you know they were trying to scare me of course what you come back what you're not going to come back yeah yeah we need to proceed as if you can't come back but of course you can't come exactly so you know that that's a little different but I

“agree with you I think I'm sure she'll want she's something of her prideful in the same way I'm kind of”

prideful um so but yeah so we're just and I'm also like I'm 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 the one next door it's just a building and she did go she gave me a like oh wow that's that's pretty like cool that that where you started and where we're at that's nice yeah yeah and then she like looked up on her foot like it was like chant she beat you what a say to your

dad when he's trying to feel proud of himself and instill a lesson and to use somehow it's also probably it's different because 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 yeah I think that's different probably but I do wonder yes if we were ever in Michigan because I very much want to do that I want to take them on a tour of a place I lived

didn't you already do that no I do that I did that with my dad with Aaron you that with Aaron

Aaron and I always go back to Milford and we look at his house in my house in our junior high

and a couple other places we hung out and we can sit there forever just look at it but yeah no I drove with my dad around and looked at every single place I was because I wanted to take pictures of it yeah of which I don't know where they are now but I had this but I doubt they would be terribly interested but they would be nice enough to act interested but I think they would be interested in that they're just a thing you know they're

they're they're given you're not interested at all and it's like in some ways yes it in some ways no obviously the older you get you become more and more interested because you start see you start understanding that they're you they you come from that like would you I would love to see you were a show yeah that I that I love yeah and I have I've been there I I when I was

“little yeah we stayed there and like I love that like that that's our family history that's what”

I mean I think part of its location yeah obviously seeing something in India I mean that really like he grew up in a village I don't even have the same thing he's just like yeah yeah and that's cool

but even like even in Savannah I feel like we would go buy sometimes the first house my

mom lived in and I thought I think that's cool okay okay good but I've been increasingly embarrassed about myself indulgence okay yeah and it's pretty self indulgence like well you can just go by yourself maybe it is only to be fair I would have gone without her yeah 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 wow yeah that's 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 Feles I just thought my whole world was gonna unravel yeah and I had this fantasy that I was gonna like rebuild it in my garage I

“didn't like oh my god so that I could go like sit in it and remember the hunger and right in there”

maybe yeah and and and and I still have so many recurring dreams about that apartment that is weird because we were just talking about yeah we were just talking about it with the house where you're just like I don't care if I don't care to be back there well I think a lot of it is like I

20 to 30 in that apartment yeah that I still kind of defined myself as yeah and that I kind of

“came to this house already baked sure interesting the kids are the new edition there yeah”

this huge thing and the only part I'm nostalgic about is I was saying when we talked about it's like I see pictures of when the kids played there it kind of gets me emotional you know it's like so I'm very nostalgic for that house yeah yeah very like we did so I mean I guess so much of all of our relationships were yeah yeah the movie room how many shows we watch tiger candy show yeah we watch we played so many games yes at least we were outside all the time it was a very good

patio to hang it was great and and yeah the the babies and like I I have a lot of nostalgia for the house sometimes when like on Halloween because your sister lives there on Halloween will you know stop

by there for candy yeah and almost always the group is always like god we remember like everyone

other like good we were just here all the time so I haven't 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 yeah that's funny because we were yesterday had dinner with my parents on fair facts and so we were blocks away from Anthony we're Anthony and I live yeah which I guess I would say like I'm trying to think of what I'm the most nostalgic for spacewise yeah I mean it's gonna be the

apartment I was just yeah for sure but probably that one on gardener the one that Kristen also

“lived in 10 years before that because I think I brought this up recently like we did improv practice”

there and we played running phase we had no money so I am nostalgic but I didn't feel like oh

let's drive by gardener like I didn't in fact I'm kind of like yeah I kind of just like it in my head and I don't want to see that again yeah yeah yeah we are weird but last thing I'll add is and I also in the continuing updates on the movies I decided to show Lincoln the prestige I invited you and your family right great movie it's better than you remember it is a flawless movie it's so fucking good and Lincoln was blown away the end of 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

“something I'm also an identity like the movie effect it is 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 the two of me I don't like it and I had a convince her I wasn't a twin you had to walk it back okay let's do some facts let's do facts stay tuned for our mcerexper if you dare did you have dairy? no there was some in my salad last night my little gem salad

at Cara the better minute nice I avoided as much of it as I could and I hated pushing aside that yummy permission you would sell it right the cheese is so good on it yeah and I hated I wish I had asked for no cheese because I hated seeing yeah I felt like a wasting money too like oh this is where's this going this is expensive permission that I'm not eating yeah it would be very tempting it to see it there not have it in your bite yeah yeah yeah yeah I have some

truffle fries though that's yummy that is the spot is there parmanet there is a little part so you know it's a little scatty want this okay that's okay I mean minimally it's a reduction yeah and then someone in the comments suggested I take an enzyme called DOA or DAO okay this is a ding ding ding ding it was like hey there's this enzyme I take before E and it's like kind of a histamine blocker and my nose runs after every time I eat and I was like mine too so ordered it and then

it went out to Cara and then Hannah said to Kristen did you take your enzyme and she was no I forgot it and I go wait what what enzyme and Hannah goes I was suggesting that Kristen

this is crazy I just heard about it in the comments and ordered it and it comes tomorrow and that's

already knocked up on it that's sim sim very very sim okay this is for Katherine Paige Harden so did I go to call your bill elementary school no I had to ask my mom this oh this is the

“Memphis period yes she said call your bill I'm entering I said and I think I said yeah but I was like”

I don't think that's right um I texted my mom she said I went to farming to elementary she remembered nope she said she had to look down okay that's impressive yeah and then I was like oh yeah farming tin although I have a on child remembers my kids name I don't want to say it I love but I'll remember the name of my kids elementary you will but you were there briefly yeah I was it I went to um five elementary schools you did I could have only one big move right

well first school peach tree elementary okay classic yeah kindergarten first grade then we moved

to call your bill I went to farming tin for second and third grade okay then we moved back oh sorry I'm wrong I went to four elementary schools okay so we moved back and I went to Berkeley

“yeah I was a survived 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 then I went so then I went to try to who telemetry my fifth 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 mean was there any people from peach tree in the final elementary elementary you know so brand new start in fifth grade well no so brand new start in fourth grade okay and then

brand new start again in fifth grade okay right so fifth grade then you stuck with those kids for junior yeah well then it was very fun as an in sixth grade some people from fourth grade you know like then people came back into the fold which was cool that would have happened to me how

“did I go on a millford high and not switched yeah well you know that one of my first”

semester moments was 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 and fourth grade it's not even really a thing like I'm looking at fourth graders I know like the way that you lunch and stuff's just cool or okay yeah and she was also really nice but she was cool pretty now yeah good for her and it was

Ashley and I was like kind of trying it you know it's like trying to be your friend but you know we weren't really good friends but I do think it was a better birthday party she had so many beanie babies um her like her mom was into it and so she had so many they were like in cases and stuff not like fucking Valentino and LeBare T it's 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 in a beanie babies the moms in the north

I I do for some reason I mean yeah my mom was real in a beanie babies though oh oh oh oh my sister was she like getting them for her and bringing them home like we got troubles yeah yeah they had a

whole band 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 like there's women who collect dowels and it's not because they have kids no no also no the purpose of this is like ultimately to like have a billion dollars yeah yeah I know I don't want to comment on that but anyway so so then I moved and then I went to fifth grade away from Ashley and then in sixth I thought about her and before sixth grade I was like I wonder if like Ashley will be there like yeah and on the right home

the bus right home on the first day of school guess who's on my bus Ashley and guess why her parents got divorced her mom moved into my neighborhood oh my gosh it became best oh wow best friends I we lived I mean I looked at her house I just she didn't live at mine but yeah get off at her stop one time my dad got really mad because we got lost in the neighborhood you couldn't find us

anyway so we were best friends and we were best friends for a long time she was on my

shielding squad also fellow double state champ oh my goodness okay we still talk we attack 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 he yes she did yeah and she deserved it she really deserved it she's a great great lady she's a great leader yeah yes yes anyway yeah I did a lot of moving so farming tin now is it pronounced polagious or polagious unfortunately it's pronounced polagious

“I don't you didn't like that and she's polagious more I know that's what you said”

I did that I don't know what I'm consistent something that where I'm not even consistent and she because she was saying polagious that sounds nice yeah and you were like yeah and she was like I don't know some people say polagious and you said I like polagious but it's polagious yeah how many jeans do humans have remember we were we were I was I'm so embarrassed still well I was talking about individual ACGT exactly DNA strand which is in the billions was only 20

some thousand yes she said it around 20 thousand yes humans have approximately 20 to 25 thousand protein coding jeans yeah yeah I mean what a factor I was off by it's a low numbers some are to that of many organisms which is embarrassing all right 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 a blank they found the gene and I got you know I just had this experience like

almost nothing isn't polagenetic 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 jeans that you could be one standard deviation above the mask and a result in seven feet tall I know but there are some she's like sickle cell I've had this great curiosity of how people are keeping taller like they're 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 six three or four yeah and his”

ex wife isn't tall and Aaron's five he's six four yeah but like what where is that come who had the gene well it wasn't the gene I know we're learning so much it's only thing I'm bummed I didn't have any boys because I would like to see like what I get a six foot five boy because I I exceeded my father he had exceeded his presumably I might have a way down my head well it's girls will probably be taller than Kristen yes yes although Delta's 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 um and Delta's getting there she's getting there she wants to get there faster and now it's so cute like she lost it to the other day and she's ecstatic she called me bloody still actively bleeding ecstatic she wasn't getting rid of those babies I know she did touch

she's like I was my I lost my tooth and I had known that this was a big deal yeah and then she brought it up again there did I tell you I was like yeah well you know when she went to the dentist and they excreted her mouth she started bawling when he says it's gonna be a while

“as she was devastated yeah I don't remember him any thoughts about my teeth but they're”

really just all fell out really quick so 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 ritributively ritributively 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

of you them this American life I did a long time ago but I don't remember this American life for a minute had a video show but I watched that yeah yeah it's called on this American life the story is called if by chance we meet again which is very such a good name 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 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

so Ralph and Cindy offered up chances DNA for the experiment second chance was born

“and he was eerily just like chance except he wasn't which they found out the hard way but I”

looked up twice it was twice but it was orange bad I wonder where we're right now I mean that that story was 12 years ago I wonder if there's been subsequent do you think wow yeah and I hope he sold first occurred on the bull's second birthday I mean two 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 the fuck I can't

imagine how terrible would be to be attacked by a bull oh my god a huge horns that's strong neck you see they pick up cars and stuff when they want they're insane they're 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 case are you gonna put it here anything the fingers in your butt the thing is gonna work well I mean it's free okay the exact figures on the dyslexia numbers

are yet two to five times more likely to be in leadership roles compared to the general pop

it also is dyslexia effects roughly 10 to 15 percent of the general population one

five to 35 percent of entrepreneurs were in the surveys and 20 to 40 percent 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 okay so yeah people with dyslexia are 2.4 times more likely to drop out of high school without proper intervention they're also up to three times more likely to be identified with ADHD as 35 to 45 percent 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 a seven or eight years old

and women at 36 right and so yeah that all kind of holds yeah that's it that's if we're Catherine Page Harden 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 up 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 haven't killed anyone but I have had moments of

aggression towards other men right other men have been hurt by me in battle shit Robert the ever punch someone in the face I don't think so me there yet yeah not I'm not rolling it up it doesn't seem fun I have to be honest like it doesn't seem even fun

like the like the same the first ball seems like it hurts really bad to the puncture like to even

on my hand it seems like that would hurt really bad yes well you know I have broke my hand yeah miss knuckles that are submerged from it so yeah but I'm I try to make this case to other you don't feel anything all right there's no there's no pain whatsoever yeah 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 gonna hurt and then come to find out it doesn't hurt at all none of it hurts you're your brain goes straight to it's primitive yeah knows what to do stay the fun isn't the contact it's that 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 gonna get hurt that's like the elation and a fight is if you're in charging 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 and it's early just like oh I have to maintain the upper hand or I'm gonna get really really hurt and this 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 gonna get hurt but when people start fights that's all pride and you get there's like it it's 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 the one you shut this down yeah but then once the action

it was it's all part of it I love you