Modern Wisdom - #353 - Robert Plomin - How Do Genes Influence Our Behaviour?

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

Robert Plomin, is a psychologist, geneticist and an author. Separating the influence of nature and nurture is something everyone considers. Robert is the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century and has run the largest and most clinically detailed twin and adoption studies in history to finally provide definitive answers to these fundamental questions. Expect to learn how much of who we are can be attributed to our environment and how much was predisposed by our genetics, why parenting doesn't make a difference, why the choice of school your child goes to only impacts 1% of their outcomes, whether penis size is heritable, if there is a gay gene or not and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on Reebok’s entire range including the amazing Nano X1 at https://geni.us/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Blueprint - https://amzn.to/3f2OYYk Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Robert Ploman, he's a psychologist, geneticist and an author when we're talking about how genes influence our behaviour. Separating the influence of nature and nurture is something everyone considers. Robert is the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century and has run the largest and most clinically detailed twin and adoption studies in history to finally provide definitive answers to these fundamental questions. Today, expect to learn how much of who we are can be attributed to our environment and how much was predisposed by our genetics, why parenting doesn't make a difference, why

the choice of school your child goes to only impacts 1% of their outcomes, whether penis size is heritable, if there is a gauging, and much more. This is one of the biggest switches in my thinking that I've had over the last year. Robert's work really does sort of upend a lot of the commonly held assumptions about how outcomes and intelligence and general life happiness manifests. We live in a world that's a meritocracy where you can be anything you want to be and to discover that there are these immutable truths that are with you from literally as you're conceived can feel restricting to some people. But it can also be liberating, learning that there are certain things that you are predisposed

to enjoy and other things that you're not actually reassures us that a lot of the preferences that we have and the ways that we enjoy living our lives is something that we should just embrace, as opposed to fight against. This is a uncomfortable but unbelievably enlightening conversation. I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. Before I get onto other news, the Modern Wisdom Reading List is finally finished 100 books that you should read before you die. That will be available on Monday, the 9th of August. I'll tell you where you can get it on the pre-roll for next Monday's podcast plus it will be on the swipe up on my story on Instagram. So make sure that you're following me and make sure that

you tune in next Monday so that you can get your copy. It's taken six months and it's nearly 10,000 words long. So yes, I really hope that you enjoy it. And it adds a ton of value. There are so many awesome books in there. Some that you'll be familiar with and many that you won't, so yes, get ready for that. But now it's time to learn about nature versus nurture with Robert Plurman, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Chris. You turned my world upside down last year when I read Blueprint. I have been looking forward to speaking to you ever since I read that book and I'm hoping that today I'm going

to be able to deliver the same uncomfortable, topsy, turbby world that I was sort of slowly ingested about 12 months ago. So I'm looking forward to seeing what the audience make of the insights that we're going to get from today. Yeah, well that's terrific that you've got it. You know, some people I think just get turned off. They just say, whoa, this is too weird. But it's really so rewarding for me when people, you know, persist with it. They're willing to deal with these difficult topics. And then when you get off on the other side, it isn't so bad. It's actually exciting. It's a new way of seeing the world, I think. So that's terrific. I'm really glad to hear it.

It's totally correct. It is a whole new world. And you're also right to say that today there'll be some uncomfortable insights, especially when we're in a meritocracy, a meritocratic society that's capitalist and you are your achievements, to hear that there are these immutable truths that you perhaps didn't choose, there are influences on you that you didn't elect, these things are uncomfortable, but you're also correct that it's very liberating. If you take it just a little bit further, it's so liberating to learn. So, okay, we've danced around it. How would you describe behavioral genetics to someone who's never heard it before? Well, behavioral genetics is like medical genetics. It's not the genetics of medicine, it's the genetics of behavior. And behavior is essentially psychology. So we're dealing with the major

domains of psychology, like psychopathology, personality, cognitive abilities, even getting into education, educational achievement. But the main thing is we're focused on individual differences. Why are some people schizophrenic and others not? Why are some children reading disabled and others not? And it's an important distinction because genes, we're 99.9% similar for all our DNA, 3 billion base pairs of DNA. We have exactly the same DNA at these are the steps in the spiral staircase of the double helix of DNA. We're identical for well over 99% of those bases, but for at least 0.1% or so, which still

means millions of these steps in the spiral staircase, we differ. And so what we're asking in behavioral genetics is the extent to which those differences in inherited DNA sequences make a difference in our behavior. Do they make us more likely to be susceptible to schizophrenia or depression or alcoholism? Or do they affect our personality? So it just can't be emphasized enough that we're talking about individual differences. The other 99.9% of the DNA is the same for all of us. That's what makes us human. And those are also important questions. You know, is that why, for example,

humans are natural language users? Or we walk on two feet, which is very rare. We have eyes in the front of our head for depth perception. So those are questions about universals. Why is the human species like this or like that? Those are terrific questions, but we're not looking at that. We're asking about why people differ and the extent to which inherited DNA differences make them different.

It's crazy to think that all of the differences that we have come down to that point 1%. All of the idiosyncrasies, the way that we speak, the nature, the texture of our own mind, the interests that we have, any of the idiosyncrasies, the way that we speak, the nature, the texture of our own mind, the interests that we have, any of the medical predilections that we have with regards to our behavior, especially given that I've got a big interest in evolutionary psychology, which is looking at that 99.9 percent, and then your field just focuses on the tiny little final bit. Right.

So it would be perfectly reasonable to think that these a small amount of DNA difference doesn't make a difference. And psychologists always assumed inheritance wasn't important. They, from Freud onwards, assumed that we are what we learn. You know, it's the environment that makes us who we are. And that's called nurture. And especially the family environment. You know, when I was in graduate school in the 70s, textbooks actually said at the time

that schizophrenia is caused by what your mother does to you in the first few years of life. And, you know, that's reasonable because schizophrenic mothers tend to have kids who are more likely to be schizophrenic. But what they didn't realize is that parents and offspring are 50% similar genetically. So the issue is to what extent do inherited DNA differences

account for some of these differences we observe. And you don't need DNA. It was only in the last 10 years we're able to use DNA. For the last 100 years, we've been able to use methods like the twin method that compares identical and non-identical twins. Adoption studies where you study genetically related people rear to part, like birth parents and they're adopted away children or conversely then adoptive parents of adopted children who

share nurture environment, but not nature. And so these shock was in the 70s and 80s that all of this evidence kept coming up with a general finding that in individual differences in psychological traits are very substantially due to genetic influence. We now say about half of the differences are due to inherited DNA differences. And the excitement now is with the DNA revolution, we're able to begin to find some of those DNA differences, which will allow us to make predictions at the level of the individual,

which is going to be a very big thing. 50%. 50% of the differences are due to inherited DNA differences. Now, first that means the other half is not due to DNA differences. It's due to the environment, but there's a big story there that the environment isn't what we always thought it was. So we can get on to that later. But we call it heritability, the extent to which genetic differences

make a difference for a trait. And there's some important... When you say trait, what's a trait? Yes, a trait is a measure of individual differences. What would be an example? Like physical, height, weight, psychological, psychopathology, personality. So when we say that these...

that heritability is 50%, we're talking about differences between people. So the easiest one, take weight. People are often surprised. You say height. How heritable is height? Well, people aren't surprised to hear. It's very highly heritable.

How highly heritable? At least 90 percent. So that means of the differences you see between people and height. About 90 percent of the differences are due to inherited DNA differences. So the first misconception is that that's not you. You didn't grow 90% because of your genes and the last 10% because of the environment. And as funny as it sounds, you scratch the surface of what people know and most people are making

that mistake. So we're talking about differences between people in the population. Okay, so highly heritable, 90%, but how heritable is weight, say body mass index? A lot of people think, yeah, maybe there's a little genetic influence, but it's mostly due to the environment. And it's not. It's 70% heritable. So of the differences you see between people in weight, about 70% of the differences are due to inherited the NA differences. So that's kind of shocking to people and it makes a couple of points. One is again, we're talking about differences between people in a population, given their environmental differences, like some people are exercising and watching their diet

and all of that, and other people, and it just let it all go. But it's, and given the genetics, that's there too, different populations differ genetically. You know, there's immigration, immigration across time. We're just describing differences as they exist in a particular population at a particular time,

we're not talking about what could be. So with weight, for example, and this is the second misconception, if it's genetic, it's deterministic, it's fatalistic, and that's true of the thousands of single gene disorders. Like if you have this mutation in a gene at the tip of chromosome 4, you know, we have 23 pairs of chromosomes, a 3 billion base pairs of DNA are Chopped up into these 23 blocks. We call chromosomes. So at the tip of chromosome 4 There's a gene for Huntington's disease, which is what Woody Guthrie had It's a long-term degenerative disease that doesn't show up till later in life

So if you have that mutation for Huntington's disease, you will die from Huntington's. It is deterministic, hardwired, unless something else kills you first. No matter what your diet is, there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Now, so it is deterministic, and that's the way people learned about genetics. That's what Mendel studied with his pea plants. These are hard-wired, deterministic, single gene necessary and sufficient disorders. However, when we get to psychological disorders and most common medical disorders, they're not like that. They're not due to a single gene. They're due to thousands of tiny DNA differences. And that changes the story from determinism to probabilistic propensities. It gives you a risk. So that's the second misconception. And go ahead. Sorry, I'm rabbling on.

No, at all. You've got to quote in the book, I think, that summarizes this beautifully. And it says, DNA isn't all that matters, but it matters more than anything else and it matters more than everything else put together in determining who we are. Right, well that's the heritability of 50%. If you look across all psychological traits on average, there are about 50% heritable. Physiological traits, you know, weight, more heritable, 70% height, even more heritable. I need to stop you there. The heritability of weight being 70%. There are a lot of guys and girls listening

that do fitness, there'll be PT's, there'll be dietitians that work incredibly hard to try and get themselves to their optimal BMI to get their athletes down to a weight and a body fat percentage that they're supposed to. And you're saying that the best diet regime would have been to have different parents? Well, absolutely.

I mean, that would make the biggest difference. But see, again, the point I was getting to here is that we're describing what is in this population at this time, with some people who are fitness nuts or really watch their diet and all of that, and other people who don't. We're saying, of those differences in weight, how much are due to inherited differences? And the answer is more than half, 70% on average across many different countries, for example, but it's also true in the UK. It's about 70% heritable. Now the point, though, the third point is it doesn't, it's a confusion between what is and what could be.

We're describing a particular population. We say on average, 70% of the differences are due to genetic differences for weight. But that doesn't mean you can't control your weight, your own weight. It's what is in the population. It's not what could be for one individual. Most obviously, if I was locked in a room and not allowed to eat, I would lose weight. And it's part of the problem too, as people think, you know, I do have, we now have these genetic scores. We can predict about 10% of these differences in body weight with DNA alone. No.

It's about 70% heritable. So we've just started doing this. But you know, predicting 10% is not bad. I mean, there aren't a lot of other things that will predict BMI to that extent. So, you know, it's a start, right, with this BMI. So, my highest risk score, what we call polygenic, is DNA composite score, is for BMI. So, I'm really meant to be a genetic fatty. But, again, you know, people say, oh, well, you're just going to give up and say, you can't do anything about it.

But, you know, to the contrary, I find it's very motivating. I know why. I keep putting on. It's invidious. You know, I put on a few pounds every year, but then you don't lose those pounds. And you know, for some of us, they tend to go to the belly and, you know, and, and, you know, people say, well, just pull your socks up, you know, just don't eat so much. Exercise more. It's easy for thin people to say. But if

you have this propensity to put on weight, I think really what it is, it's not even physiological. I think it's psychological. We've done some research saying that the genetic propensity is more, we talk about satiety, feeling awful. I go out with people, eating at a restaurant, pray God, we can do it again pretty soon. And I'm full, but there's food on the table. We're talking away. And before you know it, I've eaten that food. I'm not hungry. Well, that's totally correct.

Because for even when you're talking about particular traits, the individual ways that you can contribute to that trait manifesting can occur in a number of ways. Let's say that that 70% could be contributed to from some people who don't like exercise, some people who do have great agrel in release or leptin release or whatever in the stomach that encourages them to feel hungry. Maybe some of them have bigger stomachs. Maybe this particular selection of traits is associated with having a larger stomach or what pick your root moving forward, whatever it might be. They just have an all on nothing mentality when it comes to food.

Exactly right. There's lots of different ways in which these genetic effects can come in. It's highly unlikely to be a simple pathway. It won't be. Not everyone gets fat in the same way. That's right. And another major cue here that you didn't mention is responsiveness to food cues. So, I used to like to make bread. I can't do it because the smell of fresh, and my mouth is watering,

not just even seeing that smell. A fresh warm bread and the thought of putting butter on it, it's irresistible to me. And I say irresistible. I can resist it, but it's just other things being equal. They're not equal for me. I go past the bakery and I smell the bread and stuff. If I go in there, I'm dead. I can't help but buy these pastries. And it is sort of tree will in a way. I mean, people say that. But it's just on the fly in life. There's a lot of things impinging on us. And we're bombarded by food cues

for those of us particularly sensitive to it. So really, all of this does come down to suggesting that people ought to cut us a bit more slack. You know, there's fat shaming that goes on, and people need to recognize there's a very strong genetic component to how much weight people put on, how easy or hard it is to lose that weight. And so I think it does suggest that we,

you know, are a bit less judgmental, not just assuming. I mean, it is free will, but it's not in the context of life. It's constrained will. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. So I kind of just have to avoid having junk food in the mouth. Don't walk past the bakery.

You need to alter your route to work. So I think most people, especially when you talk about something like height or shoe size, oh yeah, my dad's, my dad's a size 15 and, and mums a size nine. So I, I had big feet as well. People are kind of accepting of that. I think that where it becomes more murky is behavioral traits, right? You know, how people manifest their personalities, their level of happiness, their depression, their materialism, their state of seeking, whatever it might be, I think that, do you find this when you're trying to communicate it to people?

The nice thing about weight, body mass index, which is weight corrected for height, is that it's kind of in between the hardcore physical things like height, which don't change much during the government. I mean, you increase in height, but you don't go up and down in height the way you do with weight, you know, as I well know. But it is a very psychological trait because a lot of the mechanisms involved and a lot of the effects are psychological sorts of effects. So what I like about it is no one argues

about how to measure weight. Whereas when you get into psychological traits, a lot of it's based on questionnaires, like depression. You know, someone would interview you and say, you know, how many times have you had these feelings or have you ever had suicidal thoughts? And it's kind of self-report. And people say, well, but that's today and yesterday I didn't feel that way. You know, it's much more dynamic.

And you'd think harder to measure. But I would say for people who just dismiss these psychological traits, that psychologist, because they know it's hard to measure these things, has spent a lot of time measuring them. And I think they do quite well and they find a lot of stability for these things, even depression, which goes up and down. But if you talk about depression over the last year, that's going to correlate pretty highly with your experience of depression 10 years from now.

How do you study this? Let's say that one of the first things that I thought upon swallowing the huge industrial sized red pill that I had to reading your book was, yeah, but I just had all of these, yeah, buts in there, yeah, but how are they studying this? So what's, how are you able to separate out all of the different genetic influences on traits? Well, there's two questions there.

One is how do we measure it? The other is how do we separate out genetics and environment? On the first bit, I would just say that I particularly like to study cognitive abilities because you can measure them, you know, like spatial ability and memory ability, and you can measure them accurately and their maximum performance, you know, so you take this test and you'll be trying to do as well as you can do on it. And your scores today will be highly correlated with your scores next month and next year.

They're highly reliable, these sorts of scores. The problem with other sorts of measures like personality is if I ask you, how shy are you? Well, you think of, what context do you mean? So we try to ask questions about many different contexts, like we're at a party with strangers, which is the kind of key aspect of shyness. The shyest person on earth is not shy of someone they love.

They live with or they're very familiar with. Shining anxiety doesn't enter into that. So it is difficult to measure, but without going into it in great detail, I would just say psychologists have spent a century trying to measure these things, and I think they do pretty well at it. But now the issue of how, okay, so now you've got a measure, I mean, weights easy, people differ, and for most of these traits, they differ in what we call the normal distribution

of bell shaped curve. So for weight, there's some people who are extremely obese and there's some people who are extremely thin. Most people are in the middle. That's this bell-shaped curve. That's the individual differences that I'm talking about. And if I use the word variance, that's a statistic that describes the extent to which people differ, the variance. So you describe this distribution with a mean, the average, which is in the middle of this bell curve, and then this statistic of variance, which describes the extent to which people vary around that mean,

because at distribution, I don't know if you can see it here, a distribution that spreads out has a lot more variance than a distribution that's tight like this. So, the way we study variance and why people differ, as I mentioned, involves methods from a century ago called the twin study, which compares identical and non-identical twins. So identical twins are clones of one another. Their DNA is exactly the same. Returnal twins or non-identical twins, like any brother and sister, are 50% similar genetically. So of the DNA that differs, that 1%, they're similar for about 50%

of that. So if it traits influenced by genetics, you'd have to predict that identical twins are more similar than non-identical twins because they're twice as similar genetically. So that's the twin method and the adoption methods even more straightforward. In families, nature and nurture runs together. So the fact that parents who are schizophrenic have kids who are more likely to be schizophrenic, it's always assumed to be nurture, but it could be nature. There could be genetic influences there. And one way to do to tell that is to separate nature and nurture. So you can have birth parents who become schizophrenic later in life who relinquish kids through adoption. And those kids are adopted away in an adoptive home where the parents are unlikely

to have schizophrenia. So that is a direct estimate of the extent to which parent offspring resemblance is due to genetics. And the converse side of it is just as neat, you've got adoptive parents of adopted children. They share a nurture with those kids. They adopt them early in life. So they're the environmental parents of those kids, but they're not genetically related to those kids. So these two methods, what's nice is they're very different, they each have different problems, but the convergence of evidence from both of these measures,

methods is really very impressive. And so that's how we get to this conclusion that across each take all psychological traits, say in twin studies, you get an average heritability estimate of 50%, which is just extraordinary. Given that 30 years ago, most psychologists would have said, now there's really no important genetic influence. How many twins have you studied?

How many people have you used in these adoption studies and these twin studies? Am I right in thinking that you have been part of the biggest ever? Yeah, when I came to England in 1994, part of the deal was they gave me a grant to study to put together a huge sample, 10,000 pairs of twins at birth from birth. 10,000 pairs of twins, 20,000 people. Yeah, one percent of all twins births are twins and there's say 7,500 birthday year at least there was back then when I started this 25 years ago. So that's you know just about what you'd expect and a third of those are

identical all around the world and that means-thirds are non-identical. So, we studied these kids 14 times between the ages of infancy at two, through adulthood at 25. We most recently studied them at 25. They're all born in 94, 95, and 96. So we started with about 21,000 sets of twins. We excluded some because of illness, especially death. We spent a lot of time making sure we didn't contact.

Imagine if you had a new twins and one of them died, it wouldn't be too cool to get a message saying, oh, would you like to participate in this exciting new study of twins? So we spent a lot of time making sure we didn't do that. And so we ended up with about 85% participation rates, which in this sort of study is amazing, but that's because parents of twins know they're special. Is this just in the UK? Yeah. Okay, so we're... Oh, it's just England and Wales. Scotland had their own thing.

Okay, is there any criticism around the fact that the heritability that is represented in England and Wales Wouldn't scale across the rest of the world Now it's a great question because remember I said we're describing what is in a particular population at a particular time So it's an empirical question, but there have been studies around the world. There's been three million pairs of twins studied around the world in about 3,000 different reports. And it could be the results are very different, but it turns out they're not very different. And that's really remarkable. And I always struck I studied cognitive abilities.

And in India, studies in rural India where people are mostly illiterate, and then you have very urban societies in India. The results don't change much. You know, they're still coming up with very substantial heritability. And it didn't have to be that way, and it'd be quite interesting if it weren't that way. But on balance, it's quite, the most remarkable finding in relation to your point, is that the results are so similar across many very different countries. Did you find or see any groups which are less heritable? Is there an area on the planet that seems to be statistically decreased?

Well, the one that's been of interest in the last decade or so is not different populations, but within a population, the thought that kids from very deprived backgrounds, lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, the heritability is lower, is what they were saying. And it kind of makes sense because you think the environment is so overwhelming, you know, at the extreme end of social effects. Yeah. All right.

And so that was an interesting notion, but there's been a dozen studies since, and they generally don't confirm it. The one thing that's left is the guy who founded initially is in America. He's done several subsequent studies where he says he still finds it. And so the possibility exists that maybe it's less heritable for low SES kids in America but not in the rest of the world, which is Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia. And you know, again, it would be a great story if it's true. I'm kind of dubious that it's true. I'm kind of dubious that it's true. This is the guy kind of hanging on to a finding that everybody wanted to believe because it's a really cool finding, you know, gene environment interaction, the

idea of different strokes for different folks. But it could make sense because in the US, it's the most decentralized education system in the developed world. So every little school district, they just make all their own decisions. So you could imagine that creates a lot of environmental variants and then you could imagine that the kids in the lowest SES schools are in the bottom of that pile perhaps. So if it were true, it'd be interesting. So I guess the point I'm making, I don't have any skin in this game I'm trying to say, it's the same result everywhere. In fact, I find it really interesting if we could find groups or countries

where the results are very different. Doesn't seem to be that way though. Okay, so how do genes influence our behavior? Is there a violin playing gene and a premature ejaculation gene and a dog-living gene? Yeah, that's what people tend to think about. You say genetic and they think single gene. Well, for the single gene disorders, it is a single gene.

I mean, Huntington's, we know pretty much what that gene does and how it affects the brain. It starts creating, we call it repeat sequences, but it messes up the gene by reproducing not what it's supposed to reproduce, but extra bits. And those extra bits just start mucking up the proteins it creates. And then eventually the brain just starts to degenerate as a result of having all this muck around. But when you get into complex traits in common disorders like heart disease or obesity or psychological traits, there's no example of a single gene disorder. And if there are thousands of genes involved, each contributing a tiny bit

of risk, what are the chances you're going to find an intervention that works? Because, people still think of the brain in this kind of simple-minded, neurologizing way. This does that, this bit of the brain does that. But I think if there's thousands of genes, they're gonna work at the level of the brain. And they're gonna make it very difficult to find any pathways. It's just, you know, it would kind of make sense, from an evolutionary perspective.

If you wanna have a species evolved, you're not gonna to just say, oh, well, let's make it simple for neuroscientists and have this one simple pathway that makes all the difference. That would be disastrous, really. What you would do is natural selection is take advantage of all the DNA differences that are there and you'd select for behavior. You'd select for people who are, say, brighter and solve problems more quickly.

And you'd take advantage of all the DNA variation that exists everywhere, not even just in the brain and the body as well. So I think it does, in my sense, it's not a happy story from molecular biologists who want to do a reductionistic approach to gene, this gene does this and that does this in the brain and then that causes this in behavior. But as a psychologist, I'm interested in the behavior, you know, and so it's okay by me. And what's exciting now is we can predict these behavioral differences with DNA itself. I guess what you're saying there, the fact that it provides a challenge for interventions. What you're referring to is that if you wanted to go in and edit the genes to make someone

a thing, if you wanted to try and manifest a trait, you don't just get to go and poke one of them. You actually have to poke a lot of them, and I'm guessing that the 10% that you're now able to predict BMI in life is because you've managed to bundle together around about 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 it makes interventions difficult. I don't think so because an important, I don't know if it's a law, but I mean for me it's just about a law, is that cheers aren't necessarily related to causes. Now you always think if you find out a cause, then you fix it. Now that's true with single gene sorts of things. It's true with single environmental agents like SARS-2 and COVID. You only get COVID if you get infected with this virus. So you want to know who has it, who doesn't have it.

It's dichotomous, and then you pick the people who've got it, and you think, well, what can we do to prevent other people from getting it, to make the course of the illness less bad, to stop people from dying? So definitely knowing the cause helps a lot in knowing the cure. But now, what if you take common disorders in psychological traits where we've got thousands of genetic differences?

There is no single cause. There is a whole gamish of causes. And I think it's gonna be very difficult to have these causes tell you what to do about cures. But fortunately, cures are often, most often, not related to causes. So if a kid has a reading disability, neuroscientists often think they're looking for the hole in the brain. They're looking for the bit of the brain that misfires, you know, and long stories there. But if there's thousands of DNA differences involved,

I think it's just some kids have more trouble learning to read. It's not that they're dyslexic, you know, if you wanna make medicalize it, you give it a Greek or Latin name, and then you say, I'm sorry, madam, your child has dyslexia. You don't say they have reading problems because the psychologist could tell them that. And similarly with hyperactivity, you don't say your kid has, or attention span, you say your kid has hyperkinetic disorder, you know, because it medicalizes it. And then you think there's a simple cause and then you think there's going to be a simple cure.

What people like is giving the name to it, wrangles the chaos into order, right? Okay, it's a thing. I know that it's a thing. I think you've got a quote that says there are no disorders, there are just quantitative dimensions. Yes, that's this bumper sticker of the normal, the abnormal is normal. What the genetics suggests is that,

more than suggests, it really, I think necessarily implies that if there's thousands of genetic differences affecting a trait like reading disability, those genes are normally distributed. So some people will have a lot just by chance of those DNA differences that make it more likely that they'll have problems learning to read. Doesn't mean that you're going to have reading disability or be diagnosed with it. It's a propensity.

And what I like about this is, it's gonna be the nail in the coffin of diagnoses. So in medicine, the illness model, medical model, you know, it worked really well when you've got simple causes. So you wanna find out what causes cholera, someone figures out it's bugs in the water, you know? And then you stop the bugs in the water and you cure this. But it doesn't work that way for common disorders

or quantitative traits. And although it might make people feel better to say, I know why I've been having so much trouble in life, I have dyslexia, or whatever. And, but the truth has got to be better. And that is that there is no, it's just all quantitative. It's not a matter of either or. To drive that home, there's no point along this normal distribution

at which after this point, somebody becomes labeled dyslexic or dyspraxic or whatever it might be. There are a whole bundle of traits that are normally distributed. Some people have a particular combination of those, which is created a meal, and that meal is a restriction in their ability to read. But as we said before, that could come from a number of different pathways as well. The same way you can gain weight by not lighting exercise or by liking food too much,

or by doing both, or by any other number of things. You can be not very turned on by reading, or you can find it hard, or you can struggle to gain vocabulary, or you can, and then the medicalisation that you've got where you give particular terminology, what you're doing is bundling common disorders or orders into a title which combines those traits together and that's the outcome that you get. And it's that columnist, you know, it's's the outcome you can get. And it's dichotomous, you know? You are or you aren't, yes. You are or you aren't.

And what's bad, what I like about this normal distribution, this quantitative idea, is that it's not like those schizophrenics and us normal people. We all have thousands of genetic risk factors for schizophrenia. It's just a question of how many you have and how you interact with the environment, because even if you have a very high score, it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be schizophrenic, partly because we're only explaining about 15% of the liability to become schizophrenia. So, it's not deterministic, it's probabilistic, but there's a lot of advantages

to thinking about these things quantitatively because you're not trying to cure a disorder. There's no disorder, you're not trying to cure it. You're trying to alleviate symptoms qualitatively. The output here, what you want to do is not just say, okay, they're cured. It's not going to happen, you know? And so there's many ways in which I think it is important. I think this medical model has been holding back psychological research. I want to give you a list of a bunch of different things

that I've come up with, and we're going to see if you know how heritable they are, or if they are, or if they aren't. Well, they all will be, as we've already identified. So aggression or anti-social behavior, stuff like that. Yeah, well, that's an interesting one. Aggression, it's hard to measure, but if you just do it the usual way

with stuff report personality questionnaires, most personality measures, including aggression, are less heritable than other traits, like cognitive traits. They're about 40% heritable. I mean, 40% 50% not much difference, but it's not 100%, it's not 80% and it's not 10% or 20%.

It's substantial, but it's not the whole story. But psychopathy is interesting because early in life, it seems to be very highly heritable and you wouldn't think you could measure it early in life, it seems to be very highly heritable. And you wouldn't think you could measure it early in life. It's not, these are the kids who, my colleague, S.E. Biden at UCL has studied this for a long time. It's more technically called callous, unemotional psychopathy. These are the kids who tear wings off flies. They'll hurt animals. Not because they'd like to hurt things. It just, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't bother them. And so, psychopaths aren't out to hurt you either,

even as adults. They want something. And if you're in the way, you know, they'll push you aside, because it just, there's no empathy there. So, I think that's a really interesting one, and it remains, it's not shown, but early in childhood it's very highly heritable. Then when you get into middle adulthood it gets mixed up with the link Wednesday, which is almost normative, shoplifting, you know, doing stuff when you're in adolescent, destroying vandalizing property. You know, I'm not saying it's a good thing, but you know, so many kids do it. Some people have said it's actually predictive of better mental health later, but that's

a different story. But the point is these kids who are cruel and doing bad things, they get sucked up into this adolescent delinquency thing, but then they come out the other end being more psychopathic. Whereas the normative sort of usual, the link with behavior in adolescence tends to drop out. Okay, IQ. That is one of the more highly heritable traits. It's probably, it's interesting over the lifespan.

Well first of all, we used to say it's 50% heritable, but almost all of those studies involve kids just because it's easier to study twins and adoptees when they're living at home. But then when you got to adults, you find that the imperability of IQ increases linearly throughout the lifespan, 20% in infancy, 40% in childhood, like the early school years, 60% in young adulthood, and some people say even 80% later in life. Now that's really interesting, how can heritability change? But it makes the point we're just describing differences as they exist in a particular sample. And so if you look at young samples versus old samples, heritability now consistently,

we've done meta-analyses across all these things. It consistently goes up in an almost linear way. Why do you think that is? Well, nobody knows for sure. I think, and I think most people think, it's because genetics isn't like hardwired in the brain. It's not what it is. It makes you use your environment differently. So if you study these really bright young kids and say, what are they doing? They're asking questions. They go into a room and they wonder about the angles at the corners of the room.

You know, they just use their environment in a better way. They get a lot more information out of it. The classrooms, the teachers can teach something to kids, but some kids will get so much more out of it than others. And I think as you go through life then, you, it's called gene environment correlation. As you go through life, it's not that, it's not that the heritability is there at the moment of conception and it doesn't change.

It makes you use your environment differently so that you select environments, modify them and create environments correlated with your genetic propensities. So kids who are academically oriented, they hang out with other academically oriented kids, they read books, they're interested in intellectual things, whereas other kids have other appetites. And increasingly, I think it's appetites. It's not aptitudes, it's not this hard-wired, you know, brain that's making the difference. It's just these sort of psychological appetites. It's what you like and what you like you do and you tend to get better at that. So that the difference is snowball until later in life. You know I see my parents were 97 until they died a couple years ago and they were in an

old people's home and you really see the differences there. I mean some of these older people are still very active intellectually. You know, they don't lobotomize themselves on television. They argue with people, they read the newspapers. You know, they're really alive. And the differences seem to be even greater, you know, later in life. So I think that's what happened.

It's snowballing. These little genetic effects become bigger and bigger as you go through life selecting and modifying and even creating environments that are correlated with your genetic propensities. Are there any traits that do the reverse of that? We don't know of any so when heritability changes it goes up. Some people say that's true for body weight as well Most of the time like personality there's no evidence that heredibility changes across the lifespan. So, anyway, cognitive ability is more heritable than personality, maybe 60%. Academic outcomes, is that the same?

No, it's not. The correlation between how well you do a school in your IQ is about 0.5 in hundreds of studies that have looked at this. But one thing that's interesting is in the early school years, educational achievement, which in England is great. You know, we have these national tests, not great for the kids maybe, but it's great for researchers because, you know, they're the most tested kids in the world. So you get very good educational achievement data, at least for what tests are measuring. And they're substantially more heritable in the first school years, like 60% heritable,

as compared to IQ, which is 40% heritable. And I think that's really interesting. But educational achievement stays at about 60% heritability all the way through GCSEs and A levels, whereas IQ is going up and up and up, and they cross somewhere in adolescence. That's so interesting. So you don't have as much of an increase in heritability over time with academic outcomes

as you do with IQ. Yes, and so, again, I don't know why, but I wonder if it, this raises, it's worth going into this, like why is that? Because it raises another issue, I think that's important. And that is that I think what educational achievements, what teachers teach, we have a national curriculum, and their teachers have to teach certain things on certain days. You know, it's very prescribed. And so kids who come to school without much background,

they very quickly do their phonetics get into reading, but no one teaches IQ. I think they ought to, because IQ is general reasoning, abstract reasoning, the scientific method, I think. And I think we need a heavy dose of that. People need to recognize the importance of thinking logically and taking new facts and coming up with hypotheses and realizing you don't believe them, you test them

and you have to test them. So I think that has a lot to do with IQ. We don't teach it. So as a result, I think when kids come to school, So as a result, I think when kids come to school, they're not getting the full possibilities for expressing their genetic propensity. So again, we're describing what is in a particular population. In this case, the early school years, and then going on through key stage 234. And one of the things I'll mention is Michael Gove

when he was a Secretary of Education, almost a decade ago now, he instituted this idea of a phonetic screening test. A lot of the Tories, they think, whatever was in the 50s, the good old glory days, that's what's got to be good. And they taught reading by phonetics then. And somehow in the 50s, the good old glory days, that's what's got to be good. And they taught reading by phonetics then. And somehow in the 60s and 70s, educators began to teach reading through word recognition.

And recognizing whole words and not worrying so much about spelling and phonetics. Well, so Michael Gove said, teachers got to teach phonetics. And he instituted this test, a four-minute test of phonetics. It's really kind of a cool test. Two minutes where you read age-appropriate words, it's seven, they're like dog cat, you know, and then as fast as you can, as many words as you can in two minutes. And then there's a list of matched non words. So these are not words, they're like, TEP, TEP, GEP, you know, GEP. They're phonetically and linguistically matched, but the only way you can say what the word is,

if you can sound it out phonetically. And so Michael Goe thought, this is gonna be a test of how well the teachers are teaching and he was gonna name and shame those schools that didn't do phonetics. It's the most heritable test we have. So at seven, when these kids have to take this test, that test is 70% heritable.

Which is amazing, given that, it was no one even questioned this. They said, well, okay, it's a phonetics test. So kids didn't learn phonetics by themselves. So this is a test of how well the teachers have taught phonetics. But instead what it says is, some kids pick it up a lot better than others. I'm convinced there's individual differences all over the place.

I bet you there are some kids who would learn to read better with whole word reading. But we force all these different shape pegs into this one round hole of the national curriculum. And I think that's the biggest lesson to learn in education and teachers know it. You can't stand in front of a class of 30 kids and not recognize that some of them pick stuff up very fast and others just need a lot more help. So I'm particularly keen on education because that's the business end of these cognitive abilities. So I keep distracting you. We just said IQ. All right. So next one is doing the live band, but 50% heritable on average.

Okay. Next one, penis size. Did anyone research penis size? There have been studies out of it, but I'm not aware of genetically sensitive studies. Shame. You should do that. Diabetes. Yeah, that's been studied a lot. And it's maybe, it's tricky when you're dealing with these disorders. Diabetes isn't a disorder. It's a quantitative trait, right?

And so many of these disorders are like heart disease, they're not disorders. So hypertension, these are pretty normally distributed traits and things that work quantitatively too. So when you've got an economy, it makes it much more difficult to say how heritable it is because all you've got is a zero and a one. What points does diabetes become diabetes? Well, but you take it for what it is, and then you create these very complicated statistics called liability.

But it's a liability to the disorder because you recognize it's not really a disorder. But if you look at simple concordance, that's like if one identical twin has schizophrenia, what's the chance that the other one does? And even though you don't believe it's a dichotomy like that, and the answer is about 50% the identical twins are similar and non-identical twins, their concordance for a diagnosis of schizophrenia, is very much lower, about 7%. Now, their half is similar genetically as identical twins, so you would have expected them to be about 25% similar because identical twins are 50% similar, but they're only

5%. But it's just because in a way, because these things are not very useful statistically when you're dealing with the dichotomy. It makes it, makes it trickier, but the evidence is still very clear that genetics is important. Got you. What about a happiness set point or sort of self-reported life happiness? Well, there's a lot of work about depression and well-being, which is what a lot of people mean by happiness, a sense of well-being. It's all a tricky business, but if you look across all of those studies, they're about 40% heritable when you measure them quantitatively, at least with happiness, you're not saying people are either happy or not, so you measure it quantitatively.

And when you do for well-being, you find that about 40% of the differences between people can be ascribed to these inherited DNA differences. That's crazy. When you think about how much work people put into trying to make themselves happy, you know, it's one of the most common conversations that podcasts have. I actually quite err away from having it on this show, especially after reading your book, but also generally it's just a bit of an icky topic to me to talk about happiness and this generation of it as if that's the only thing really that people should be aiming for in the world. There's a lot of other contributing factors to this sense of wellbeing. Have you got meaning in your life?

Do you have connections? When does that become happiness so on and so forth? Yeah. Yeah. It's just people do some meditation training or something, to recognize that you don't become happy. You've only got this instant. You be happy.

You can be happy. Be here now. That sort of thing. I mean, as Hoki has these things sound, like we mentioned sound here as we were talking before. And I think his app waking up app is, it's really changed my life in a lot of ways. I was in philosophy and I took against it because it's not empirical. I can go into that a bit. But psychology is

actually the empirical side of philosophy, but it can only deal with things you can test. Psychology is the empirical side of philosophy. I like that. Right. Well, it was because I was at a place at the Paul University in Chicago that specialized in phenomenology. Now, that's the branch of philosophy that talks about the isness of things like the deskiness. What is it that's the essence of a desk? You know, okay, fair enough. But after I heard this about the third time, I kept saying, well, there's these huge arguments about it. And we was saying, how do you know this guy is right? Or that guy's right? It's gotta be some way to test it.

And I ran into a stone wall because I realized finally that if you can test it, it's no longer a philosophy. And I asked, what is it? It's psychology. If you can actually test it. So at that point, I just said, well, we've been great, I'll go into psychology, which is what I did.

And I've sort of been anti-philosophy. Well, you've come full circle now. I have, yeah, maybe that's the result of getting older or meeting Sam Harris. And, you know, it's not the, you know, philosophy went bad in the 70s. It went into linguistics and, you know, it's not like, I'm really into stoicism which

is the most ancient philosophy around concussionism and I think it's very practical psychology what they're talking about there. Well modern philosophy you know is not that. I mean it's really dealing with this very abstract mathematical linguistics sort of stuff. Fine, you know, everybody do their own thing, but there's got to be room here for philosophy and the old sense, you know, the ethical and moral and what does it mean to be human and how can I be happy or become happy? And, you know, so I think it's a great point.

And having said that, I agree completely, you know, that people are obsessed with becoming happy I'm happy. I think it's a great point. Having said that, I agree completely that people are obsessed with becoming happy and that's a losing proposition in a way. The Stoics talk about it. This William Irving has written some great stuff about Stoicism. The Stoics, we're talking about many, many centuries ago, they talked about hedonic adaptation. And if you live life because you'll just be happy if you can get X, Y, or Z, the new car, the new house, the new job.

But then you get it, and you're a little bit happier for a while, but then there's hedonic adaptation. You get used to it. And again, it's not making you happy. In fact, if it could have made you happy, if something could have made you happy, if something could have made you happy, you could have spent your life trying to be happy, and it hasn't made you happy, you might get the idea trying to get what you don't have is not the way to go,

and the stomachs say, it's the other way, it's to say, use these techniques, like, negative visualization, to want what you have, and to realize what you have, you may think is shit, but he'll say there's about a billion, ten billion billions of people on earth who would do anything to trade lives of a fear. Well, that's the thought experiment, right? Like the things that you now have, those which only once you dreamt of, and when you actually, when you reframe stuff like that, yeah, I am ad-roop at Spirer on the show recently non-dualism guy. I found him very, very clear and precise with how he put across non-duality as a philosophy,

which is, it can get a bit messy at times. I'm still having trouble with that, you know, I'm struggling with the Sam Harris, that has a new whole lecture series by someone on this level. I think it might be Rupert. He's definitely got you. You're exactly right it is. Very softly spoken British man. Exactly.

I started listening to that today. Okay. Even with Sam, I still have trouble with this. I maybe I have two big and ego to deny myself. Separate yourself from the experience. Yeah. Well, I mean, so the episode will be out. So I'll send it.

I'll send it you want to go. But yeah, and he used this word and it really got to me. He used the word happiness. He was talking about the fact that the natural state of humans, once you strip away the egos, the preconceptions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's happiness. And I had a real problem with it because I felt like happiness to me is something in motion. It didn't feel like a stripping away. It felt like an action. It felt like momentum. And Rupert said he would be happy to interchange that for peace.

And I was like, okay, so for me, the word, if what he means by happiness is peace, absolutely fine with that. Like that's a still, that's a still-car motion or a clear sky, as opposed to happiness, which is like there's a boat in the ocean or there's a plane in the sky. So we've got sidetracked. Last two, I've got two more for you.

Okay. Is infidelity heritable? Have you ever been able to look at this? Well David Buss, David Busce studied it, a good trend of mine, from an evolutionary perspective, but divorce has been studied, and that shows heritable influence.

Do you know how much? Not, you know, not a lot, maybe 30% or so. That's quite a lot. Yeah. And again, it's not because you have genes for divorce. You say that there's hair to blow influence on divorce. People say the divorce gene. Or you talk about aggression, the warrior gene, for example.

It's not that. It's like what makes people get divorced? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, you get, maybe you get bored, you're a sensation seeker, or you just really like the fireworks of love and romance. These may have been the things that made someone attractive in the first place, but it could be that those same things make them more at risk for divorce. So, I don't know of a study of infidelity.

I'm sure there are some though, but it's not something I've looked into. What about sexual preference? The gay gene is something that people have talked about for a very long time. What does this come out in the research? Well, see, that got started, you know, when DNA revolution was just happening, it was way premature, and it wasn't true you know that there's a gay gene but Michael Bailey at Notre Dame has done most of the work on this and there is genetic influence on sexual preference and I know

some people get very upset about that but I think most gays are happy to accept that because it means it isn't just a lifestyle-fashioned choice. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, which in the current identity politics day, it seems to be getting to be more like that. But there is a genetic component. I worked at an Adolescent Treatment Center where we had three gay boys when I was in graduate school. And you know, they just tied their story from early in life. They just really knew they were different and they hit it. They tried their best to be daddy's boy and everything. And then fortunately, and by the 60s or so, it got a little bit easier for people to come out. So again, I think it's important to recognize there is a genetic

tendency. It doesn't mean everybody who is gay has this genetic tendency. It's just overall in the population of gays, there does seem to be a genetic propensity, but it doesn't mean your determined, it's not hardwired, it's just like all these other traits. The thing that I'm interested in weird, it's just like all these other traits. The thing that I'm interested in here when talking about the genes is a child's behavior, like an aggregate of how their parents behave your manifests. So, can you have genetic influences on behavior which kind of come out of nowhere? So, can you have two very calm parents whose DNA combines to make an easily prone to anger or violence child?

Obviously, we're talking on average here. Yeah. Well, it's a good point because a lot of people think, well, you get your genes from your mother and your father, so surely you have to be a blend between them. But the thing is, these are discrete units. That's what Mendel figured out long ago. Genes don't just blend. They're discrete. So you can have 0, 1, or 2. We call them alleles, form of a particular gene. Now, you look at polygenic scores

that involve thousands of these. Those scores will be normally distributed within a family. I mean, we can show this, and we've always known this to be true. So that means that, say, parents where one is very highly educated and the other isn't, it's not like the kids are all going to be in between. They're going to have a whole range of individual differences, including some that are some of the brightest.

You know, they have the highest genetic scores and some that have the lowest. And what I like about this is there's a concern about right now about genetic casts, you know, like the Indian cast system. And the idea is that by meritocracy is getting us into genetic casts because the Silicon Valley people marry each other and they have these super bright kids. But what's I don't think it true, as long as there is mobility. Because if, say, two parents IQ is mean of 100 and we call standard deviation of 15. So it means if you're at the 85th percentile, you have an IQ score out of 100, but of like 115.

And two standard deviations, an IQ score of 130. The average IQ of people with PhDs is 130. So suppose you have two parents with IQs of 130. The average IQ of people with PhDs is 130. So suppose you have two parents with IQs of 130. What's going to be the average IQ of their kids? It's not 130. It's 115. It's 50% heritable. So the kids will regress to the population mean of 100. So on average, they'll have a considerably lower IQ than their parents. And then secondly, there's this big distribution of scores. Kids in a family with the same parents have genetic scores that differ a lot, not as much as anybody, any random people in the population, but a whole lot, so that you can get kids in

the family with the same parents, where one is genetically has got all the good and the other doesn't. And this is really come to me because my sister, never liked school, never looked like to learn to read, didn't like to read, still doesn't much like to read. Whereas I read early, not because my parents didn't have anything to do with this, neither of them went to high school, they just barely finished high school in the depression. And the United States. So just on my own, I started reading,

even before I went to school, I got books from the library. And I always loved school because it was easy. I was good at it. And you know, got me words for it. My sister just didn't like it. And yet we have the same parents. We have the same nurture. And people say, well, but you've got the same genes too.

When we don't, we can show this now with the DNA. And I think it's an important point to recognize that when university educated parents have kids who don't want to go to university, and it's like the end of the world. But do we want to force kids with all their different shapes into these round, this one round whole of this golden yardstick of academics. I think there's a big movement now away from that. So we might talk more about that later. Yeah, it's so interesting that that point I never even realized that you as a set of parents

providing traits to your child, you're you're competing or you're sort of almost aggregating them against where the center of that normal distribution for the population is. So if you're an outlier on either side of that, it's either going to drag down or drag up on average from wherever you are. Yes. And then the other part of it though is that there'll be a big range of your kids don't all have that one mean score.

So everyone's 150, I do. Yeah, yeah. No, and I think that's hard for some parents to accept, like with my sister, but well, she just wasn't trying hard enough. But again, it's appetizing. She just didn't like it. She just didn't like academic things. She went on to do a good life.

She was a lab tech in a hospital. She did save people's lives by doing these blood tests very carefully and she's very good with fine motor stuff. She just likes that and she's good at it and the world's a better place for it. All right, so outside of genetics, what are the other influences on our behavior? How do they slot together? So, you're talking about the 50% of the differences that aren't due to genetics. That's the other big story that we haven't touched on.

Because psychology for a century just assumed everything's nurture. The way you are is the way your parents treated you. You know, I mentioned schizophrenia before, but also kids do well at school because they have parents who do well at school. Why is that? Well, parents help them to do well at school. It's all environmental. Well now we know half of the differences are not genetic. The half that aren't genetic are not what we thought they were. They're not due to these systematic effects of parenting. They make

two kids in the same family as different kids in different families. So the environment is important, but it's not this nurture, the systematic effects of the environment that psychologists always assumed were so important. And I know it's hard to get your head around that, but you can see it in many different types of studies, but the easiest way to see it is adoptive families, a third of them adopt a second child. So these two kids are genetically unrelated to each other, but they grow up in the same family.

Well, for IQ, siblings correlate about 0.3 in childhood, about 0.4 later on. How much do these adoptive sips correlate? Because they grow up in the same family, they have the same parent, zero. So that's, so the fact of growing up in the same family isn't making them similar, yet the environment's important. And what is it? We call it non-shared environment. That is, it's something that's not shared. It's not shared by kids growing up in the same family. So you can start to think of things once you start thinking this way. You've got to ask, what makes kids in a family different? And you can think of things like peers. You know, when your kids get into adolescence, you can see that makes a difference. Accidents, illnesses, things

like that. But after 30 years of looking for these things, we haven't found them. So one of the points of my book, Blueprint, is I've come to conclude what's called the gloomy prospect. I don't think it's so gloomy, but it's just the role of chance that the important environmental factors are sort of idiosyncratic. You know, we call it stochastic. What do you mean? Chance events. So I was thinking of Bill Clinton,

says he got into politics because at the age of 16, he shook JFK's hand, John F. Kennedy's hand. And that just really made him say, I want to go into politics. I mean, maybe it's just a retrospective history. But there are events like that where, when people do their autobiographies and they look back on their lives,

they say, that was a real turning point. That teacher at school, that biology teacher, or this event where I was humiliated in the playground, or there are these events that you can't just Measure because they're kind of unique to an individual at a particular time. That's what I mean by idiocene pratic It's the sliding doors sort of phenomenon. There's several current books out current novels one that I just finished today is called the Midnight library which is by Matt Hague HAAIG He was the guy who wrote what is it? Midnight library, which is by Matt Hague, HAIG.

He was the guy who wrote, what is it, 20 reasons not to die, he's a depressive, but this book is about alternative endings. And you know how things could just change a little bit, but then that is a tipping point that leads to other things and it could end up very differently. Lionel Shriver's new book too is about that, about alternate endings in life. So I think, and there's a great book by Melvin King who is the former Bank of England head that's called, not random,

chance, what does it call? It's a great word, but it's like super chance. You know, it's that we need to recognize that chance plays a much larger life role in life. Physicists are getting into this too. You know, the idea that things are essentially unpredictable at some level. And I think it's good for us to know that. In Matt Higgs book, the woman who wanted to commit suicide and goes to this library and tries out alternate lives, ends up coming back to her own life,

having realized that every life could go many different ways. It's again what we're talking about with meditation. It's all you've got is what you're experiencing this instant. Everything else is either a thought or a memory that came from, it's, you know, it's sensations. It's not you that created these things. These are just sensations in your brain. So I don't know, maybe I might be kind of taking some psychedelics or something. No, I get it.

I mean, I like it when these things all some psychedelics or something. No, I get it. I like it when these things all come together like that. I agree, yeah, the synchronicity is beautiful. And it lends credence to the theory as well, right? That if you have these particular narratives that coalesce, it's the same as when people talk about Buddhism and Stoicism and Meditation and new well practice and Confucianism, you go, OK, well, if multiple different parties

from different times, from different geographic areas, with different cultures all arrive at similar sort of conclusions, you probably got a fairly good amount of backup that that might be right. Exactly right. And that's why I'm, I'm resolved to get a sense of non-dualism. But I'm having a hell of a time, I mean, it's only been out a few months. But I find it really difficult, but I'm beginning to see, at least Sam Harris is saying, you don't get it all at once. You know, it comes, some people haven't a piphony, but for most people, you just get it a little bit more and a little bit more. But it's exactly as you say, I mean, every ancient philosophy comes up with this. There's all the ego. There is no self. Yeah. Be present, find happiness in the moment. Yeah, all of these different things.

You saw, you saw right. So there's the, my favorite sentence in the entire book that I think kind of drives this home. So we've put people into a coffee and we've put a couple of nails in and then this is the dirt that goes on top, I think, saying, parents matter, but they don't make a difference. What does that mean? Well, I'm glad. I think I was saying you liked it or... Oh, I loved it. I lived for this stuff, yeah. Right. Because that's the four pages in the book that I've by far gotten the most attention so much so that I was going to write another book that would just focus on genetics and parenting. Are you a parent? No. But when you become a

parent or you know people who are parents, there are thousands, literally thousands of parenting books. They don't mention genetics whereas I have no doubt that genetics is the single most important thing that parents need to know. That is not that it's all deterministic, not that they can't do anything about it, but they have much less control over their kids' outcomes than they think they have. Because genetics is genetics, and the environment isn't the environment we thought it was. It's not. If it's chance and stochastic events, idiosyncratic events, parents don't have control over that.

So I think they need to relinquish control to a greater extent and to spend more time figuring out what their kid likes to do and what they're good at and helping them do it, rather than preordaining my kids going to be an Olympic athlete or a professional musician. It's not that you can't do it. The Tiger Moms, he shows you can make kids do stuff to a certain extent. But why?

I think it's analogous to like, if you have a partner and you pick them because you say, what is a pretty good raw material here, but I'm going to make them into what I really want them to be. You know, as a disaster, because you have relationships because you love people and when you love people, you want to do good things for them. You want life to be nice for them on their terms. And so same with kids, I think, you know, it's better to focus on your relationship. It's a long relationship. And some of this tiger parenting or helicopter parenting is counterproductive to the relationship.

And so I just think it's better for parents to realize they don't have nearly as much control as they think they have. And it's better to go with the flow. It's not to say you can't change things, but it's awfully good to recognize what kids, their appetites, as well as their aptitudes, and to help them do what they want to do, to be like a resource manager, to give them opportunities to find out what they like to do. So, is there a way to game the stochastic idiosyncratic model?

I think it's partly what meditation is about is to realize that things that happen to you, they're just happening. There are these events in the world. They don't have anything to do with you. There's things that are happening. And you know, you don't want to read too much into them. You just say, like the Stoics would say, this is a challenge. They talk about Stoic challenges.

Instead of just saying, oh, God, not again, this is happening to me. I've lost my job or I have to go on furlough, I've got COVID. You know, you can take that and say, uh, life is crap. Or the Stoics would say, think about it as a challenge, you know, and do what you can with what you've got is their motto and do it now and make a plan and don't waste your time with negative emotions because they don't do any good. I was talking more from the perspective of the parent. So let's say that this, there are these chance incidents which occur in young people's lives, they can shape them in unbelievably disproportionate ways.

As a parent, presumably one of the things that you could look to do with your child, there would be a big difference between a parent who sends their child to the same routine week in, week out for 18 years and a parent that encourages the child to do a bunch of different things. The outcomes have to be different for that child because the number of opportunities for different idiosyncrasies and stochastic

inference events to occur is wildly different. The one that does go and do summer camp and every summer for, you know, throughout all of the years of school and the one who is encouraged to go to this sport and then this sport is opposed to you will be a boxer, you will be a this thing. Like that has to have it. So what I'm thinking about is for the parents that are listening or for the people that want to have kids in the future, what are some of the ways that you think people could maximize that kind of stochastic advantage, I guess? Well, it seems like Axi Moronik to talk about systematic, unsystematic events.

So what we're doing here, I think it's more important for parents to recognize, there's just shit happens and stuff will happen. And you know, some things, so what we're saying is these things are heritable and they don't show shared environmental influence much at all, especially for personality and psychopathology. And that includes these parents who are doing what you say, who give their kids lots of opportunities or don't. But again, it's what is rather than what could be. So if you want your kid to be a sprinter or a musician, you can get the best teachers around, you can do as much as you can do,

but you gotta say at what cost, you know? And I don't think we do that enough. And to recognize, you're better off going with a genetic flow, than spending a lot of time figuring out how you're going to systematize chance because you really can't. That's a really, really good takeaway. I use Tiger Woods as an example a lot because he had such an extreme childhood and has continued to sport through, but look at the externalities that he's had in his life, like just hugely public marriage failures. He's fallen asleep on the side of externalities that he's had in his life, like just hugely public marriage failures.

He's fallen asleep on the side of the road because he's been on anti-depressant drugs. He recently rolled his car and broke like, oh, everything. So yeah, I think you're totally correct. The price that people pay for extreme performance within narrow domains that they may not have chosen themselves, especially when it's deployed on them by a parent in early life, you do not know the potential externalities, the cost, the suffering that's going to occur from that. And I love the idea of genetic flow.

I've looked like I am here to provide resources to be open, to move with the child, to allow them to do what they want. I have some wisdom. I can say maybe trying to do free running off the top of a building at four years old is a bad idea to me. Maybe there are certain things that are better and worse, but also, yeah, I love the idea of being sort of like a kite in the wind, right? You're holding the kite, you can let it out, you can pull it back, but you allow the kite

to kind of choose its undirection based on where it wants to go. And you recognize that there's very different sorts of kites. Yes, yeah, the first thing one is as a reference. What kind of kite you've got and what they like, you know, rather than these parenting books are really, they're bad. I mean, you know, they want to... What do you disagree with most about the parenting books? Just about everything? I mean, they mostly are all implying that parents are completely in control. And it's always by doctor so and so, so they appeal to authority, but they don't appeal to data. Very few of these books have any evidence base.

There's a few now starting to come out. But parents, then it's really bad for psychology because all you got to do is go to the book's shop, pick up two books from that pop psychology shelf about parenting. And one will doctor so and so will say things very dogmatically about you must do this about sleeping and eating. And the other one will say things dogmatically too that are completely different. And neither one is based on evidence. And the evidence is that these things don't have much of an effect, partly because kids

are so different. You know, what do you do about night waking? I say the answer is it always depends on the kid. And you know, you sort of go with the flow of what works for you and the kid. You don't do things because some doctor so and so said, this is what you must do because you can bet it's wrong. That's a perfect example. You could create a lifestyle in which you,

parent, are miserable and it, child, is also miserable because you're trying to fit into some pre-conceived idea that's been written down in a book. And you both have an absolutely miserable year or couple of years for the outcome to be the same in the end in any case. Like that. So this starts to get us toward the reason

that I felt it was liberating. As long as you can avoid the nihilism and the fatalism, I think the liberation that you can get from this is, it's really strong. I want to put one final nail in the environmental coffin, which is some of the work that you did to do with schools and outcomes between different schools. And obviously being in the UK with us having such a formalized education system, key stages and the way that's, who's what's the awarding body?

What's the company called? What is it I'm blocking out? NSQ in any way. Another one that I mean. Yeah, I do, I do. The ones that create these tests. When you were a kid and you came, no, no, where they come around and they assess the schools and they say how well the schools are doing. Oh, off the, you were. I do. The ones that create these tests. When you were a kid and you came, no, no, no, where they come around

and they assess the schools and they say how well the schools are doing. Off-stead, you know. Off-stead, that was the age. Yeah, remember when you were a kid in school, if you were British in school, you used to have to be really, really well behaved and the teacher would award you afterward

if you'd been super well behaved. So they gave me such. How they don't give you notice when they come or they give you just notice of the day before. No way. Is this like a random drugs test now It is yeah, I mean it's in fairness then you couldn't do a better job assessing schools They interview the kids the teachers the janitors, you know parents the observed kids in the classroom

You know, which might be fake to some extent but not when you don't have any notice about it. So I think they're very good ratings, but that's getting, that's in aid of what you're about to say, right? Yeah, so different schools, different outcomes. What did you learn by looking at that? Yeah. Well, I guess the main point here with Offset is that parents change their lives because of Offset. It's the essence of these school league tables. And parents will move house and pay like a 15-20% premium because

that house is in a better catchment area. So no one had asked how much of a difference does it make. We know there are average differences between the schools, but if you just take all the kids in the UK, thousands, thousands of kids, and you look at the schools that were in the off-stead quality ratings they have, how much variance in the GCSE scores, say, just to start with, is due to that. The answer is 4%. And if you correct for socioeconomic status differences, because kids are not randomly assigned to schools, some school districts have a lot more money than others. It's 1%. With DNA alone, we can explain 15% of the variance

of GCSE scores. So probably what that's about is that because Austin's been around for a while, you've gotten rid of the worst schools. So most schools are pretty much good enough, but then there are these private schools that have tremendous resources. Their kids do a lot better at GCSEs, but what we also showed is that there's no added value of these very expensive private schools. The kids get a whole higher average grade for GCSE. But it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

They select the kids who do very well at school. They interview them. They get bright kids who are stable and motivated. It's a no brainer. These kids are going to do well at GCSEs. The question is, how much is added by the school? And the answer is about nothing. Now, maybe kids have a better life there there and certainly have a lot more resources,

but I really think we should get rid of private schools or make them not be charities unless they take like 50% of kids from who are less advantaged. And that's the way these things started, the private, what we call public schools here, but the fee paying schools, they started that way. They were gonna get money from the rich ones to educate other people. And the grandmas, they were started very much that way,

giving kids a chance, who couldn't, whose parents couldn't afford that. So I do think the selective school thing is bad because that gets you into meritocracy as well. And meritocracy only comes into the issue when you select. If you didn't select kids, you don't have to select on the basis of merit, which is a bad word. I mean, it's talent or skill, because they don't merit anything. Genetics is a lottery. You know, the fact that you had a particular genetic hand at birth, nothing to do with you. That's just as much chance as these environmental events.

It's all chance, really. So it's not merit. But, well, we could go on and on about meritocracy, but the main point is if you don't have to select don't and there'd be a lot of good things that would come from getting rid of selective secondary schools, which we don't have in the rest of Europe, really, or in the United States. All right, so what we've talked about here is the implications of the other partner that you choose and your genetics really, really influencing the outcomes that your child gets. More so than the school that you choose, more so than the way that you bring them up, how many parenting books you decide to read, so on and so forth. What are the implications here for

Mate Choice, then? Is DNA dating a thing? Oh, it is. I mean, it was in the last five years or so, it's one of the hotter new things. There's like a 20 or so companies that add DNA to their dating sites. And the problem is that the DNA is very predictive, well highly predictive of cognitive things, but for personality, it's not very predictive yet. Yet they're selling it as if this is the one objective indicator you have on dating websites. So it will happen eventually. I mean, it is starting to happen now. I mean, if you, it's got some advantages over just, you know, people's own statements, which God knows how true they are. But there's a neat aspect to this. I just wanted to mention, it's DNA dating, but there's this famous biologist on George Church at MIT, however, who is setting up a dating service. Any couple that's about

to get a hooked up or thinking about having kids, if you send your DNA, which is just a cheek swab, you know, you just put this cotton button in your mouth and you get a few cells there, he will do whole genome sequencing. That is not just looking at a few hundred thousand DNA differences, but all three billion base pairs of DNA. And the reason he's doing that is because there are thousands of single gene disorders, but most of them, thankfully, are very rare. But with whole genome sequencing, we could determine the extent to which you and your prospective partner have the same mutation, because most of them are recessive, meaning you need a copy, two copies to show it.

If you get one, you're a carrier. But you and your spouse will both be carriers for maybe a half a dozen or so of these very bad single gene disorders. You won't show it though, because you're just a carrier. And you won't show it if your spouse has different mutations. But what if you have the same mutation then your kids have a 25% chance of having that disorder and you can then prevent it within vitro fertilization or whatever.

So, Askenazi Jews have done this about 10 years now and they've basically eliminated TASAX. We already have to take in the U.S. we have to take blood tests for sexually transmitted diseases and stuff. So, there is some testing that goes on. And I do think you won't even have to pass laws. I mean, if couples become aware of this, they'll find out and they'll do it because he'll do it for free.

And you have to agree to have your DNA be part of research. But you might as well be part of a good academic outfit than one of these companies that sell your DNA for billions of dollars. So I do think that's something for people to consider getting this DNA screening. Because in the past, you only find out about it when you have a kid who has the disorder. And then you go to genetic counselor. It totally doesn't surprise me that DNA dating

is the thing because if we actually look at what the fitness signals are that we'd look for in a partner, all that we're doing there is using very, very hardwired in evolutionary signals to tell us that. So for instance, David Busc, absolutely loving me, has been on the show, a friend of yours, he told me that symmetrical faces are genetically more difficult to manifest, that a symmetrical face is something aesthetically which pleases us, but also it's an indicate refitility. So is more feminine features in a woman,

that if you have larger eyes, red or full ellipse, rosier cheeks, that is correlated with higher fertility. So all that you're doing now is as opposed to using the way that someone looks, which is quite a rough, human statistic. You're peering underneath the hood and you're going, okay, so what are the contributing factors that actually create these traits? But there's one big difference is that evolution is normative.

We're talking about the human species. So we're talking about faces are more attractive when, you know, they're symmetrical or not. What I'm talking about is individual differences. And that's called a sort of mating. And in general, like attracts like. So taller people, you can can see tend to be attracted to each other. The correlation there is about point two.

But do you know the trait that shows the greatest disorder to mating is IQ? Its correlation is about point four, five. And so people who say, oh, there's no such thing as IQ, it's just what IQ test may measure. They're doing it. They're measuring it. Here's your partner. Yeah, what's your partner's IQ?

It's good. You know, when you go to a single's bar or something, within a first few sentences, I mean, you can sort of tell someone's verbal intelligence. And vocabulary alone is the single most heritable cognitive measure. What's that? And that's also pardon me.

What percentage is that? It's about 60, 70% heritable vocabulary, which is kind of neat because people say how can that be heritable? You have to learn words. Well the point I've been making is DNA is these genetic effects are never hardwired in. It just means you tend I've got one grandchild who's a star that she wants to know everything about nuances of words. Why did she use that word and not that word? You know, then I have other grandchildren who say, whatever, you know what I mean.

You know, and who's going to get a better vocabulary? That one who's really keen on the language channel. So sort of mating is an interesting phenomenon, and we could talk a lot more about it, but it is interesting that cognitive abilities is one of the most highly, the traits that show the most assertive mating. That's hilarious. So rolling it forward, I don't want to get too deep into the sort of policy implications for this, but I'm sure that everyone that's listening has thought to themselves, okay,

there's a lot of talk about equality of outcome at the moment, and that if you take what we've learned today and apply that to the world that we're in, you could actually roll forward to find a world where there was zero environmental inequality, but what that would actually cause is all of nurture would be out of the way every difference would simply be due to genetics, and that seems super unfair as well. Yeah, I mean it's such a good point. You know, it's equality of opportunity can be indexed by heritability because as you say, if you get rid of all the things like privilege and wealth and access, you get rid of all the environmental differences, you don't get rid of the genetic differences. So other differences that remain, they're going to be entirely due the genetic differences. So of the differences that remain, they're going to be entirely due to genetic differences. And it's an interesting, especially in education.

That's a really interesting principle in a way for people to get their heads around. So I'm glad you raised that point. But you said equality of outcomes, and the more fundamental point is that it's equality of opportunity that's important, but you're never going to have equality of outcome. So you can give kids all the same environment, teachers in a classroom see this all the time. They're going to differ in their how well they do, say in terms of educational achievement. So equality of opportunity doesn't translate into

equality of outcome and in fact as you say if you achieve equality of opportunity you actually increase the heritability of the outcomes. So if heritability is an index of equality, does this mean that as we improve societal conditions, people will become more and more entrenched in their social positions and that social mobility will slow down? Have you thought about this? Yeah, it's sort of what we were saying before about genetic cast, people worry about this. Silicon Valley effect. I'm saying at a genetic level, parents, kids will have, on average, the kids will have a lower

IQ than them, and they'll be a wide distribution. So as long as we have social mobility downwards, as well as upwards, it will be okay. But there is evidence to suggest that parents are able to use their wealth to help the kids who ordinarily wouldn't have done so well. You know, Galton, who founded behavioral genetics in England in the late 1800s, he had this

raised ability will out. It means, if you've seen really gifted kids, like a musically gifted kid, you almost can't keep them down. I mean, they don't have to have the best teachers in the world. They'll bang on pots, they'll sing to themselves, they'll hang out with friends who like music. I mean, now with Spotify and all of that, you know, there's no limit to what they can get on their own. So, ability will out. But at the lower end, it's a reasonable model of education to say, we should really focus our resources on the lower end, which is called the finish model, where you do

what it takes to get everybody up, everybody up to minimal levels of literacy and numeracy because without that you really can't be a participant in our increasingly technological society. So that's a matter of value, you know, but it is one way of handling this genetics. It's teachers need to recognize kids are different and they differ genetically. It doesn't mean you throw up your hands, it just means you notice those differences. You don't expect them to all do the same with the same curriculum. And I think you put more energy into the lower end of the distribution because at the higher end, ability will out. Now parents of gifted kids are going to be screaming at their screens now.

But, you know, I do believe that. And sure, you can help the kids at the higher end to give them even more opportunities. But basically, they'll probably do all right. And if you have to choose, and maybe we don't, but I'd say the resources really ought to go into the lower end of the distribution. Have you got any idea where the biggest impact is? Can you make a smart kid smarter easier than you can make a dumb kid smart? I hate to say that the answer is probably yes. I mean, you know, you don't have to do much with the smartest kids, and they'll just take

off. So, any program that comes even like head start in the United States, or what was it called here? Early starter, you know, that program they had to take kids at three years. Gifted and talented type thing, yeah. But it wasn't even, what no, it was the other way, it was for kids with lower SES. Oh, okay. Added.

And in the States it was called Head Start and it went on for 20 years or something like that. It began here about 10 years ago in England and it's pretty much fizzled out. And it's fizzled out because it was meant to give kids from disadvantaged environments a leg up, but instead the middle class families figured out the system and they got their kids in. So you know again it's the bourgeoisie. So it is hard I think it's a worthy goal to think about helping the kids at the lower end because you know it just doesn't take much for the kids at the lower end because it just doesn't take much for the kids at the upper end to do well.

You just sort of got to stay out of their way. What do you think is the implication of this? Someone's been introduced to what we've spoken about today, the fact that behavioral genetics is this huge kind of unseen, unspoken about influence on our outcomes in life life on our day-to-day experience, how has this informed the way that you lead your life and see life and the way that you tell your sort of research associates and your students as well to lead theirs? Well, I don't tell my, we do science, you know, we don't do personal counseling, I'm afraid to say, but it's a good question.

I think that you can answer at different levels, but it's just, I think the first step is just to recognize, I mean, maybe you don't, readers, listeners don't accept it, but realizes this huge body of evidence that says inherited DNA differences account for a lot of variance. In fact, is the major systematic force making us who we are, which is why my book is called Blueprint, how DNA makes us who we are. It should say, as individuals. The environment is important, but I believe it's not the systematic effects we thought were

important. So if DNA is the major systematic force making us who we are, we've got to pay attention to it. We ought to listen to our genetic whispers and realize we're all different. And partly, meditation might help you think about who you are and what you like and not being molded by what people want you to be or what you think you ought to be. And in the end, I think it will make people happier if they live more harmoniously with their genetic propensities.

Again, it's not to say you can't struggle against them. You can. I mean, like alcoholism, no matter what your genetic risk or alcoholism, you cannot become alcoholic unless you drink a lot of alcohol over a long period of time. So, you know, if you stop drinking alcohol,

you can't become alcoholic. So there are definitely things you could do. It's just like me and body weight, though. Easy to say that for people who don't have those genetic risk factors, but for those of us at the front line, it's really tough coming home late at night, being tired and just saying, ah, there's a bag of crisps. And then it's gone. Well, I think I've been talking a lot about releasing the tiller, which is a term from Jed McKenna's book, Spiritual Annitement. And what he's talking about is the tiller

attached to the rudder on a boat. A lot of the time people grip it very hard as if steering more efficiently would get them through the current more easily. But when you actually just sort of release and relax and allow things to occur, think about the people that you love to watch on television or at a sports game or comedians up on stage or a dancer or even a friend that just has sort of this effortless social grace, what they're doing, they're not gripping the tiller. effortless social grace. What they're doing, they're not gripping the tiller. They're just there in the moment. I had a guy that focuses on the biology of flow, Stephen Kotler on the show, not long ago, and he said that he thinks 10% of the entire world's GDP is people watching other people in flow in one form or another, whether that be reading a book or watching a sports game or supporting somebody on TV or whatever that might be. And all of this, we talked earlier on about synchronicity and sort of different narratives coalescing, and it really feels like this to me.

Like, there really is something to it. Just, I was given this cue ages ago by an embodiment practitioner that said, a lot of the time when we're focusing especially on a screen, we lose the awareness of our peripheral vision. But for everybody that's listening now, if you just focus on where your peripherals are, whatever it is that you're doing unless you're driving, and you just take one breath out and you go, oh my God, there is so much more here, I'm so much more relaxed, I'm so much more open to this. And I think that what you're saying here, using the genetic current, what do you want to be interested in? Like genuinely, what would,

what would you like to do? You don't need to take society's preconceptions and norms and ideas of what you should be doing. Like your life can be lived by design, not default. And you can also do that in reverse. You can have faith in the embodied version of you. That will drag me forward. And I think that confidence in ourselves should have been very much reinforced by what we've gone through today. Well, I really agree. That kind of brings us to a good point of closure, I think, with the philosophy as well as the psychology and the genetics. So it's been great talking to you. I really enjoyed it very much. There's so much more to say, but that's a good starter anyway. Robert, it's been absolutely awesome to you. I really enjoyed it very much. There's so much more to say, but that's a good starter anyway.

Robert, it's been absolutely awesome. Blue Print will be linked in the show notes below. Where can people keep up to date with the work that you're doing at the moment if you got website or something like that? Yep, and I'm easy to find just Robert Plumman. And you can Google me and I have 900 papers and 12 books so you can get sick of me pretty quickly. But there's a lot of new and exciting stuff that's happening. But mostly I do the hardcore science part of it. But it's an exciting field, and I feel very lucky to have been in this field just on the rocket ride, you know, from where when I started, psychology didn't accept genetics at all. And now, most psychologists accept there's a strong genetic component. And then, the DNA revolution came along where we can actually find the bits of DNA

that predict these differences. So, it's been a great ride and it's lovely to see the science work out like that. But again, I was just there for the ride in a way. I mean, you know, and it's sort of what you're saying is, you know, if you're going with the flow, you can see whoops, I'm going that way, you know, you've got your hand loosely on the rudder. I'm a sailor, so I know exactly what he means. The boat actually knows better than you. If you hold it hard, the boat wants to go up and down the waves a little bit, but if you're making it go straight like that, it doesn't actually sail very well. So I think it waves a little bit, but if you're making it go straight like that,

it doesn't actually sail very well. So I think it's a good analogy, a good metaphor for life. Well, I appreciate you for dragging yourself out of the illustrious towers of doing research and coming to the trenches to talk about it. I think that stuff like this, it is without someone like you, like an academic communicator, an intellectual who's able to actually just get this stuff across in a way that people can understand.

No one's digging into this research. It's so complex and it would be too far too hard. So you are doing awesome work and whenever whatever comes out next comes out book number 325 or whatever it is, I will be harassing you to bring you back on. Robert, it's been so good. Thank you. Everything. Well, thank you, Chris. you