Huberman Lab - How Genes Shape Your Risk Taking & Morals | Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden

Starting point is 00:00:00 There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they see someone suffer if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer. So ordinarily, if you see someone be shocked, you have interior insula. It's like you're being shocked, too. Unless that person is first portrayed as violating some moral or social norm, in which case, dopamine, you get a reward out of seeing that person punish. I think that it is a lust just as much as lust for substances or lust for sexual partners. It is a desire people want to see people punished.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Catherine Page Hardin. She is a psychologist and geneticist and a professor at the University of Texas Austin. Dr. Hardin is an expert in how our genes shape our life trajectory, especially how they interact with life events during our adolescence and how they impact our long-term mental and physical health. Today we discuss the interplay of nature and nurture in addiction, criminality, susceptibility

Starting point is 00:01:22 to trauma, and the larger themes of sin, sociopathie, empathy, and forgiveness. As you'll soon see, Dr. Hardin is used. unique in her ability to define how biology, psychology, and the sometimes randomness of life interact to drive people's choices. Today, we talk about known differences between males and females, the role of hormones and hormone independent influences on male-female differences, and how people assume different roles in life depending on the power structures they find themselves in. I want to be very clear that this is not a tap dance around the big issues episode.

Starting point is 00:01:54 Today, you are going to hear a very direct conversation about what the best science says about the role of genes and environment on human choice and how the biology, meaning genes and everything downstream of them, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc., drive what choices are available to people and which ones they tend to make. I've long been a fan of Dr. Catherine Page Hardin's work because I know of no one else researching these topics with the level of rigor that she is. And as you'll soon hear, she is an exceptional educator. She's clear, she's direct to the question, and her compassion and belief in people's ability to better themselves, no matter what their genes are and to better the world is woven into everything she says, and it's all backed by data.

Starting point is 00:02:34 I should also mention that I learned during today's episode that Dr. Catherine Page Hardin has a new book coming out soon. It is entitled Original Sin on the genetics of vice, the problems with blame, and the future of forgiveness. And you can find that anywhere books are sold. It's now available for presale. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Catherine Page Hardin. Dr. Catherine Page Hardin, welcome. Hi, thank you for having me.

Starting point is 00:03:14 Few things are as interesting to people as the relationship between genes and behavior, or what we call genotype and phenotype, the expression of all the stuff downstream of genes. And few things are as interesting as adolescence and puberty and the home we grew up in and how our genes interact with our choices, et cetera, you work at the intersection of all of those, which is a very brave thing to do. Could you just frame for us why you selected to study the relationship between genes and outcomes using adolescence as the time point in which you jump off from those questions because it could have been, you know, from infancy or in an old age. Why adolescence? Yeah. So I did my PhD at the University of Virginia and I was trained as a clinical psychologist.

Starting point is 00:04:06 And if you're looking at when does mental illness emerge, when does this risk for mental illness really start to increase, it's in adolescence. So most cases of substance use disorders or addiction begin in adolescence, that's when people's risk for depression. goes up, if you're going to have a first psychotic episode, that's going to be in late adolescence, early adulthood. So from a clinical perspective, adolescence is really interesting. And then I'm also trained as a lifespan developmental psychologist. So thinking about how does what's happening early in the life reverberate really through the rest of your lifespan. And if you think about when in life do individual differences between people emerge, can

Starting point is 00:04:53 get deeper. When are people's life trajectories really starting to be a parent? It's in adolescence. So I came into this field really interested in teenagers, late childhood in the teenage years, so thinking about puberty, sexual behavior. But then from there, what's happening in adolescence? It's also rule breaking or aggression or, again, risk for alcohol and drug use. So my research program was really based on, okay, well, what's happening in this period of life where the genes were born with and the family environments we were raised with? How do they combine to shape people's lives? By the time people finish their teenage years, they begin adulthood. They're beginning adulthood on such different life trajectories. What ages constitute

Starting point is 00:05:42 adolescents? I mean, that's changing, I think, right now. We typically think of adolescence is beginning with the physical changes of puberty, right? Adolescence is this period of transition to reproductive and social maturity. So we're thinking of adolescence as beginning between 10 and 13 when people are going through puberty. I think more controversial is when does adolescence end? Because historically, we've defined that as you're an adult when you take on the social roles of adulthood. And that keeps being, you know, for various reasons, economic, social reasons, pushed back later and later. So I've typically studied people between 10 and 25, so that kind of 15-year-old, a 10-year-old is clearly a child, a 25-year-old is about to be kicked off their

Starting point is 00:06:33 parents' insurance, they can finally run a car, they can technically take on the social roles of adulthood. And that's a long period of time where a lot of things are happening in the body, in the brain. This may be outside the scope of what you work on, but I've always been struck by the fact that while kids, including myself, generally hit puberty somewhere, as you said, between 10 and 13 or maybe 14, some seem to go through puberty for a much longer period of time. And I think of puberty as perhaps one of the biggest developmental milestones because the brain changes, hormones change, of course, but perceptually and how people perceive you changes completely. And the acquisition of what we know as secondary sex characteristics seems to occur at such

Starting point is 00:07:24 different rates. So, I mean, I can be open about this. I know I hit puberty by, I know, at 14. But then I didn't, you know, I didn't really shave until I was almost graduating college. Yeah. But I had grown, right? Whereas there were other times. kids that we went home for the summer. And they came back. And they came back, like, not a grown man, but looking like, this guy's like, looking like a grown man. Yeah, and kicking our butts in soccer. And he's just, you know, just in terms of everything, right? But then, and I don't want to out this person,

Starting point is 00:07:57 but then when I look at us now, it seems that the people that went through puberty more quickly may have aged more quickly in general. Is there any notion of a clock and the rate of that clock turning can be sort of visualized in puberty and predict longevity? Is there any relationship there? We are working on this right now. So we can think about individual differences in puberty in three ways. We can think about pubertal timing. So when does it start? For girls, puberty seems to be early puberty timing, seems to be the best predictor of risk for mental health problems, physical health problems, earlier menopause, shorter lifespan. Early onset of puberty.

Starting point is 00:08:41 Early onset of people. So it's not looking at the sort of rate of characteristics. For boys, it seems that the difference in puberal pace or puberty, some people call it puberty, so not just how early does it start, but how long does it take for all of those changes to unfold? We did a study many years ago where we found that boys were less effective. by when it started, but more affected, at least for their emotional development, by how quickly it happened with boys where they changed overnight having the hardest time sort of assimilating

Starting point is 00:09:17 all these changes that are happening because your cognition is not necessarily maturing as quickly as your height or your musculature or your hormones. And so it seems that boys seem to be particularly sensitive to going through puberty very, very quickly. What we've been looking at, recently is how the epigenome changes during this period of time. So the genome is your DNA. It's the DNA sequence in your cells, and that doesn't change with development. But the epigenome is everything on top of the genome that affects how DNA is used by the body, used by the cells. And there's one epigenetic mechanism known as DNA methylation, which is, you know, a methyl group is basically like this chemical tag, and it can get kind of tagged on to the genome. So there's great work in aging that shows that the epigenetic clock

Starting point is 00:10:14 measured by DNA methylation starts ticking in infancy and faster biological aging as measured by the epigenome predicts shorter lifespan, worse health, earlier mortality. What we looked at is, Well, instead of training an epigenetic clock on age, can we train it on puberal development, so how physically mature you are? And what we found is you can. So there's these, the clock is ticking as you get older, but there's another clock that's also ticking as you become more physically mature. And those two things are correlated. So the epigenetic changes that we see as you go through puberty faster,

Starting point is 00:11:02 do seem to be related to aging more rapidly, even in older life. So our reproductive development is, I think, very tied at a cellular, molecular level with our lifespan development. And we see that's across species. If you genetically engineer mice to go through puberty earlier, they die earlier. So we have this tradeoff between reproductive maturity and lifespan across species within species. and I think now we're beginning to see that at the molecular level too. Fascinating.

Starting point is 00:11:34 I also like the way that answer lands because I had a very protracted puberty. Yeah. And I feel grateful for that in retrospect. Because, you know, in terms of athletic ability and things like that, I wasn't really delayed, but I was sort of couldn't get past the sort of middle of the distribution. But then over time, I was like, this is kind of wild. I feel like I look very different. And I looked very different at 30 than I did at 20, like markedly different without doing anything except existing.

Starting point is 00:12:05 Some people seem kind of frozen in their adult look at this earlier age. At this earlier age. And from the animal literature, and I'm thinking the studies from my colleague Eric Knudson, in particular, where he was looking at plasticity in barn owls, but it's been looked at elsewhere. There's this really striking correlation between the onset of puberty and the end of the so-called critical period for neuroplasticity. Of course, plasticity can go on throughout the lifespan, but the plasticity that occurs until and around puberty is, yeah, an order of magnitude greater than the plasticity that's available as, say, a 30-year-old or 40-year-old. So they've done the experiments of like overreactomizing animals or taking the testicles out of animals and preventing, somewhat preventing puberty. And it doesn't seem to extend that window. So in humans, is there any relationship between cognition, brain flexibility, and the onset of puberty, the timing of the onset of puberty?

Starting point is 00:13:03 That's a really interesting question, and it's complicated, in part because it's like, well, what part of plasticity you're looking at, what part of brain development are you looking at? And also, with humans, we can't, unlike animals, manipulate the onset of puberty in quite the same way. So it does seem like there are some cognitive functions. Like if you're thinking about executive function ability, your ability to shift attention or update, the things that are tested by a standard IQ test, those seem to be much more age related. Whereas your ability to learn from peers versus your parents, your sensitivity to risk and certain types of emotions, that seems to be more tied to pure. rebutal development than with age, but they're so confounded within observational studies in humans that it's a continuing challenge to try to pull these apart. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers

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Starting point is 00:15:32 This is why I use the continuous glucose monitor from Lingo. I absolutely love it, and I'm thrilled to have them as a sponsor of the podcast. Lingo helps me track my glucose in real time to see how the foods I eat and the actions I take impact my glucose. When glucose in your body spikes or crashes, your cognitive and physical problems, performance do too. In fact, large glucose peaks in valleys lead to brain fog, fatigue, irritability, and hunger. What you eat, of course, plays a major role in your glucose. Some foods cause sharp spikes and big crashes, and others do not. But not everyone is the same in terms of how they respond to particular foods. Seeing your glucose in real time helps you build eating and other

Starting point is 00:16:09 habits that support metabolic health, mental clarity, and sustained energy. Lingo has helped me to better understand what foods to eat, when to eat, and how things like a brief walk after a meal can help keep my glucose stable and much more. If you'd like to try Lingo, Lingo is offering Huberman podcast listeners in the U.S. 10% off a four-week Lingo plan. Terms and conditions apply. Visit hellolingo.com slash Huberman for more information. The Lingo glucose system is for users 18 and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for the diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. Individual responses may vary. I recall some mouse data showing that if you expose young pre-pubescent mice to older males, they enter puberty earlier.

Starting point is 00:16:57 Does that exist in humans as well? So this is a controversial area of research. It is true that girls, human girls, who are raised with a non-biological father, do, on average, tend to go through puberty earlier. and some have hypothesized that it's a similar sort of cue from the environment about the stability and availability of resources. If dad is gone, maybe the provisioning of the environment is going to be less stable, maybe evolution would favor a reproductive strategy where you go through puberty earlier

Starting point is 00:17:36 rather than this continued, you know, childhood is so costly, right? Like a human childhood is long. It takes a lot. I have three kids. It takes a lot to feed them to grow an adult. And so it might make sense to say, okay, well, if resources are going to be scarce or if resources are going to be unpredictable, it might be better for me to have this strategy where I go through puberty earlier. What's difficult about that is that people don't end up in family structures at random. And moms who go through puberty are more likely to have sex at younger ages, more likely to end up in.

Starting point is 00:18:14 non-marital childbearing family structures and are likely to have daughters who are being raised without a biological father. So is it the biological father absence that's causing the earlier puberty or is it that mom has genes that predispose her towards early puberty? That changes her reproductive life and then she's more likely to be in this certain family structure and pass on those genes to her daughters. It seems to be a little bit of both, which is kind of the standard answer to all of our questions about nature and nurture, that there's a very strong genetic effect on the timing of puberty for both boys and girls, but that also the environment is pushing it in different directions. And that's part of why we're seeing that the age of puberty keeps going

Starting point is 00:19:03 down with every successive cohort. I mean, it's been falling for the last, basically as long as we've been keeping data, people have been going through puberty earlier. I'm realizing that you have a very very difficult job because the languaging is so delicate. So I'm just going to jump on the bed of nails for you. Okay. I've also heard that if the biological father is present, it provides a quote unquote protective effect against this earlier onset of puberty in the presence of the non-biological father.

Starting point is 00:19:34 But just that language, protective effect, implies that a one-year shift or two-year shift earlier puberty is somehow bad. Like, I think the human brain just works this way, right? for understandable reasons, like, oh, you know, these young girls that were supposed to go into puberty at 14, they're now going to puberty at, you know, 10 because the dad was absent. They pathologize it. They pathologize it. And they write a script. And then, as you point out, you know, there's things related to the situation as it relates to the mother and her choices and her genes.

Starting point is 00:20:04 And it's a real barbed wire mess for the typical person to try and pull apart, you're pulling these things. apart beautifully, but it's also fodder for anyone that wants to drive a narrative. That's tough. How do you navigate that? Because I'm going to ask you about adolescents and genes and sexual promiscuity, right? We're talking about sin. Today we're going to talk about sin. And so how do you, how do you look at these things that, I know you look at them objectively, but then how does one choose to communicate about these things in a way that doesn't arm people to kind of run their own agendas, whether they realize it or not. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:44 I'm not sure I'm the best person to give advice about that. I, you know, I'm a scientist, I'm a mother, I'm a college professor. I teach intropsych at UT. And so I'm always thinking about what does the science say? How would I explain this to my 13-year-old? How would I explain this to my undergrads? And with a sense of awe and respect for how, amazing a human body and brain is, right? Like to think about we as women, as at one time girls,

Starting point is 00:21:20 are equipped with a brain that's, you know, looking out into the environment and integrating all of these signals about internal and external, about, you know, resources and stress and body weight and light and integrating that to say, okay, now is the best time for us in our situation to go. Now is the time for our bodies to change in these amazing ways that is puberty. I feel like I keep coming back to if we have respect for the amazingness of the human body and the brain, and I'm trying to communicate it with clarity and empathy in the way that my 13-year-old son would understand. understand it. I don't always succeed at that goal, but that's really my, I feel like that as an educator, that's how I'm approaching these topics. Well, I appreciate you saying that. I'm,

Starting point is 00:22:17 I didn't ask that to kind of inoculate against anything, but now we can really get into the, get into the tango. Yeah. I have long thought that, um, the hypothalamus, right? These is various clusters of neurons above the roof of our mouth that drive hunger and sex behavior and thirst and aggression and a bunch of other interesting things is sort of the seat of the seven deadly sins. I have heard you say this before. And of course, all those brain circuits and structures interact with other brain circuits and structures.

Starting point is 00:22:53 There's no one location in the brain that governs a behavior entirely with some rare exceptions. How do you think about the genetic programming of the hypothalamus? in terms of people's proclivity for addiction, promiscuity, aggression, being overly passive in a way that might harm them or other people as well. I don't really think that much about the hypothalamus per se, actually, in relation to those behaviors. So just stepping back one step when you made this reference to the seven deadly sense, right? So if I kind of remember all of them, there's wrath, there's envy, there's lust, there's greed, their sloth. And what do the seven deadly sins have in common? How can we operationalize that more scientifically? What those behaviors all have in common is, I mean, I mean, accept envy for a second,

Starting point is 00:23:49 is doing something that might be pleasurable in the short term to the extent that there's negative consequences, negative consequences to yourself or negative consequences to other people. I think envy is interesting because you're seeing other people enjoying pleasures and you're like, I want that one, right? So it's kind of looking at other people's pursuit of things. I think of envy as a severe opportunity cost because as long as you're envying what someone else has or is doing, then you're missing all the stuff that's happening now that you could now build your life on. I think of envy as like a clue to what do you desire that you haven't admitted to yourself. One question I ask graduate students when I'm recruiting them is,

Starting point is 00:24:35 whose career do you want? Whose career do you envy? Because that tells me more about where they really want to go with their lives than, you know, their kind of prepared speech that they have for me. Yeah. You know, let's take wrath or let's take lust. You know, anger is an emotion that's useful. Sexual desire is an emotion that's useful.

Starting point is 00:24:56 When do they become sins? They become sins in our minds when people are, are engaging that behavior in situations where we think it's going to be harmful, not just to themselves, but to other people. From a clinical psychology perspective, we would never say we're going to study the seven deadly sentence. But we do have clinical language or diagnoses where the predominant symptoms that you see are people engaging in behaviors that are impulsive, that are.

Starting point is 00:25:30 are maybe immediately pleasurable, but in the long-term harmful to themselves or other people. So the obvious consolation of this is substance use disorders, right? So I'm ingesting a substance. It feels good. And I'm doing that at significant cost to myself and other people. We can also think about in childhood what would be called conduct disorder, which are people who are children who are engaging in wrath. They're engaging in aggression towards other people that hurts other people, their parents,

Starting point is 00:26:06 their teachers, their schools, the law is mad at them and they're doing it anyways. So what we're interested in scientifically is, are there genes that affect the likelihood of developing these disorders? Yes. Are there genetic overlaps between these different things? So do the genes that make it more likely for you to become addicted to substances? Also make you more likely to have many sexual partners. Also make you more likely to engage an impulsive aggression.

Starting point is 00:26:41 That also appears to be the question, yes. And then if we're looking at genes that have these associations, not just with substances or not just with sexual behavior or not just with aggression, but have cross-cutting effects on all of them, what are they? Like, what are those genes? Where are they active in the brain? When are they expressed in development?

Starting point is 00:27:03 So that's the work that our group has been doing for eight years now to try to discover what these genes. We have a good idea from twin and adoption studies that there are genetic influences on these things, and now we want to figure out what are they and where are they active in the brain. And it turns out that it's not just hypothalamus, it's really broadly distributed, you know, throughout your brain.

Starting point is 00:27:24 I'll update my... messaging. And I did couch it as a hypothesis. I never said that there were, you know, that you could lesion one of the sins. There are genes that vary between individuals that predict addiction, predict impulsivity and other things. You're exploring how the genes that predict addiction might predict impulsivity for other types of behaviors. I think I heard that the answer is yes. Indeed, there's overlap. Yeah. So I'd be very curious to know what those genes encode for.

Starting point is 00:27:59 What are the protein systems and neural circuit systems, hormone systems downstream of those genes? Yeah. If we go back one step, just why did we think that there were going to be genes that overlap between this? The biggest set of results that supported this hypothesis were adoption and pedigree studies. So these big data registries, you get them in Sweden, you get them in the Scandinavian in countries that keep track of every single one of their citizens. And what you see is that the seven deadly sins run in families. So if you have an adoptive parent who's addicted to alcohol, you are more likely to have many sexual partners and you're also more likely to be diagnosed with

Starting point is 00:28:42 conduct disorder or be arrested for a violent crime. Even if you were never raised by that parent, and it's not just substance use to substance use or violence to violence, or, you know, risky sexual behavior to risky sexual behavior. It seems that having a family history of any of these things increases your likelihood of manifesting any one of them. So that's why we thought that there was this genetic commonality across them. So what we found is that there's many, many, many genes that affect all of these behaviors. It's massively what we call polygenic. So it's not just one thing in one part of your genome.

Starting point is 00:29:22 It's distributed throughout your genome. And that those genes are most expressed in neurodevelopment in utero, in second and third trimester. So if you look at genes that are associated with all of these things and you see, okay, when in the human lifespan are they most active? They're active during cortical development in the second and third trimester. So there's something very like early neurodevelopmental that's going on them. And it seems to be affecting the brain's balance of inhibition and excitation. So as your brain is developing while you're in utero, the GABA system, which is inhibitory, and the glutamate system, which is excitatory, sort of being tuned, like in the balance between

Starting point is 00:30:12 those two things is being worked out. If children are born free term, part of the reason that that affects their psychological development negatively is because it affects this balance between inhibition and excitation. So I think we're still very at the beginning of this, understanding the bioannotation of it, the biological mechanisms of it. But what it suggests to us is that, you know, sometimes you hear like ADHD as a neurodevelopmental disorder. I think that substance use disorders are every bit as a neurodevelopmental disorder as ADHD. I think conduct disorder, which is characterized by impulsive aggression is every bit a neurodevelopmental disorder as ADHD.

Starting point is 00:30:55 Because if you look at the genes that are causing them, they seem to be affecting this pattern of brain development very, very early in life and this balance between the brain's inhibition and excitation. Fascinating. I mean, I have to be careful not to go down this rabbit hole. What I started off as a developmental neurobiologist. So, you know, fetal brain wiring is we've never really talked. about it on this podcast, but we've talked about the effect of fetal exposure to hormones in the brain in particular in terms of sexual differentiation. But yeah, there's a ton going on in there at these stages. And when I hear you talk broadly about, you know, the

Starting point is 00:31:37 balance between excitation and inhibition and some disruption in that or some alteration in that setting up a probability of the expression of some behavioral disorder or choice, set of choices. It makes me wonder, you know, about brain function more broadly is, you know, does that somehow make these choices to use a given substance or to do a impulsive behavior? Is it, we have to be careful not to project, but is it an attempt to restore some sort of order to that balance or is it an expression of an imbalance system? It's just a seesaw that never, that doesn't tilt all the way to one side or the other. I think that's a really good question and I don't know the answer to that.

Starting point is 00:32:21 When you talk to people who are, you know, experiencing a substance use disorder, sometimes you hear narratives that are very much in this kind of self-medication frame, right? Like I took this substance and it made me feel normal and I didn't feel normal before I had that. But that's not everyone. I mean, addiction is a very heterogeneous disorder. And so I think people's perceptions of their motivations to engage in substance use, that's harmful for them. And then how does that relate to the brain mechanism? And then how does that relate to early neurodevelopment?

Starting point is 00:32:58 I don't think we know, you know, the specifics of those links to the extent that you exist, yeah. My colleague, Anna Lemke, who wrote Dopamine Nation. Yeah. She once said that many addicts, behavioral addictions, I guess they call them process addictions or chemical addictions, that they have this feeling that unless they're experiencing something really intense, like life isn't really happening. They crave this intensity of experience. They want peak experience. Yeah. Either to numb themselves, I mean, it could be a trough experience in the case of sedatives.

Starting point is 00:33:33 But that stuck with me implied in that is that not everyone is seeking. these kind of extreme states. And so layered on what you just described in terms of excitation and inhibition balance, I kind of wonder if people who struggle with addiction are they're craving getting out of too much inhibition or too much excitation. But this is probably an overly simplistic hypothesis. So just thinking about that sensation-seeking thing, that driving for intensity, Usually when we think of people who are chronically engaging in some behavior

Starting point is 00:34:08 despite it having negative consequences for themselves and other people. So this could be drug use, this could be aggression, this could be risky sexual behavior. We can typically think of three dimensions of sort of personality and temperament that are often at play. And one of them is this sensation-seeking drive for intensity. So I want it, I want it and I want a lot of it, right? And then one is this disinhibition, failure of self-control. I can't stop myself. And then another, which I think is less well studied, is what people call antagonism or callousness, which is, I know this has negative consequences for other people, but I don't really care.

Starting point is 00:34:58 Like, that doesn't bother me. And I think what you see is that the combination of factors that goes into any one person's behavior can really vary. So for some people, it's like, this feels great, this feels good, I want the high, I want it to be intense. I'm not disinhibited. I'm deliberately seeking out this behavior. You know, I plan the drugs that I'm going to use for the club the whole week, and I plan my week afterwards. It's not just inhibited at all. It's very purposeful.

Starting point is 00:35:28 And then there are people that are like, I wasn't planning, but now I'm at the club and someone offered this to me and I can't stop myself. And then other people are like, I'm not, I like it okay. And I could stop myself. But these negative consequences that people keep harping on, you know, the fact that my partner doesn't like this or the police don't like this. Like, oh, you know, I'm indifferent, right? And so all of that to say, I think I think we need to be aware of the company. complexity and the heterogeneity of different people's motivations when they're doing these behaviors. Yeah, and these days we hear a lot about the role of trauma in addiction.

Starting point is 00:36:11 I mean, I can't do a single post or podcast about addiction and the biology and not hear, well, it's trauma-related. But of course, genes come from our parents. We'll talk about that, heritability. And so generational trauma or just childhood trauma doesn't even have to be transgenerational. It can get layered in there in a complicated way. And I'm not trying to say that trauma doesn't play a role. Clearly it does. But it seems that genes could be primary trauma in the parents, trauma in the children, traumatizing, you know, hurt people, hurt people.

Starting point is 00:36:47 It's the one cliche that seems to, you know, stand the test of time. I think it's very hard to say that something is. primary or secondary because everything's interacting with everything else. One of the scientific challenges and then also one of the very human tragedies that we often see is that the parents who have genetic risks who are passing those on to their kids are also the caregivers for those kids. And so the kids who would most benefit from firm, warm, stable, nurturing parenting are also the least likely to get it because the parents themselves are also dealing with their own stuff and they're also leading their own complicated lives. And so it's a tapestry. Like there's a

Starting point is 00:37:35 warp and a weft to a piece of cloth. There's the threads that go this way and this way. And I think that's how I think about the relationship between genes and trauma early experience is that really they both are woven together to build the brain and the body and the personality that then struggles with these behaviors later on in their life. So if we were to have access to our genomes heading into adolescence or child kids' genomes, and we know, based on your work and the work of others, presumably that some of the genes that predispose to impulsive behavior, addictive behavior, promiscuity, et cetera, that would be useful information, I would think.

Starting point is 00:38:19 Then one could think carefully about friend choices, situational choices, install buffers, you know, it sounds so mechanical, but, you know, have people around who can help buffer against these genetic predispositions, which no doubt, as you just said, weave into situational predispositions. Why don't people want that information or do they want that information? Because I remember in the 80s hearing, oh, you know, soon we're going to have genomes and you could know if you're going to get Huntington's, you know, a very destructive degenerative disorder. And then people said, well, I wouldn't want to know. I mean, I think many people would also want to know. And especially parents, you know, if they can just get past their guilt,

Starting point is 00:39:01 that it has something to do with them, I think they'd want to help their kids avoid these predispositions, given that most of what we're talking about are maladaptive predispositions. So this is a complicated and really rapidly growing area of research, which is what happens if you return people's genetic information back to them. So if you have ever done 23 and me or some sort of direct-to-consumer genetics company, you might have gotten, like, this is your genetic risk for Crohn's disease, or this is your genetic risk for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. And now there are more companies that are expanding into that genetic information around many gene indices, we call them polygenic indices or polygenic scores that are correlated with someone's

Starting point is 00:39:50 risk for developing an alcohol use disorder, say. I think there's a couple of things to keep in mind here. One is that our genetic information is rapidly improving. It's still not very good at the level of predicting an outcome for an individual. So as an example, you can think cities that are at higher altitude tend to be colder. Like that's a correlation. That's a correlation of around 0.4.5. You can know that if you're trying to think about, okay, well, which cities are colder on average than others.

Starting point is 00:40:29 That's not going to tell you, do you need to pack a sweater if you're going to Montreal next Tuesday, right? Like, that's a specific weather incident. Polygenic scores right now are like, I can tell you that, you know, in general, like these people have a higher risk in these people. But they're not a pregnancy test or even a Huntington's disease test. not prognosticators of like an individual person's risk for an alcohol use disorder. There's some uncertainty there. The other question is what are the ethics of telling someone that they have a low genetic risk, especially if we're uncertain about that?

Starting point is 00:41:09 Like you've talked a lot about how, you know, no alcohol on average is better for you than some alcohol. We think about the risks of telling someone that they're genetically predisposed towards a negative life outcome. But there's also risk to telling someone that they're not genetically proposed, because is that going to, are they going to interpret that as license to drink more? I don't need to worry about that. I don't need to worry about my consumption because this company told me that I'm at low risk. And then the other thing you're picking up on is that there are individual differences in desire for kind of deliberate ignorance. So there's a great study after the wall came down in Berlin

Starting point is 00:41:50 that was conducted on whether or not people want to know the contents of their Stasi files. Like, who was reporting on them? And some people were like, of course I want to know. Of course I want to know who was saying what about me. And other people were saying, no, I don't. Deliberate ignorance is bliss. Deliberate ignorance is what I want.

Starting point is 00:42:11 This is what other people were saying about them. Yes, yes. Don't read the comments. Yeah. Deliberate ignorance. Don't read the comments. It's also a form of deliberate ignorance. This is like an avid debate between podcasters.

Starting point is 00:42:23 You know, Rogan is Mr. Don't read the comments. Lex Friedman, I go back and forth on this. I'm guarding the comments. I mean, yeah, it can be useful. So all of that to say, I think we're in a situation which the science is rapidly developing. It's not nearly at a point where it's going to be a high confidence predictor. There's also risks to being told that you have a low, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:47 a low genetic risk because it might act as a permission structure for behavior that might ultimately prove to be risky. And also, people's psychologies are complicated and not everyone responds to more information as a good thing. Not everyone wants to read the comments of their DNA. This isn't a pushback, but I feel like most people, even if they don't understand genes and heritability, understand that they got their genes from their parents. Yeah. So there is an argument to be made perhaps that people are already doing this. Like someone whose father was an alcoholic, whose grandfather was an alcoholic, could say, well, yeah, I got to be really careful because obviously this runs in my family, right? And then someone say, well, your mom doesn't have an issue with alcohol. She could have a couple drinks, no big deal. So you're protected. And we don't know how gene dosing protects us or makes us vulnerable. No one knows. But we all do this.

Starting point is 00:43:43 Yes, I think we do. I mean, we'll get into discussions about genes and heritability. But, you know, like the topic of eugenics and genetic selection, even within embryos is super dicey nowadays. Everyone's, you know, like, you know, it's so scary to even have the discussion. But then I've always said, I mean, people do a kind of genetic selection. They pick sperm donors and they pick partners. Yes. Oftentimes based on a combination of traits, which are clearly involved genes.

Starting point is 00:44:10 You know, so people are doing a genetic selection in partner choice anyway. way. And so to me, maybe it's just a scientist in me, the conversation feels unnecessarily scary. But when it comes to things like substance use disorder, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, I think it makes sense to look at your parents and say, listen, if one of them has an issue with alcohol, or both of them have an issue with alcohol, I have to be very careful with alcohol. And with your children, too, right? I think as parents, at least as a mother, I look at my kids, And I think they don't have the same temperament. They don't have the same personality.

Starting point is 00:44:46 I think the risks of cannabis use is different for my son and for my daughter. And so I think an attuned parent is going to be thinking about what do I know about my kid as they go into adolescence? How does that inform how I'm helping shape their environment? I think what you're picking up here is that oftentimes people treat genetic information as if it exists in a vacuum. and it's the only thing we know about a person. And that's obviously not true. There are phenotypes that we see in our family members and our prospective mates and our children. And most of the research can also act as if you would be returning genetic information about a child or about a person to that person.

Starting point is 00:45:31 And it's the only thing that they know. And that's not true. So I think that we really are at a place where we need more meta-science, science. about the science in what is the most responsible way to give people access to their genetic information in a way that permits them to make the best choices. But we're not going to be able to do that if we're continuing to pretend that genetic information exists somehow siloed from all the other things that people are paying attention to when they're observing themselves and their family members. If you're a regular listener of the Huberman Lab podcast, you've no doubt heard me talk about

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Starting point is 00:46:48 I absolutely love it. Again, this is a limited time offer. So make sure to go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get started today. I feel like the more information we have about our parents and their parents and their positive traits and their, let's just call the maladaptive, destructive traits to themselves or to others, the more informed our choices can be. But I do understand that it can start to set up some constraints in our mind of what we are capable of or not capable of. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:47:16 I also feel like, especially in the United States, there's this notion that we can become anything. It wasn't until I was in a relationship with somebody from Southern Europe that I realized that that notion growing up with that is kind of outrageous to some people in the world. Because in a lot of areas of the world, as you know, people get siloed really early on. And not everyone grows up thinking they could be an amazing athlete if they chose that path.

Starting point is 00:47:40 Yeah. They could be a billionaire if they chose that path. You know, they could. But in the United States, we love this notion of anyone can get to any position if they just work hard enough and believe in themselves and align with the right people. So I think that you think of it probably as, you know, another source of data and isn't more data better? Like, isn't we improve our decision making when we have more variables at hand? that's a very scientific way to think about genetic information whereas I think for many people in the broader public

Starting point is 00:48:11 there can be a temptation to see genes as a very special sort of information there's a lot genetic has a myth around it that maybe this is my data on my heart rate variability doesn't have about it I often I think that people can fall into these really essentialist stories about genetics, that it's telling them something about their, like, their deepest or truest selves. And that's when the delivery of genetic information, without correcting their perception of what genes are really telling us, can start to be dangerous. I mean, I think about 23 and me, their tagline for many years was, welcome to you. Spitting this tube, welcome to you, right? That we are going to give, we are not just going to give you another piece,

Starting point is 00:49:01 of information about yourself to add to all the things that you could be using. We are going to tell you who you really are. And it's when the genetic information lapses into these more essentialist stories that I think things get to be, in your words, a little bit thornier, a little bit riskier. I never did 23 in me, but they were just right up the road, but somehow never did it. But I did hear that one of the surprising results of 23M. and companies like it was that a not insignificant number of people discovered they have relatives that they didn't know they had.

Starting point is 00:49:36 Yes. Or that their father isn't the father that they thought they had. Which is a pretty major psychological frame shift. Yeah. I gave a talk at a college, a small college, and it was a writing class, and they had to write about a book, and they chose my book to write about, which is great. It's like, you know, freshmen and they all have to actually write something, and they chose a book that was deliberately, you know, a little bit controversial to give them something to push off on. And I asked him, I said, you know, you're writing professor. How did you find my book? And he said, well, I did 23 and me. And I realized that my, the man who raised me is not my biological father.

Starting point is 00:50:16 My parents didn't know this. It was our fertility doctor, who was my biological father. and I have something like 26 half siblings because this guy had been doing it in his practice for years. He's now, the doctor is now deceased, and I just was like, that's so much more interesting that I'm going to talk about, like anything I'm going to talk about with these freshmen, this story and that, and I think that speaks to,

Starting point is 00:50:43 he had a whole narrative about his life and his family, and then he got this piece of genetic information, and it blew that story out of the water, because if there was something about the genetic lineage, that is really important to our sense of who we are. And he really had to reconstruct his family story and his identity in the light of that information. It's so interesting because I've heard of people learning something unfortunate, bad about their grandparent or parent that they weren't aware of. and then internalizing that somehow they are bad, especially young kids can internalize that message. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:26 This is a message to all people who may end up divorced. Don't bad mouth the other parent because you're essentially telling your kids that they come from bad. There's badness in them. Yeah. And we all think that this is about people's behavior. But my understanding of spent a little bit of time with this literature, just how people in interpret information and how kids interpret information is that they like, oh, I come from something bad. And there's actually, I mean, there's all these movies about this.

Starting point is 00:51:57 Star Wars has this and, you know, and other movies. You know, like our genetic origins and how those played out in previous generations can frighten people about themselves. Yes. So to go back to your earlier question about how do we talk about genetic? in relation to these phenotypes that are really part of our identities. Another thing is that I don't think anyone's bad. I don't think anyone's all good either. I think that humans are complicated and our behaviors are complicated

Starting point is 00:52:31 and none of us can be reduced to one thing we've done or one gene we have or one aspect of our phenotype. But that is a really common perception that genetics is telling us something essential about ourselves and that it might turn out that that essential thing is a bad thing. I write in my new book about this letter that I got from a man who is in prison. He's been in prison since he was 16 for a horrific crime that he committed. It's actually violent crime that he committed when he was 15 years old. So still an adolescent, still a growing brain, still not an adult.

Starting point is 00:53:22 In Texas, you can be tried an adult as 15, and he's been in prison ever since then. And he read about my lab, our behavior genetics lab at Texas, and an issue of Texas Monthly magazine, which I guess the prison subscribes to. And he wrote me a letter, and it showed up in my university mailbox. And it was him singing, I've done this thing, like, let me tell you about myself. been in prison my whole adult life, even before then. What do you think makes a child go bad, nature or nurture? And that question haunted me because I could give him a technical answer, which I could say.

Starting point is 00:54:06 We know that nature matters. We know that nurture matters. We know that all of our behaviors are influenced by both nature or nurture. But I think when he's writing me, he's not just asking for a science lesson, right? He's someone who's done something horrible, and he's saying, I feel like I'm inherently a horrible person. And that might be because of my genetics. Do my genetics make me bad? And I think that's a story about genetics, which has no scientific basis, but really pops up in a lot of places in our culture.

Starting point is 00:54:42 and it makes it very difficult to talk about because, you know, you're here saying these genetic variants are expressed at this point in prenatal development, and that increases your probability of having these behaviors. But if someone hears that as I could be born bad or I could be born broken, that's absolutely not what we're saying,

Starting point is 00:55:01 but that story about genetics is really, you know, woven through our culture. The bad seed. The bad seed, bad to the bone, natural born killer. We have, I think, the fact that we can come up with English idioms and phrases for this so easily tells us something about the way that we think about behavior, morality, self, and biology. I have so many questions, but I think the first one I want to ask is a developmental one.

Starting point is 00:55:31 Yeah. I think most of us, presumably, carry this idea that it's during puberty and the activation of hormones, in particular testosterone, that takes a sweet kid and makes them a bad kid. I think that's not true. I don't believe that's true. But are there examples in the literature of kids prior to puberty being destructive in a sociopathic way? Yes.

Starting point is 00:56:02 And that's one of the biggest predictors of what people have called a life course persistent pattern of antisocial offending, which is onset before the age of 10, antisocial behavior that's not just destruction of property, but also aggression against other children. And when we're thinking about aggression, oftentimes we discriminate between aggression when provoked versus proactive kind of cold aggression. So the worst prognosis we would anticipate would be a male child. who begins to aggress against other children or against animals before the age of 10 and doesn't feel guilt or remorse around that, that has kind of this cold callousness about it.

Starting point is 00:56:53 That's a poor prognosticator of having well-regulated paver into adulthood. So of those kids who have conduct disorder, especially before the age of 10 with these callous emotional features, we would expect that 50 to 70% of them will have a substance use disorder in adulthood. A non-trivial percentage will have meet criteria for antisocial personality or another personality disorder in adulthood. And so again, I think we're looking at a subset of children where there's clearly a heavy genetic component. There's clearly a heavy nurture component. It's very neurodevelopmental in terms of its origins and early brain development.

Starting point is 00:57:35 and currently we have vanishingly few effective treatments. And again, I think that's because people have maybe implicitly or unconsciously interpreted the genetic research or the biological research as these kids were born bad, not. These kids were born with a set of neurodevelopmental liabilities, and we really need to figure out how to help them. You know, what are the treatments we can offer them? And when people see something as a moral failing, they're less likely to see it as a biomedical problem that we can, you know, throw the weight of science behind. What percentage of these kids younger than 10 that show this antisocial behavior are male versus female?

Starting point is 00:58:19 The sex ratio varies, but sometimes it's two to one. Sometimes it's as high as four to one. It can't be explained by post-Utero testosterone because they haven't hit puberty yet. Yeah. So it either is an early organizing effect in utero. or there's something on the Y chromosome that creates a susceptibility. And we really don't know. Actually, one of my former postdocs is working on this now, the analysis of the X chromosome, because most genetic studies just focus on the autosomes.

Starting point is 00:58:48 So just focused on the non-sex chromosomes. The other thing is we also see this in animals, that male guinea pigs are much more vulnerable to the effects of preterm birth than female guinea pigs. Again, preterm birth disrupts that same kind of gabat agglutamate, excitatory, inhibitory balance that we're also seeing popping up in the genetic research. Also, I have three kids. I have two girls and one boy. And even with humans, the labor and delivery nurse will be like, okay, well, we got to keep him in longer

Starting point is 00:59:22 because those early boys, they struggle. They know that the male fetus seems to be more vulnerable to these insults than the than the female fetus. Are the guinea pigs sociopathic? Guinea pigs, I mean, all of these things you can, you used to work with non-human animal models. For better or worse, I've worked with so many different species. I have to say, I do not miss working with animals for a variety reasons. That's how I ended up in a clinical psych program.

Starting point is 00:59:51 Humans can consent to be in an experiment. As an animal lover, it eventually wore on my soul too much. And I understand where it's necessary. I also think there's an excess in particular. And I'll lose some friends with this. But in particular, with some of the larger primate work, one really needs to justify. And there are instances where there's good justification. But, yeah, I've worked at a lot of different animals.

Starting point is 01:00:16 But I was about to say, I know we both dog lovers, there's this saying, there are no bad dogs, just bad owners. But we don't say that about humans. We don't say, oh, you know, they're no bad people. Everyone is a good person. They're just bad parents. At some point, usually 18, we say you're responsible for your actions, regardless of what happened to you, regardless of the genes you came into this world with. And things shift where people understandably are responsible for their behavior in a different way. Sounds like in Texas it can come in earlier depending on the crime.

Starting point is 01:00:53 Yeah. But I assume all dogs are good dogs. that they're trustworthy, that they would never harm you or another dog, maybe an animal, because I've seen what happens when certain dogs get a hold of certain animals. But I don't think we make the same assumption about people. I don't think we do either. I titled my new book, Original Sin, to really spotlight this exact thing. You know, before I was a scientist, the first 20 years of my life,

Starting point is 01:01:27 I was an evangelical Christian. So I was raised in a very fundamentalist household, Southern, praised God and pass the ammunition in lots of ways. And in my brand of Christianity that I was raised in, which was Protestant, reformed, Calvinist, I really was raised with this idea of original sin, which is that humans are born bad, that they're born deprave, that they're born broken.

Starting point is 01:01:59 And I don't believe that's true, but that's the explicit teaching of some religious traditions. And that's a religious tradition that was really foundational to our culture and our institutions. So I don't think it's a coincidence that we talk about how there's no bad dogs, but we assume people can be inherently bad. Because I think many of us were taught that, you know, from a young age that, that, that, all of us or some of us, you know, if you're thinking about Calvinist theology of some people are the elect and some people are that, that some of us are inherently bad. So you can be raised with a religious tradition that really is talking about inherent depravity. And then you have

Starting point is 01:02:45 a scientific tradition that's studying, well, how does genes, how do genes affect bad things that people do? And then we have debates about how science should be used. And that's where I think things get really thorny and really tricky, which is how do we apply the science without lapsing into this really ancient way of thinking, which is interpreting the science as proof that we're broken, that people are broken. At the same time, I mean, going back to this letter that I received, people do horrible shit. Like, people do horrible things to each other. And I think about that man who wrote me a letter and I can say, I think he did a horrible thing. And I think he probably, everything I know scientifically, I think he probably had horrible luck in terms of his parents and his genes and his birth experiences and a child experiences.

Starting point is 01:03:43 And so how do we put those together? What does it mean to hold someone responsible for how they behave? I do think that we're responsible for ourselves and responsible to each other, while also keeping in mind the fact that no one created themselves from scratch. By the time he was an adult, he was already in prison for the things that had happened to him while he was still technically a child. I wrote this book, my new book, because I was really attempting to wrestle through that question. I think I'm getting this story right. It's a true story that was told by our former director of neuroscience at Stanford, Bill Newsom, about the guy who went up in the tower at UT Austin and shot a bunch of people and killed them. The tower shooter.

Starting point is 01:04:37 I think he was eventually taken out by a security guard. The remarkable thing about the story is, at least the way I remember it, is that this guy knew, something was wrong with him, thought that the sight of the problem was in his brain, was asking people to look at his brain and help him. I think I'm getting this right. We'll double check. And then said at the point where he realized he was going to go through with this thing, with this act, that he wanted them to look at his brain. And it turned out he had a tumor in a, I think it was some temporal lobe region that.

Starting point is 01:05:15 It was amygdala. It was actually in the amygdala. So you know this story clearly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's where you work. Yes. Fortunately occurred long before you work.

Starting point is 01:05:25 I mean, terrible that it happened at all. But in this age of school shooters and public massacres, right, people were just, you know, going up into Vegas hotel window and, you know, hosing people with bullets. This case is a unique one because the guy knew there was something wrong with him, in some sense, wanted help. but you can kind of create this picture of, you know, angel, devil conversations in his head between neural circuitry that's saying, don't do this, don't do this, ask for help and do this, do this. I mean, it's like the cartoon or movie with the angel and the devil on the shoulder or in each year. What are we to make of that?

Starting point is 01:06:06 Yeah. Gosh, the Whitman case is so, it's so interesting because he did say that he, there was something wrong with him. He did ask for help. After he died, the state of Texas ordered an autopsy, and they found that they had this tumor, and the whole thing was basically labeled almost like a natural disaster had occurred. So the report talks about like the catastrophe or this incident that happened.

Starting point is 01:06:40 And so they ultimately, when trying to make sense of Whitman's shooting people from the tower at Texas, took what some philosophers have called this objective view. So basically, like, they weren't viewing him as an agent who's choosing, who's doing something in the realm of good or bad, a moral failing. They were viewing him as kind of a machine that's gone haywire, right? He got a tumor in his amygdala, and he wouldn't have done it if he hadn't had this tumor. How would they have made sense of his behavior if he hadn't asked for a brain autopsy? If they didn't know about this tumor, how many other people have something going on with them in a specific location that if we knew about it might help us understand how this behavior. came across. I write in my book this story of this Dutch family where basically all the women in the family were functioning okay, but half the men in the family were one raped his sister,

Starting point is 01:07:56 one stabbed his boss with a pitchfork, one multiple, one committed arson, multiple of the men were in prison. And at some point, I guess one of the women was like, y'all, you have to figure out what's going on with the men in our family. Like, this is too much to be a coincidence. And what they found is that on the X chromosome, they had inherited a rare mutation in the MAAOA gene. So MAOA is an enzyme that degrades monoamines that, you know, regulate how your neurons are talking to one another. And women have two X chromosomes. So if they inherit a bad version, there's still the other version. whereas men only have one X, and so from their mom, they got a 50-50 shot. Am I going to get the mutated version or the non-mutated version?

Starting point is 01:08:47 I mean, I find this study fascinating on so many levels, right, that the single letter change in your DNA could have this massive effect on your behavior. But also that all of these men were in the criminal justice system and had not been obviously flagged as something organic or biological or mental illness going on with them. And later, there was another group that found this, you know, a sensibly rare mutation in several other impulsively aggressive boys that had been referred to their hospital. And they ended their scientific paper on what I find one of the most haunting notes in the scientific literature, which is, is this actually rare? Or is it that when we're faced with

Starting point is 01:09:37 people doing horrible things, we never even stop to look for what might be causing it from our genetic or neurobiological from organic way, which I think that's a really, really chilling thought. So how do we, you know, in the absence, I think the question that you're asking is an important one, which is in the absence of some smoking gun, you know, the mutated gene, the amygdala tumor, how do we put together our non-examination? scientists, as people who read the science, that, yes, it's genes, yes, its environment, yes, it goes into the behavior. And also, we're humans.

Starting point is 01:10:18 We have this outrage and this, naturally, this blame towards people that harm each other. How do we as humans hold both of those truths at the same time? I think that's the real challenge. I think once somebody is harmed, our empathy shifts to the victim. Yes. Or victims. in a way that accludes our, maybe even at times, depending how close we are to the victims,

Starting point is 01:10:44 or how much we identify with it, that includes our even care. Yes. Like, okay, this guy, this guy went up on this. I'm describing it historically. This guy went up on this tower, killed his people, the security guard eventually got him. But the, you know, the parent of that kid

Starting point is 01:11:01 that was just walking to class or, you know, the young woman who, was, you know, freshman year or whatever, you know, she's dead now. Yeah. She's gone. And so I think that in a kind of healthy way, not kind of, in a healthy way, we just, we think the hell with that guy. One less, glad they killed him. People will say that. Right. People say that. I'm not necessarily, yeah, I guess in some sense, if I just stand back and my reflexive response, it's like, this guy killed a lot of people. I understand he was driven to it. He was stricken with something. But it's hard for me to get to, okay, where there's a genetic thing that set him up from a glioma, in the amygdala of all places.

Starting point is 01:11:40 Like, he bad luck. Because we assume that people can intervene in their own behavior. This gets down to kind of free will type stuff that my colleague Robert Sapolsky, you know, he'll argue to the end of time that there's no free will, which is a frustrating one for many of us. But, you know, he's a hell of a smart guy. I think that the issue for many people is that genes are fairly far upstream from behavior. You know, if I said, okay, there was this guy down in Los Angeles and, you know, he got rabies from a dog he was trying to save from the L.A. River. And then three days later, you know, he randomly committed this crime. He killed somebody.

Starting point is 01:12:26 He said, well, he had rabies. He was rabid. Like, we can make the connection very easily, but that's a, you know, a neural virus that hits the amygdala, among other things, and causes people to get very aggressive. We'd go, okay, you know. Well, you can imagine him without the rabies. So there's, there's some distance between the self that is the object of moral judgment and the cause that you're locating as the salient cause for this behavior. And if there's daylight between those, then you can say, okay, well, I can imagine what he was like before the rabies. Genes make it harder to do that because when we think of them as so essential to the making of the self that is the object of moral judgment, who is the person that has different genetics?

Starting point is 01:13:19 We can imagine what Whitwin would have been like if he didn't have the tumor. We could imagine what the guy would be like if he didn't get with rabies. But who is the person who has a different genotype? It's very difficult to cast a different self. And so it's very difficult to rescue that self from our condemnation. I'll say something controversial on the back, what you just said, which is there may even be, I'm speculating here, you're the geneticists. There may even be some deeply hardwired, unconscious notion around genes that we're, We know that genes can be inherited, that if somebody has a gene which makes them a quote, quote unquote, bad seed or predisposes them to a really bad behavior and then they engage in it.

Starting point is 01:14:08 And then they're in jail for the rest of their life where they get shot by the security guard. We hear the words good riddance. Good riddance implies good. Those genes were now stopped. You know, we don't know if they reproduced before that. So there's something, which makes the example you gave before, especially eerie of the IVF doc that was literally seeding these eggs with his own genes. And then somebody is like, I mean, the implication is not that that person was killing themselves, but whoever that physician was. I mean, not somebody, A, it's terribly unethical at, you know, at every level.

Starting point is 01:14:46 And he's replicating. He's replicating his bad genes, right? Whereas if somebody who has a genetic predisposition to be sociopathic or really destructive is eliminated, for lack of a better word, or taken out of society, I mean, sure, I can orient to the empathy around this person who is feel stricken. But I think we are, I believe we are more hardwired to think about, you know, inheritance and propagation of genes than maybe we are consciously aware of. I mean, growing up, I mean, my dad's, he's, I wouldn't say he's like super old school, but I remember growing up, like one of the messages I got was, you know, if you're going to date someone, meet the parents. Like, you can learn a lot by meeting the parents, which on the one hand is really cool. It's like, oh, see how their family is and how they interact. But it has a genetic, you know, inheritance implication.

Starting point is 01:15:39 Like if they're kind people, if, you know, what do you look, are you looking for pathology? No, you're, you might be, but you're mainly looking for good features or what, what? what's there. No one talks about this openly these days, I feel like. It's a really hot-button issue. But if I asked you, for instance, you know, if the guy in prison had four kids before he went to prison, does that worry you? I feel like those kids statistically would need more. Like, you know, a lot of this research didn't pan out, but as a metaphor, I think it's really still useful is the idea of like dandelions and orchids, that there are, or sunflowers and orchids. Like, I do think there are some children who, by virtue of their temperament, brain development,

Starting point is 01:16:34 are pretty resilient across a variety of different environments. And then I think there are children who, back to dogs, just like there are dogs that, like, you can be a lazy dog owner and the dog will still be fine, or you can have a dog where because of their size and because of their temperament and because of their breeding, they need a skilled and loving owner. And we can think of that very clearly. So like my dog, I caught him as a rescue,

Starting point is 01:17:06 and we think they were being bred as fighting dogs in Texas. And, you know, you can be like, well, you, there's a, vicious attack dog. He's being bred as a fighting dog and you found out he's had a litter of puppies. Does that make you feel appalled or like they're bad puppies? Or you're like, no, they need really good homes. We have to find really good homes for these puppies. My friend Whitney Cummings would be on her way. She's constantly adopting or like rescuing pit bull after pit bull. Like I think she subscribes the idea there are, I don't want to put words in their mouth, but they're like no bad dogs, just bad owners. And there are many sweet, sweet, sweet pit bulls that come from fighting camps.

Starting point is 01:17:44 many ways I feel like as soon as we get out of how we relate to which other as humans and we think about this, we can think about dog behavior more objectively than we can about human behavior. And we can think even if personality and temperament is heritable and even if the parent did terrible things, the offspring are still not bad puppies. They're puppies that are higher needs puppies or they're puppies that need a more skillful care and that's how I also think about this. I don't know about hardwired to pay attention to heritable traits. I do think we are evolved to matter to each other in a way that we call moral.

Starting point is 01:18:26 I think that we are a social species that evolve to cooperate. And at every point in our evolutionary history, every cooperative system has some mechanistic of enforcement. If you have bacteria, colonies of bacteria, and one bacterium starts to soak up too much of the iron or some mineral in the environment that they all need, the others will send out signals to try to hurt that one. And they're like, stop doing that. Stop, stop freeload and stop taking too much. If we go all the way back to the beginning of our, you know, our evolutionary history, we have cooperation and enforcement of failures to cooperate. And I think that evolutionary history is a big part of why we feel so intensely when someone harms one another.

Starting point is 01:19:21 So, Sapolsky can make all his arguments that, like, we're not supposed to feel moral outrage at people. And for me, I'm like, that's like telling me that everyone should be abstinent. Like, it's just, I think that mattering to each other in the way we call moral is this deeply baked into the start. of what it is to be human as sexuality is. And so, of course, we get caught in this, what philosophers call this rescue blame trap, which is they did a horrible thing. We think of humans as having agency.

Starting point is 01:19:58 Of course they're to blame for it. They deserve to be punished. Oh, but wait, his genes, his brain, his trauma, his childhood environment. He was also a victim here. maybe he needs to be rescued from blame. Oh, but he did it. And like he was so bad.

Starting point is 01:20:14 And we go back and forth. We go back and forth about ourselves, right? Like if you've ever done something that you really regret, you have probably done this where you're like, here's all the reasons that I was trying and these were my good intentions, but oh, I can't believe, you know. And how do we find our way through the rescue blame trap? And for me, it was thinking about bad luck doesn't negate responsibility. It might not have been my fault, but it's still my responsibility. But holding people accountable doesn't have to mean harsh punishment.

Starting point is 01:20:53 Accountability doesn't mean making someone suffer. And keeping both of those in the same mind is really what made me feel like I could push through this rescue blame trap. I'm letting that sink in. Everything you say resonates. and I therefore am updating my hypothesis. Again, just a hypothesis that people have an inherent desire to stop the progression of the bad seed. I'm intentionally using this language. Like we want to like if that person is, sure, stuff happened to them, but guess what?

Starting point is 01:21:25 Stuff happened to them because their parents were bad. And guess what? They're bad because their parents were bad. And like those are, they're a bad seed at the extremes, of course. I'm just, I also think because based on your. dog example of adopting puppies from, you know, fighting parents, that in that example, there is this notion that with the appropriate amount of love and care that we can rescue them, but also we can choose whether or not they have puppies.

Starting point is 01:21:56 So I do think that there is this idea that, like, if we see children in really horrible circumstances, that I think it's a very human hardwired thing that we, can rescue the lineage. Yeah, that we can rescue lineage. I mean, one thing that's always fascinated me and encouraged me is I think, yes, there's lots of, you know, transgenerational trauma, whether or not it's purely through genes or through experiences still debated, but probably both. But that also in a single generation, you know, the child of severe alcoholics who makes the choice not to drink or to quit drinking to then pair with somebody who can have a healthy relationship to alcohol.

Starting point is 01:22:40 Their cycle breaker. They're cycle breaker. So I think we understand this without understanding genetics. Yeah. Like we don't have to take a class and understand Mendelian genetics, you know, to understand that in one generation, something can start or stop in a family line. Yeah. And I think most people are wise to the idea that family lines no longer exist in small tribes.

Starting point is 01:23:00 I mean, you see shows like succession, right, where it's over like, oh, let's talk about the propagation of sociopathic-ish, narcissistic traits. They were not trying to be cycle breakers. No, they were trying to maintain the cycle that it fed them in their niche. I mean, I think the other thing with regards to cycle breakers is also people tend to think of genetics in terms of how it makes you like your parents. You know, you got your genes from your parents. But the other thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is genes recombine, right?

Starting point is 01:23:33 You are not just like your dad or like your mom. You are a random draw of all the potential draws that you could have gotten from their genotypes. And so even within a family with the same parents, you see tons of differences. I have three kids and they are different personalities, definitely different risks for addiction and conduct disorder problems across the three of them. And so I think it's a mistake to think of. lineage as genes being an unbroken lineage because our genes are getting recombined in these novel ways with every generation. That writer Andrew Solomon says that we should never use the

Starting point is 01:24:11 word reproduce. Reproduce is something that lulls parents into thinking that they're copying themselves, but that every child is produced. Every child is a new product and it's unpredictable what that product is going to be. Oh, that's interesting. I never thought about that word in that way. Yeah. Wild. Who said that? Andrew Solomon. He wrote Far from the Tree, which is about children who are very different from their parents in some way.

Starting point is 01:24:37 So deaf children of hearing parents, savants whose parents are like, we don't know where this chess or music or math came from. And then also interviewed Dylan Klebold's mother. So Dylan Klebold was one of the Columbine shooters. So normal suburban parents who ended up having a child who was a school shooter. And he talks about this idea of horizontal versus vertical identities. So you get your vertical identity from your parents, but then you are not your parents. You are not a reproduction of them. They produced you and that there's an identity that's separate from that lineage.

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Starting point is 01:26:51 With a 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can try Our Place with zero risk, and you can see why more than one million people have made the switch to our place kitchenware. I like to believe that despite the fact that humans have some selfish wiring, that we are all inherently good can be drawn toward goodness, in the right conditions, and with the right amount of effort can direct ourselves in ways that are really beneficial. Learn from mistakes, be benevolent, all that. So I think I believe that. I think most people believe that.

Starting point is 01:27:26 We want to believe that. If we step a little bit away from the extremes of like severe psychopathology and sociopathy and, you know, some people are more mercenary than others. And our society in certain careers tends to favor that. When I was coming up in science, I don't know what it was like in psychology, but there was this cohort of scientists, neuroscientists in New York. They were called the New York neuroscience mafia. One of them, two of them have Nobel Prizes. I'm friendly with these guys. But you'd go to meetings and, like, they would hold court in a way that was it was all about them.

Starting point is 01:28:01 It was all about their displays. They're brilliant. They've done brilliant work. But for a lot of people coming up, it was sort of a pressure test. Like, do you think we could make it in this field? Like, we're going to have to either wait until these guys die or, you know, somehow integrate with this scene. Yeah. And they would pick favorites and they would decide who was who they'd go to drinks with.

Starting point is 01:28:23 I mean, it was very hierarchical. Every scientific field is like this. Yeah, okay, good, okay. So I'm both relieved and dismayed that every field is like that. And very different than the West Coast version of it, because we are a little softer on the West Coast, but on the West Coast there was a more cryptic version of it. Yeah. Southerners are like that too.

Starting point is 01:28:40 Oh, is that right? It's not that they aren't mercenary. It's that they hide it, right, under a blanket of softness. Is the Midwest the only place where people are truly decent? Have you ever seen that thing where it's like the divides, the country into quadrants and it's like axe mean is mean like acts nice is mean that's the south and then i think it's the pacific northwest is axe nice is nice but i don't know about the midwest what was california i don't remember oh probably acts nice is mean is that there's sort of

Starting point is 01:29:11 it could be could be i mean i mean here we're focusing on on the dark and there's good people in every field but but i remember thinking you know like going to a meeting then you had you had to you couldn't get, you couldn't let your guard down. Yes. And I now know, because I'm, you know, I'm adjacent to it now because I'm not, I don't depend on them for grant reviews or I don't need anything from those guys anymore. I remember the moment where they sort of invited me in was based, where one kind of took a little jab at me and I jabbed right back, but I hit them harder.

Starting point is 01:29:44 Why would it be that like you'd get invited into a group with special, um, resources by virtue of being kind of a jerk. Yeah. Like, I'm going to be a jerk to you, and if you can be a jerk back, like, we can be jerks together. Yeah, it's a status dominant. It sucks. It's a status dominance move at saying, I'm signaling to you that I'm confident enough

Starting point is 01:30:10 in whatever this is that I don't need to cower or submit. And then someone's like, oh, maybe I don't want to be in a status dominance aggression competition with him because he might win. So now we're going to. I have a theory that a lot of scientific fields and men in scientific fields are a little bit like mice. And that mice have very rigid social hierarchies that they establish through aggression. And once everyone's figured out, like, who can bite whom without getting bitten back, then they can settle into their nice hierarchy. And you bit back.

Starting point is 01:30:48 So you were like, no, I'm higher in the hierarchy than you think that I am. I grew up in a big pack of guys. Like, I never was the aggressor. But, like, if you don't bite back, you know, when somebody kind of with more power than you pokes on you, you, you were saying I'm not acting like you have more power than me. I'm acting like I can poke back, right? But it doesn't feel good, right? We would all like to believe that we can ascend in our fields, settle into our place without

Starting point is 01:31:15 having to, like, do that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, because anyway. So I think one thing that you, the story gets at too, is, you know, we talk about impulsivity and desire for intensity and disagreeableness. Like I don't actually care who's who I'm hurting in this as unambiguously bad things. But a little bit of those is actually can be very adaptive in some circumstances. Like you don't want your surgeon to be like, oh, am I hurting them by cutting them open?

Starting point is 01:31:52 Like, you want someone who's a little bit callous to your physical pain because they're focusing on you as a body in doing this. If you look at studies of who is a successful entrepreneur by the age of 30, they are white men, so social advantage, high IQ as measured by a standardized test, history of a little bit of adolescent delinquency. Right? And that makes sense if you're thinking about adolescent delinquency was a manifestation of risk tolerance, of sensation seeking, and who are the people who are not going to be real great at having a boss, but able to tolerate the risk of starting a business, right? Like, academia is full of people like that that are like, I want to think about what I want to think about, and I don't want anyone telling me what to do. and I don't really care if other people think this is useful

Starting point is 01:32:47 and I'm willing to be really competitive to get resources. And I'll use taxpayer dollars, thank you, to do it with. Exactly. So I have this thought experiment in my book where I think, again, thought experiment, I'm not recommending this. Or I think, what if we did have the means to select every baby that was born, Every reproducing couple is going to do IVF. They're going to create as many embryos as they can,

Starting point is 01:33:19 and we're going to select the ones that have the lowest antisocial behavior of substance use genes. And we have a generation that is the most puritanical, risk intolerant, non-sensation-seeking, controlled, not disinhibited, you know, very inhibited. Is that a good thing? Like, is that a world that we would want? You don't want my opinion on this.

Starting point is 01:33:43 To live in? I do. I would love to hear your opinion of this. I mean, I don't want sociopathy. I mean, the really dark examples are so salient. We had to be careful not to end up there. But I watched that. I didn't watch the Dalmer thing on Netflix.

Starting point is 01:33:59 I would pay money to not see that. No, no, I don't have the talks. But I did watch the Richard Ramirez Nightstocker story a few years before that was on Netflix. And it was done exceedingly well at the level. of it scares the shit out of you. And he was a true sociopath, like he was a true sociopath by all measures, you know. But then when you hear the history of his childhood, you know, just horrible treatment of being, I think I have this right, like being tied to a gravestone in a cemetery overnight

Starting point is 01:34:31 as a young kid, like three or five. Like overly traumatized. Just left there, like his father did. I mean, just horrible things. But again, it doesn't change. What I see is the guy with the pentagram. written on his hand in the court, like the mental imagery, right?

Starting point is 01:34:46 So taking away guys like that, people like that, I think you go, yeah, I mean, he was a sadistic killer at every level. But then a bunch of just pure passivity everywhere. I don't know. I mean, I guess it depends on how far it goes because in the earlier example, when we were talking about this academic interaction,

Starting point is 01:35:08 my friend Jocco Willink, former Navy SEAL, he's very active in, and now we're talking about kids' health and education and he's doing a lot there. And he reposted something recently that I had a good chuckle at. It was certainly true for me, which was that it said 90% of being a dude is making fun of your friends to their face and cheering them on behind their backs. Oh. And I think every guy that had a lot of guy friends or has a lot of guy friends, growing up or even just a couple good ones, knows that that's true. And the inverse of that are

Starting point is 01:35:47 the people you're trying to select out. Right? You don't want somebody who's nice to your face and then behind your back is trying to backstab, right? Or be kind and then backstab. But yeah, a lot of being a dude is like making fun of each other, but then rooting each other on at the same time. That's kind of how we grow up. So I wouldn't want a society where people wouldn't make fun of me and I couldn't make fun of them. But it, The encouragement part is also really important. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know what it is for girls.

Starting point is 01:36:16 I mean, I have a sister. And, I mean, she's a very, very, very, very kind person. And I was always shocked the way that girls treated one another. So they can be really mean. Girls can be really mean. Yeah, yeah. I mean, relational aggression, there's literature on this. You know, when we talk about aggression, we so often think in terms of physical aggression.

Starting point is 01:36:41 you know, I'm punching you, I'm stabbing you, I'm hurting you, you know, relational aggression where you're destroying someone's reputation or social standing or making them feel isolated is just as painful as physical aggression, if not more so. I mean, there's few things that humans are more attuned to than that feeling of, oh, am I being pushed out of the group, right? Because that means, like, ancestrally, that means death. And so what we see research is that the same genes that predict physical aggression in boys predict relational aggression in girls and relational aggression can be every bit as damaging

Starting point is 01:37:16 but I think also kind of bewildering to the adults around it like it's more covert right and it's hard to to see it I was shocked at how early that started I thought it was going to be something I dealt with with my daughter when she got to be a teenager four years old elery said this and you know, Lily isn't my friend anymore. And I met with her preschool teacher and I was like, what is going on? And she was like, this is what four-year-old girls do. They make relationship conflict and then they repair relationship conflict and they do it all the time every day. And that is why they are so much less bewildered by repairing relationship conflict than your average teenage boy is by the time they reach adolescence. And I was just completely thrown and fascinated.

Starting point is 01:38:08 by this experience. Yeah, boys sorted out in such primitive ways. I mean, I can remember dirt-clod wars where somebody broke the fundamental rule, which is you can't throw rocks, they threw a rock, then someone gets upset, then they get into a scrap, and then sometimes somebody went home,

Starting point is 01:38:27 and then, like the longest lasted in terms of a fracture in the group or the relationship was like a day, maximum. And then we just kind of forget about it. Yeah. Yeah. And it was kind of understood that someone was going to push the boundaries. I'm not completely confident that I'm remembering this study correctly.

Starting point is 01:38:45 So if your listeners are like, no, page, you got this wrong. But I remember hearing about a study that was about marital conflict where they had married partners, keep diaries of their interactions, and then also, I think maybe like spit into a tube every morning and evening. and they looked at how long did men's cortisol remain elevated after an argument compared to the wives cortisol. I was basically like they had the fight, has spiked up, and then it went down, like classic trier curve of, and hers was elevated for like 24 hours afterwards. And if you think about what that means for their psychological sense of what's happening in their relationship, she's like, I'm still amped about this. And he's like, what are you talking about? Like, we had that fight.

Starting point is 01:39:37 And then my cortisol, like, we're over it, right? So I do think there's some interesting sex differences in the relationship between our physiological arousal and our conflict styles and just the timeline that that plays out. Fascinating. Yeah, so many ideas. You're thinking of all the examples. Well, I think of some examples. And, yeah, and of course, what the. what the evolutionary benefit is of those different cycles.

Starting point is 01:40:07 I mean, there's certain interactions you don't want to forget. It can be damaging to self to forget fights so quickly. Yeah. I mean, I can say I've had interactions where at the moment it felt so vital. And then a day later, it's like, I'm like, how is it that I'm like, this might not be good that I'm not still thinking about this. But life is carrying on. The conveyor belt is still moving. So I think it's only fair that I ask about, you know, we talked about pathology as expressed in boys.

Starting point is 01:40:43 And it always seems to come out as aggressive violence, et cetera. In girls, you're saying that the social dynamics can be benevolent, right? Because you did say conflict and repair. That sounds healthy. Yeah. But in terms of genes that predispose for addiction, And do those show up differently in girls? Is it, you know, I think the assumption that some people have is like, oh, it's always going to be promiscuity.

Starting point is 01:41:08 But nowadays, especially because of access to prescription drugs, and I was told this by a former guest, Heath Humphreys, you know, if you look at addiction, men and women, it tended to lean more towards men than women until you get to prescription drugs because there's something, I don't know, less seedy. The social opportunity is different. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, what we see in the twin studies and the adoption studies and then also in the newer studies where we're looking directly at people's DNA is that the manifestations of at least the genes we've discovered so far are remarkably consistent between men and women. So if you have, you know, a genetic liability towards disinhibition, problems with self-regulation, that, that can manifest as alcohol use that can manifest as aggression and antisocial behavior. But there aren't really strongly sex-type manifestations where it always looks like this in women and always looks like this in men. You know, we haven't discovered all the genes and we haven't looked at the sex chromosomes yet, so there might be something different. But the theory so far that seems to have the best evidence is that the underlying ideology is remarkably consistent across men and women.

Starting point is 01:42:30 and it's just really the mean that differs between men and women. So you just get higher rates of all of these behaviors and men, but the underlying disposition is really similar across the sexes. So if we were to say sensation-seeking, novelty-seeking, equally distributed, but men act out more. Yeah. So what you see is that men show slightly higher sensation-seeking, but the genes that predispose a man towards sensation-seeking seem to be.

Starting point is 01:43:00 similar in women. If a woman has a fraternal twin who's a boy, his sensation-seeking will protect hers just as well as if she had a twin sister. So similar genes, just a mean shift. What you see is that actually in adolescence, boys and girls have very similar trajectories of sensation-seeking. Where they differ is in the evolution of their inhibitory control. So girls mature in terms of their impulse control faster than boys do. We did a study, maybe 10 years ago now. It was basically, it took until men around the age of 24, until around the age of 24,

Starting point is 01:43:40 to be as controlled as your average 15-year-old girl was. There was like a decade-long gap in the maturation of impulse control. You're nodding, and I used to be a 15-year-old boy. I mean, yeah, that tracks. I think the point is that men develop more slowly. Yeah. But presumably they catch up, but then they die or. earlier. Well, they go through puberty later and they have a more extended, you know,

Starting point is 01:44:08 increase up to having adult levels of reproductive hormones. I mean, men's testosterone is increasing. Puberty is over, but their testosterone is still going up through their teen years and into their 20s. And they die earlier, but they, they, women have that long, you know, they're alive, but they're not healthy for, you know, on average at the end of their life. The difference in health span is less different than lifespan, as you know. So there's something interesting about the ways in which men seem to be slower developing in uterus. They're getting to reproductive maturity later and they're getting to adult level of personality later. We need more patience.

Starting point is 01:44:52 Women are all thinking, we've given you enough patience, you know. We require more patience. That's the right phrasing. Let's talk about punishment. Yeah. But maybe also talk about rewarding good behavior. A while back, I think it was Zimbardo at Stanford. He was talking about, you know, that we're everyday heroes, you know,

Starting point is 01:45:11 that we were supposed to start orienting towards, you know, rewarding the everyday heroes of life. This was kind of a thing in the early 2000s, as I recall. And there's the positive psychology notion. And I feel like psychology is kind of split into dark and light. The people who like to look at the dark stuff versus the light. Oh, that's probably true. morality, but I'm an outsider. I don't know. But we spend a lot of time thinking about whether and how we should punish people. And of course, at the extremes, it's obvious, right? To the legal

Starting point is 01:45:42 system, it's obvious. But the middle ground is the interesting ground. Penalty boxing people, maybe not even with social isolation, but who we reward and place into positions of leadership. I mean, this is very salient right now. And it comes with. with a lot of assigning of labels about psychopathology from people that may or may not be qualified to assign those labels, right? Yeah. How do you think about the genetic and evolutionary,

Starting point is 01:46:13 but also the societal labels of punishment and forgiveness? Yeah. Oh, such a good question. So first of all, let's just define punishment, because that actually can mean different things to different people. So as a psychologist, I think about punishment is applying an adverse stimulus in an attempt to reduce the frequency of a behavior. Right.

Starting point is 01:46:43 So the rat is in its skinner box and every time it goes into this area, you give it a shock. And that's a punishment to make it not go into this area of the box. If you have a child, punishment is you're going to be in timeout or I'm going to spank you. I'm going to give you some sort of thing that I know you're not going to like in order to try to reduce the frequency of this behavior. From psychology, we know from decades of evidence that punishing bad behavior doesn't work nearly as well for shaping behavior as rewarding the behavior that you want, right? So if you reward a rat for pressing a lever, it'll do that all day long. If you give a rat alcohol every time it presses a bar and then you stop mid-experiment and you start shocking it, some rats will stop pressing the bar and other rats will actually

Starting point is 01:47:46 increase the rate of behavior. They will be like, maybe this time, maybe this time it'll be. it's the same thing with kids, right? We know from, you know, all of our research on corporal punishment that children who are spanked do not behave better than children who aren't spanked and if anything, they behave worse. So you've had Dr. Becky Kennedy on here, you know, she has been, I think, so influential and that you need to have consequences. but attempting to help your child behave better through harshness is, is on average going to be a losing strategy. And then I think you said, you know, it does, you know, maybe at the extremes with the criminal justice system, but we also see that in the criminal justice system, that increasing the harshness of criminal penalties

Starting point is 01:48:41 doesn't predict a decline in crime. The thing that seems to predict it is the likelihood of getting caught and having other potential, potential opportunities to get the rewards that you want in your social structure. But just increasing penalties for crime doesn't on average reduce crime. So, you know, whether we're talking about rats or children or prisoners, adding more harshness is not, we know, the most effective way to get the behaviors that we want. This is also true, going back to dogs, right? Like, what is the best dog training method?

Starting point is 01:49:18 It's never harshly punishing them or applying pain for behavior you don't want, right? It's firmness, boundaries, but rewarding the behavior that you do want. And also in the context of building, you know, trust in a relationship with your dog. So I feel like no luck doesn't obviate responsibility. Like we are still responsible for the people that we are, even though we're shaped by factors that aren't in control. but in terms of holding people responsible, punishing them harshly doesn't bring about what we really want other than just satisfying that retributive itch. It's giving them opportunities in the reward structure to be rewarded by the things we do want

Starting point is 01:50:06 that we know is the most effective strategy all in all. So I think the slide that people make is, if someone's responsible, if someone had agency, then they deserve to be punished. And what I'm trying to separate is those two things. Can someone be responsible? They had agency. We want to hold them accountable. But how do we do that without immediately jumping to? And so therefore they deserve to suffer. And so therefore they deserve to hurt. And there's no like one-size magic bullet to making that happen, right? Like, you know, that's how do we relate to each other as people. But as a mother, my strategy with my own kids has been really heavily influenced

Starting point is 01:50:55 by thinking about, like, punishment is not the most effective way. That doesn't mean we live in a no, there's no rules. Anything goes household, right? Like, we have consequences. We have accountability. We have boundaries. But there's always space to say, reflect on what you did, reflect on what needs to be different for your behavior to be different in the future, and how can we create an environment that helps you grow, helps you, helps that happen. I'm pretty anti-punishment. I'm pro-responsibility and pretty anti-punishment as a way of holding each other responsible. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep.

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Starting point is 01:53:01 to get up to 27% off. In the last few years, there's been a real shift. it seems in how we hold people accountable for their behavior in teen years. And I think it's with all the cameras and everything. There have been a few examples, for instance, of text message threads were unearthed of people who are now in their 20s and 30s from their teen years. You know, I think in one instance it was a group of friends and people were making racist comments. And then I think the ultimate decision.

Starting point is 01:53:36 was, okay, if this person apologized, their whole life shouldn't be ruined on the basis of a comment made, you know, earlier, you know, five, six years earlier in a different context, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's how it moved forward. But there were people calling for like, hey, this person is a racist. They should be forbidden from having a government job. And I think it played out pretty quickly. but nowadays with social media, everyone can chime in. So we're not really talking about courtroom decision.

Starting point is 01:54:11 We're talking about court of public opinion. Yeah. A different example, perhaps, that I'd like your thoughts on, is like Kanye, a year or two ago, made a bunch of really anti-Semitic remarks. I was wearing a swat t-shirt and then recently published an apology. He said he was sorry. He wasn't in the right state of mind, et cetera. He's talked about some mental health challenges and things of that sort.

Starting point is 01:54:35 And he seems to be largely forgiven. At least that seems to be the sentiment. Now, of course, he also brings something that a lot of people want, which is music that people love to hear. So there's always this kind of value add, value subtraction thing when we punish people versus the anonymous person, right? They're not doing anything for people. So they're more quick to just say, well, just punish them, lock them away. It's fascinating because we use, even though these are public-facing examples, we use these as a template for how to deal with, you know, someone who, you know, got too drunk at the dorm party on Friday and said something really stupid and you got a bunch of offended people. Do you kick them out of school?

Starting point is 01:55:19 Maybe. Or her? Or do you sit them down and go, hey, that was really insensitive. And they have to do a bunch of sensitivity training. And, you know, and then you go, okay, like, they're healed. You know, like, I mean, I don't have any answers to this, but this is how it seems to play out in the real world. It's sort of like very salient examples, not at the super extremes. I mean, racism's bad, but he didn't kill anyone.

Starting point is 01:55:42 So then the punishment is either do we keep him or do we isolate him? And then what happens does set the course of what happens at more everyday levels. So I think what you're pointing to is America is an engagement. incredibly punitive or tributive culture. There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they see someone suffer if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer. So ordinarily, if you see someone be shocked, you have interior insula. It's like you're being shocked too.

Starting point is 01:56:22 Unless that person is first portrayed as violating some moral or social norm, in which case, dopamine, you get a reward out of seeing that person punished. I think that it is a lust just as much as lust for substances or lust for sexual partners. It is a desire people want to see people punished. Nietzsche was an amazing observer of human nature before there was a scientific psychology. And he wrote about how, why do we use? monetary terms to describe people being punished, pay their debt to society. People shouldn't get off Scott free. Scott is a word for tax. What is that? And what he theorized

Starting point is 01:57:13 is that what you're being paid back with is the pleasure of seeing a fellow human hurt. You hurt someone and we can't undo that hurt. We can't magic it away. How does them being punished pay their debt to society. And he wrote, maybe it's that cruelty is a currency and that all of us have a primitive desire to be the punisher. And that's what's being repaid. Blew my mind when I was reading it. And now that I see it, I see that everywhere. I think we see that in cancel culture mobs. I think we see that in politics. I think we see in America a real lust to make other people suffer and finding ways that they're guilty that allows us to feel entitled to that pleasure of punishing them or entitled to that pleasure of witnessing them

Starting point is 01:58:07 is absolutely runs through our culture, top to bottom, both sides of the political spectrum. One of my favorite books that I read when I was writing my book is this book called One of Us. And it's about the Norwegian mass shooter who shot all of those children at a summer camp, who was someone who was afflicted with terrible luck. From the time he was a child, he was described as someone who had a temper who was socially odd. His mother was very unstable. A lot of nature and nurture and circumstance conspired. And during his trial, they had this whole debate about, is he insane?

Starting point is 01:58:56 Is he not insane? And they had a psychologist who gave testimony, and he said, no matter what's happening, he's one of us, he's part of our society. So how are we going to deal with him without exiling him, throwing away the key? And all of the examples that you described are people trying to make this decision about, like, who do we keep in our group? Do they have enough for us that it's worth keeping them? And who do we get to exile and then feel entitled to feel the pleasure watching them suffer?

Starting point is 01:59:30 And I think that's a fundamentally inhuman way to look at our. I think that we are a society, and that means everyone, even people who do terrible, terrible things, there's still one of us. There's still one of God's creatures. They're still part of our human circle. But how do we shift our culture away from this glee? punishment, I don't know. I think it's, I think it's, you want to talk about sin. I think, I think that's the original sin of American culture, is our delight in punitiveness.

Starting point is 02:00:01 Incredible. Incredibly sad. Incredibly important. And an incredible opportunity for us hopefully to navigate out of what seems to be one of the deeper troughs of this that we've been in, at least since I've been alive. I want to just ask about this cruelty currency. Because I learned a long time ago that one needs to be very careful about coming up with evolutionary just so stories. It's so easy to do. It's so seductive. And it can be oh so wrong. So with that stated, you know, you said that if somebody observes somebody else being harmed, it activates areas of the brain that are associated with empathy.

Starting point is 02:00:49 presumably a surge of hormones and neurotransmarers that make us feel bad. If that person was a perpetrator and we're aware of that, then it feels good. It's not just neutral. It's the inverse of that. And then you said that Nietzsche described it as a cruelty currency. And I've been wondering about something. And forgive me, I don't know if I can articulate this very well because I haven't thought about it out loud. Just think through it.

Starting point is 02:01:18 If we return to the idea that every species, including our own, wants to make more of itself, care for its young, and propagate, that there's some forces there, clearly. I've often thought about dopamine as the universal currency of reward. And certainly there are other chemical currencies of punishment. And maybe drops in dopamine are punishment and increases, etc. Overly simplified, but I think we have enough data to support those statements. And then I think about how we punish people. And let's think about on a hockey rink, you put someone in a penalty box.

Starting point is 02:01:54 You take them out of play. In society, somebody could be canceled either permanently or they've got to take a break. Or somebody's put in jail. They're taking out of society. Several examples came up already today of people who were able to propagate their genes or not propagate their genes, depending on all. honest, like finding a partner, making the decision about, you know, consciously or unconsciously, the genetics, their personality, et cetera. And, okay, I'm going to create children with this person. I'm going to create new life versus the IVF doc who cheated in one of the most egregious examples I've ever heard, creating new life. And I think about maybe the currency that is dopamine is about energy and the opportunity to create more life.

Starting point is 02:02:43 It's like life energy. It gets a little bit woo. But when I think about it, it's like if somebody gets something by virtue of their hard work, we expect and want them to be rewarded for it. If they lie to get it, you know, like a Bernie Madoff who admitted to lying, so I don't think I'm going to get in any trouble by saying. I think he agreed he that he lied to get all that money. Then he robbed people of currency.

Starting point is 02:03:06 He got a lot of currency in that. And we hate that. He got more life energy. And when we're punished, we lose, even if there's, is not an explicit behavioral punishment that hopefully the shame, the regret, it takes us out of the running a bit. Yeah. You know, and people will play these games.

Starting point is 02:03:23 They'll try and manipulate around this. But a lot of life is about doing things that give you more opportunity, that give you more life energy that allow you to move forward. And a lot of the ways that we punish people is by trying to take away life energy, forgive the term, that we feel you didn't deserve that. Yes. Or you did something so that you shouldn't be. able to continue to propagate your life energy.

Starting point is 02:03:47 And so it gets in, I'm weaving it partially in with reproduction, but it's really about resources for your family so that your kids can have more. But I do think that in the end, what we're competing for is energy. And what we're punishing for is people that we think got it unfairly. And we definitely reward people that we feel gave us energy through a song, through art, et cetera, with money, which is really opportunity. There's nothing inherently valuable about it. Even gold backing it doesn't do that.

Starting point is 02:04:22 So, you know, so I feel like in the end we're playing an evolutionary game for energy and the opportunity to propagate our genes. Okay, so just some responses to that. Like, as you were talking, I was reminded of certain things. If you look at punishment, I won't even say punishment. If you look at enforcement, if you look at enforcement of cooperative norms in non-human species, even in not even in animals, a really consistent feature of that is reducing the punished organisms fitness opportunities. I'm going to block your access to mates. I'm going to eat your eggs so that, you know, I'm going to wasps reproduce.

Starting point is 02:05:11 via figs, and if the fig tree detects up the wasp as being a lazy pollinator, it will rot and wither away the figs that the wasp has laid its eggs in. It's denying it reproductive opportunity as a, you know, it's a retaliation against fitness. So I think what you're picking up on is like, you know, the ways that we punish people rob the mess of fitness. I'm opportunities. That's something that we see as an evolutionary through line. If we think about when we're trying to understand animal societies, what counts as a punishing behavior? Is it reducing their fitness opportunities of the punished thing? The thing about our language is to say like penalty box, you know, a hockey player is put into a penalty box. They don't get beaten with a red

Starting point is 02:06:05 hot poker when they're in there. They're just not allowed to play the game for a period of time. And I think this is where people get somewhat confused between retributive punishment and boundaries to keep the person and their teammates, which is all of us, since we're in a society, safe, right? So I'm not against people being in prison necessarily. The prison abolitionists will be mad at me for saying that. But we've never had a society of any sort where there isn't some mechanism to say, we need to be. protected from this person and this person needs an opportunity to have a timeout from society while they reflect on how they're going to behave differently in the future. But we don't have to design that system the way that we designed it here. There's this Instagram meme which is

Starting point is 02:06:55 is this a Scandinavian prison or a London hotel room. And people can't tell the difference. It's just the surveillance dome on the ceiling. And that speaks to something, which is that the purpose is not to make the person suffer. The purpose is to put them in the penalty box to protect the rest of us from their behavior. How do we get it so that our reactions to each other when we're holding boundaries is more like you're in the penalty box and less like, I want to make you suffer and I'm going to feel delighted so that you're suffering. The Danes are wonderful people and do seem to have this like sense of morality and decency. And social contract. And social contract. Although in fairness, I think there's been some criticism that some Northern European countries have been too lenient on violent offenders and it's made society more dangerous.

Starting point is 02:07:48 This is a very complicated literature and it's, you know, I'm not saying that it's just their prison system, but their rates of violent crime are astonishingly low compared to America as a whole in particular is compared to Texas. Yeah, I think that these templates for punishment versus reward, because we haven't really talked much about reward. realizing, you know, the punishment piece can be scaled, penalty box versus flogging. Forgive me for telling you another story. I've been reading a history of the counterculture movement mostly in California recently, but also the human psychology evolution movement. And it takes us to Big Sur inevitably. And some interesting Joseph Campbell was there and worked there and wrote there.

Starting point is 02:08:35 but Hunter Thompson was a security guard up there. A security guard. Yeah, at 20 years old he was hired as a security guard because he had a gun. And he could keep order on this place where people would come to use the baths. And it wasn't quite counterculture yet. But there's a story, and I believe it's true, that he was making some homophobic remarks. And there were some gay bodybuilders up from Venice, California. So the group decided what his punishment would be.

Starting point is 02:09:06 His punishment would be that these bodybuilders were going to hold him over the cliffs above the ocean, which is maybe three, 400 feet to his drop until he renounced homophobia, which eventually he did. And then they let him back on and then he was able to live on and work. And they're like, okay, he's cured, you know. So, I mean, it's a ridiculous example. On the other hand, everyone participated in this decision. And apparently he was very frightened.

Starting point is 02:09:32 And I don't know. didn't know him, but apparently he adjusted at least his behavior. Yeah. Kind of an interesting, silly, you know, funny enough but serious enough example. Nowadays, it would be very different, right? He would have lost his job and no amount of apology would have rescued his job, which on the one hand, you could say, okay, well, he's homophobic. They didn't want anyone homophobic working there.

Starting point is 02:09:55 On the other hand, the opportunity to potentially convert his thinking is lost. And so I think that's what you're talking about, that there are certain forms of punishment that give the opportunity not just to protect others, but to really help people evolve their moral concept. Yes. I think sometimes people talk about this as the difference between a backward-looking conception of justice versus a forward-looking conception of justice. So a backward-looking conception of justice, you are often caught in this, again, this rescue

Starting point is 02:10:28 blame trap, which is, does he deserve to be punitive? Or maybe he doesn't deserve to be punished that badly because of these extenuating circumstances. Oh, but he did this horrible thing. He made these homophobic comments. Whereas a forward-looking conception of justice is, given that we are where we are today, and given the harm that he has caused, and given the brain and the body that he has, how do we best maximize our chances of other people being protected from future harm? and him changing, him having, even if he doesn't change in his heart of hearts, changing the words that come out of his mouth, taking responsibility for what he says. The rule in my house with my kids is you're not allowed to tell me about what your brother did.

Starting point is 02:11:19 Your brother will tell me about what your brother did and you'll tell me about what you did. And then we're going to talk about what you want to happen in the future. and then we're going to talk about what everyone needs to do so that we can not have this argument. But this constant, like, attempt to figure out, like, how much does he deserve to hurt? I feel like it's an abyss. You know, you just drown in it.

Starting point is 02:11:44 And you drown in it with yourself, too. Like, if you've made comments that you regret yourself, like, how much do I deserve to be punished for that versus, but I can remember all the extenuating circumstances? No, it's, what do I need to? to do better in the future and what do other people need to know that they are safe around me now, which might be, you know, might be a penalty box. But, you know, thinking about punishment, not as, again, this is, it's not about some, you know, justice for, attempt to weigh the scales in the

Starting point is 02:12:15 past. It's about how do we make things better in the future? How do we keep people safe and repair things in the future? Before moving to reward, one thing that occurs to me is, People seem to integrate what people deserve now on the backdrop of all the shit they had to put up with in the past. Yeah. Not just from that person. I feel like we're all integrating on the backdrop of how we were treated, how much pain and frustration we've had to endure. And that weaves in with how much forgiveness we have for when people screw up or when they're like being just jerks or they're being outright awful. So I feel like it's an almost impossible problem to wrap our arms around, except at the very extremes.

Starting point is 02:13:06 So I think when people feel that they've been victimized accurately or inaccurately, that amps up, that retributive urge. And again, I'm not saying that, you know, this is just some people. I think this is part of being human that when we feel hurt, we want to hurt back and we want the person that hurt us to be hurt. And we're trying to keep some ledger of power and victimhood in our minds. I think that's, to some extent, an inescapable emotion of being human. But we don't just have to respond to our emotions. We don't have to let that lead, right? we don't have to let that run the show.

Starting point is 02:13:53 So I do think that you're right that in all situations, we're thinking about the situation and also the backdrop of the situation and thinking very much about power. I mean, going back to what we can learn about punishment from looking at non-human animals or not even not animals, even trees, even bacteria, is who is punished and who is the punisher is always a statement about the social roles within a group and those social roles

Starting point is 02:14:25 are structured by power. I talk in my book about how you can have alpha queen wasps and they eat some proportion of the eggs of the beta queens in their colony.

Starting point is 02:14:39 But if she eats too many of the eggs, her sisters will bite her. They will be like, okay, you're allowed this much power, but no more and we're going to enforce those limits.

Starting point is 02:14:50 So I think a lot of the debates that we're having about punishment in our society, who should be punished, are really debates about who gets to have power and to what degree in our society. What's interesting to me is how much the language of choice is leveraged or used in those debates. People so common, once you listen for it, it's really, really common that as soon as someone wants to just, justify punishment. They don't say, I'm justifying this to prevent harm or I'm justifying this to maintain or change your power structure. They say something about how the person being punished chose that. They chose to be there. They chose this thing. I think a lot of our focus on choice in American culture is really an interest in being entitled to punish people. If you're on a plane and they're like, they're trying to get people to check their bags,

Starting point is 02:15:54 they'll never say that the airline chose to overbook the plane. They'll say, if you've chosen to bring more than one bag with you, then you're going to need to check it, right? Which is like, you chose, so therefore you can be inconvenience. You'll hear it everywhere now. I'm going to listen for this. Okay, reward. The good stuff.

Starting point is 02:16:15 when I was a kid we'd go to dinner and we didn't go out to dinner very often we just wasn't our family but when we did we could get soda we couldn't have it at home and I would drink some soda then my sister would make sure that she drank a little less soda so that at any point in the meal

Starting point is 02:16:33 she had more soda than me even though we started off with more soda classic sibling thing okay so she's a wonderful person I adore my sister and yet she had to win that competition. Yeah. And so... That's some primal stuff there. That's some primal stuff. I don't know if it's the hypothalamus, but it's definitely... Do my parents love me more? Exactly. And if you feed two dogs at

Starting point is 02:16:59 once, you know, because I had a bulldog mastiff, my girlfriend at the time had a pit bull, and whoever got food first, and I swear they're paying attention to the size of the little... Yes. I mean, they are processing that at laser speed. what's going on? We pay attention to how much people are rewarded. Yes, we do. And we get something about rewards that go beyond just the reward. I mean, again, we are a species that's evolved in cooperation, and there's really nothing worse for a cooperative society than freeloading.

Starting point is 02:17:36 Someone being rewarded without putting effort into the collective. there's this great study that was run by these economists where people were put into these online basically like online you know kind of societies where they could interact with one another and you could pick which village did you want to join and you could switch villages at any time and in both villages everyone who is in that society

Starting point is 02:18:10 society, online society, online game, was given an allocation of digital money, and they had to decide how much are they going to donate from their personal wallet into the collective? And so that's a classic economic trade-off game, which is what's best for my self-interest is if I don't contribute anything and everyone else contributes the maximum and then I get to benefit from the common good, right? That's the freeloading problem. But if everyone does that, then there's nothing in the common good. Okay, so in one of these societies, people were given, this is back to reward and punishment,

Starting point is 02:18:48 people were given the ability to see how much other people donated and could pay to punish people who they didn't think had donated enough. So we're in a society, and if we're in the punishing society, then I can see that you got rewarded with this, and then you didn't contribute enough of it back to the collective good. And then I could pay my own money to take away some of yours. And in the other society, people got to make their decisions, but they were anonymous, and you couldn't respond to other people's decisions.

Starting point is 02:19:25 The rules are transparent. It's not mysterious what's happening. And at the beginning of the experiment, participants are allowed to pick, like, which village do I want to be in? And they think, I'm against, I'm against, punishment, and I don't want other people to know my business. So I'm going to go to the non-punishing society. And then it basically collapses in like three rounds because everyone's keeping their stuff to themselves and not contributing to the good. A few people pick the society where they

Starting point is 02:19:59 have the opportunity to punish from the very beginning. And they immediately establish a strong norm of you, if you get a lot, you give a lot. There's not going to be some asymmetry between how much you're taking, how much you're keeping for yourself and how much you're contributing to our collective society. By the end of the game, the non-punishing society has collapsed and everyone has migrated to the punishing society. And they are incredibly attuned to freeloading. So your sister is like, he's not getting more soda than me, is he? And I want to, if I'm going to feel something. I want to feel like I have more soda than my brother does. I told my kids last week, I was like, I'm going to just start acting like a capricious dictator and just like make

Starting point is 02:20:49 no more attempt to keep things even Steven so that you can understand what unfair really feels like because I'm so sick of this like, Jonah got half a chocolate chip more than me and his cookie. Why is seeing someone punished if they've done something wrong? Why dopamine? Why that? It's because it is so foundational to our survival as a cooperative species to have social norms and see that they're enforced. And seeing someone get rewarded when it doesn't feel like it's fair, I think activates all of our freeloader alert, freeloader alert. Like, we cannot have this module. Paul Bloom, who's a child psychologist, has a great paper where he says people prefer inequality to unfairness.

Starting point is 02:21:44 It's not things being unequal that they necessarily dislike. It's things being unfair. It's when the inequality feels unfair that people are like. No. These days, I love observing online behavior. That makes one of us. It's just a scientist. in me.

Starting point is 02:22:05 Yeah. I just, well, I feel like there's something to be learned from it. If one has a little

Starting point is 02:22:09 bit of, like if you, if you can have some distance from it. And I think I don't spend all my time in the comment section, but it's sometimes

Starting point is 02:22:19 interesting things play out. And you can see this, you know, and it's really, yeah, this concept of kind of who gets money, attention,

Starting point is 02:22:30 etc., which is really life energy and gets to keep playing the game of life versus who, is getting batted back and penalty boxed. And I think fairness lets us rest. Like the sense that there's fairness lets us rest.

Starting point is 02:22:42 Yeah. I think that some people more than others, like the sense of seeing injustice, feeling injustice, activates people. And it activates them in a direction, typically that they don't get paid for, that is taking away from their other life energy. I mean, the media, I'm not going to blame social media.

Starting point is 02:23:04 but or the algorithms. That's no longer a good argument in my opinion. But I do think that there are monetization systems that try and hijack people's sense of injustice to drive more clicks and views, more advertising. And that's how you get people moving forward. But they're not really, the illusion is that they're moving forward. In fact, the financial incentive there is to just keep people on a treadmill where they feel like they see more injustice and they're angrier and angrier and they just continue.

Starting point is 02:23:34 And nothing changes. And I'm not dystopian, but I think one has to be careful not to get caught up in that. It's very different than a game, like a game of football or who gets more soda. I think that right now, who gets rewarded seems to be more under control than who gets punished. Like we feel like the, I think a lot of people feel like the bad guys and gals are outside of our control. So now it's a question of just making sure people don't get rewarded. As you're talking, I'm thinking again about that study I was describing, where you have the two villages. And the people who are, who were most influential in setting the norms of the society that ended up thriving in this online game,

Starting point is 02:24:23 were people who engaged in a lot of punishing and rewarding, public punishing and rewarding behavior from the very beginning. And again, I think this goes back to punishment and reward. is a way of establishing power, right? It is a way of asserting power over what are the rules? What are the rules in this society? Like, what are we doing here? I'm picking a society that has these rules and I'm going to enforce them. We now live in this community collapse where we don't live in isolated villages.

Starting point is 02:24:57 We don't live in small tribes where we interact with each other reciprocally over time in dense Ken networks. We are massively connected with a lot of one-time interactions between strangers. And as you were talking, I was just like, is that taking a psychology that's evolved to be in connection in a small community where the purpose of rewarding and punishing is to establish the norms for your group? But now there isn't a group. There's no one group. They're not a cohesive group.

Starting point is 02:25:34 And so people are, they're essentially arguing about what are the rules are going to be. But it's like they're playing a game and they're arguing about what the rules are in the middle of the game. And if you feel like the only tool available for you is to just ratchet up the consequences and yell louder, right? But yell louder into the void. It's not a real community. Like X is not a, it's the internet, right? Like that is not who you're living next to. I love doing this podcast.

Starting point is 02:26:03 but the reason I continue it is for the opportunity to have conversations like this. In person, yes. Yeah, with you, I get more intellectual stimulation from this job, frankly, than I did when I was in my office at Stanford every day. Yeah. Because people were all so busy. Yeah. Yeah. But it's also so people can hear the conversations because what you're describing is very real.

Starting point is 02:26:23 Things are so diffuse now. And there isn't really an opt-out option. Is that legitimate? Can you say that? You can't really opt out. I'm opting for an opt-out option being a legitimate statement. You know, where would one go? I'm not sure we can get completely offline.

Starting point is 02:26:45 I think it's possible in small amounts, but certainly younger generation. I've talked to my niece about this. It's like, no, no dice. It's not happening. The question is, I guess, how big is your sphere of visibility? I think that's a really hard question. There's a British writer, Oliver Bergman, who... has written, he has this great newsletter called The Imperfectionist.

Starting point is 02:27:08 And one piece of advice he gives is about, you know, letting your energy and your heart be local. And for me, I feel like that's a real struggle to think about how do you not harden your heart to people that are suffering, right? At the same time, how do you let, if you're keeping yourself tender, if you're keeping yourself attuned to caring about fairness, caring about injustice, caring about the vulnerable, where is that energy going?

Starting point is 02:27:43 And if it's just going back to the internet, I'm not necessarily sure that it's really helping. But if it's to, how does my neighborhood organize a winter coat drive? Or do I make sure that, you know, I fill up a stocking, for children whose families can't afford Christmas gifts for my children's preschool. That feels so much more satisfying than any amount of yelling on social media every well.

Starting point is 02:28:13 So it's how do you be tender to the world but act in your own neighborhood? Feels like the balance that I feel the best when I'm there, but it's a very difficult balance to maintain. Winning the game of everyday life is exactly what you just described. I think one can be online, see what's happening in the world, but there has to be a buffer there. There has to be an emotional buffer because otherwise you lose our minds. I mean, to steal your words from earlier, although I won't say nearly as eloquently, I mean, it's a new technology that's forcing us to reevaluate our morality.

Starting point is 02:28:53 Our hardwiring hasn't changed. Our ability to soft wire our brain and modify it hasn't really changed in tens of thousands or more years. I think it took about 10 years of smartphone use for us to arrive at this place. We're like, oh, shit. How often should we be on this thing? And how much I, like, what aspects of this are beneficial and healthy and which aren't? A lot are not. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:29:15 Well, and the whole world migrated into this position right before. But then also I say that. And then I'm like, but it's given me such incredible opportunities. Like would I have written a book without, you know, it was Twitter at that time? Like, would I be here and getting this opportunity to talk to you? one of my best friends I met online. So to the extent that it is a tool for real-life connection and real-life action, then I think it's good.

Starting point is 02:29:42 And to the extent that it takes you out of real life, then it's bad, at least for me, is how I have come to think of it. I'm certainly immensely grateful for the work you do. You're a brave one willing to go into these corners of the psyche, corners of human reflexes for better or worse and to be willing to, you know, talk about issues of morality, sex differences, reward and punishment. There's some questions from, quote, unquote, the audience, from the dreaded Internet. Speaking of the Internet that we've just been talking about

Starting point is 02:30:16 this whole time. I trust in people. They're like dogs. They just need to be treated right. That's a compliment, by the way, at least coming from me. Okay, questions from the interweb. Always a Fun and dangerous thing. Now, these are excellent questions, and you've answered many of them in our conversation already. A couple of people asked, how can identical twins be so incredibly different? Oh. What's going on there? So this is not just identical twins.

Starting point is 02:30:46 We see this in other genetically identical animals. There's studies of inbred mice. There's studies of, we were talking earlier about armadillos who give birth to four. for identical quadruplets. There are studies of clonal fish. And what there seems to be is what some scientists have called developmental noise, which is this emergence of individuality that's neither nature nor nurture, but is something about the initial chaos and then path dependence of development.

Starting point is 02:31:20 One of my favorite studies about this, they raised these mice, in bred mice, genetically homogenous. They raise them in identical rearing environments and then at a certain point put them together in this big vivarium where they could interact. And you saw almost immediately just variability, which might have been initially random in activity levels, aggression levels,

Starting point is 02:31:47 where in the cage they like to hang out. And then those differences started to stabilize. You basically saw the emergence of individual differences in mouse personality over time. And it's experience. It's experience that's there's some randomness and then there's a path dependence there. And then it's your nervous system responding to experience that leads paths to diverge. I actually think that's one of the most interesting things about identical twins is that they can be different. If you have one twin who has schizophrenia, there's only a 50% of you, there's only a 50%

Starting point is 02:32:23 chance that the other one will. 50% is way higher than 1%, which is the base rate, but it's not destiny. If someone wants a fiction treatment of this, I know this much is true, is a novel by the novelist Wally Lamb, and it's written by the perspective of

Starting point is 02:32:38 an unaffected identical twin whose identical twin has paranoid schizophrenia. And it's very scientifically interesting because it captures a lot of the, did one of them get exposed to a virus, did one of them get kind of singled out for maltreatment by the stepfather.

Starting point is 02:32:56 So some things that might have gone into that difference, but also just the phenomenology of being genetically identical to someone who's having such a different psychological experience as you in life. Twins fascinate me. Just as the nature-nurture thing. Which, by the way, we are only saying now in this podcast, amazing, right? Are there specific periods in development when genetic influence is at its strongest and how does that influence shift relative to environment across the lifespan?

Starting point is 02:33:27 Oh, this is a really interesting question with a complicated answer. So in some ways, genetics matter most when they affect fetal development because that's laying the groundwork for how the brain is wired over time. When you look at heritability estimates, so when you're estimating how much of the differences between people are due to genetic differences. You can estimate that using twins by looking at how much more similar are identical twins versus fraternal twins. And what you see is actually that heritability goes up with age.

Starting point is 02:34:04 So the herability of cognition, intelligence scores goes up until around age 12, in which case it stays pretty heritable from then. Heritability of personality continues to increase until around age 30. And so how can that be that the older you are, the more your genes matter? Because you've been acquiring experience all this time. And part of the answer to that is that people are picking their own experiences. So people are picking their environments, they're responding to their environments according to their genetically shaped temperament, personality, neurobiology.

Starting point is 02:34:40 And what that means is that identical twins actually converge over time, even though they are acquiring experience over time. So when do genetics matter more? It kind of depends on what you mean by matter. When are genetic differences most predictive of your phenotype once you're an adult? Because you've had a chance to pick your own life experiences. There are several questions that I'm going to merge into one. Earlier at the very beginning of the conversation, we were talking about possible pheromone, but if not, pheromones and odor effects of timing of puberty because of the presence or absence of a male. It's kind of an interesting example, but I'm sure there are other examples where something about the environment at a chemical level impacts whether or not gene expression

Starting point is 02:35:32 is turned on or off. And so this is an infinite space to consider, but depending on where one is born in the world, maybe you're getting longer days and shorter nights for a portion of the year if you're near the equator, less of that. If you're in Scandinavia, you're getting some extended periods of lack of sunlight. And there were a number of questions about how sunlight can impact gene expression. So if you take two identical twins and you raise them in very different environments, let's say equator versus closer to the North Pole, is there any evidence that amount of sunlight day length across the years can impact expression of. of what would otherwise be called genetically determined traits?

Starting point is 02:36:16 So I will say that I don't have any expertise specifically around sunlight or I don't typically study physical environments. I usually am studying social environments. There is one hypothesis about how basically people whose ancestors are from equatorial climates, if they are in colder climates, if they are more susceptible to, schizophrenia because of activation of risk genes for that. I don't actually know the current state of the literature on this. The human being is both developmentally programmed in this very resilient way.

Starting point is 02:37:01 The fact that we managed to grow such a complicated nervous system and psychology from so humble beginnings is really amazing. And also, we are incredibly adaptable creatures. And the reason why we're adaptable is because our genotype, that developmental programming can respond so flexibly to the environmental inputs that we're in. So that's a kind of a non-and-I mean, that's a very vague answer. But your DNA is a molecule that's sitting in your cells. It's not doing anything until it's acted on to be read, to be transcribed, to be expressed. And so that always requires an environment and is sensitive to an environment.

Starting point is 02:37:46 Thank you so much for answering those questions. And I mean, you've really expanded everyone's thinking about genes and morality. And I know that people, including me, but many, many people will really appreciate the thoughtfulness and the rigor that you approach these things because they are dicey topics. But they're central to who we are and how we're functioning. And it's also very clear from everything you've said that there's a ray of all. optimism thread through all of it. I hope so. You know, that we can make positive choices for ourselves.

Starting point is 02:38:18 Yes. Well, I really appreciate the conversation. You know, I'm an academic, so I'm used to giving talks and getting a Q&A, but it is rare to have an interviewer that is so delightfully varied in their questions and so careful in the questioning, too. So I really appreciate the conversation. Oh, thank you. Well, we certainly have to have you back again.

Starting point is 02:38:39 Before I forget, you have books. We'll put links to those. Great. What are you most excited about now? I'm sure you're working on something right now. I mean, I'm really excited to talk about the book. My new book is coming out on March 3rd, and I'm just really excited to be in conversation with people about these issues that I've thought about for a long time. What's the title of the book?

Starting point is 02:39:00 Sorry to interrupt, but I want to make sure. The book is called Original Sin on the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame and the Future of Forgiveness. And it's out in early March. Amazing. All right. I am going to go purchase it. don't send me a free copy. I always tell people, don't send me a copy. I want to buy the book to support, but also to read. Amazing. Okay, awesome. Fantastic. Well, thank you. We'll have to have

Starting point is 02:39:21 you back again. I would love to. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Catherine Paige Hardin. To learn more about her work and to find a link to her new upcoming book, Original Sin, on the genetics of vice, the problem of blame, and the future of forgiveness. You can simply go to the link in the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning

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Starting point is 02:40:23 and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation. for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best.

Starting point is 02:40:49 Again, the book is called Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content

Starting point is 02:41:07 to the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers There's cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost.

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Huberman Lab - How Genes Shape Your Risk Taking & Morals | Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden

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