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

There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they see someone suffer if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer. So ordinarily if you see someone be shocked you have interior insula. It's like you're being shocked too. Unless that person is first portrayed as violating some moral or social norm, in which case dopamine, you get a reward out of seeing that person punished. I think that it is a lust just as much as lust for substances or lust for sexual partners. It is a desire people want to see people punished. Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life. [music] I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Katherine Paige Harden. She is a psychologist and geneticist and a professor at the University of Texas Austin. Dr. Harden is an expert in how our genes shape our life trajectory, especially how they interact with life events during our adolescence and how they impact our long-term mental and physical health. Today we discuss the interplay of nature and nurture in addiction, criminality, susceptibility to trauma, and the larger themes of sin, sociopathy, empathy, and forgiveness. As you'll soon see, Dr. Harden is unique in her ability to define how biology, psychology, and the sometimes randomness of life interact to drive people's choices. Today we talk about known differences between males and females, the role of hormones and hormone independent influences on male female differences and how people assume different roles in life depending on the power structures they find themselves in. I want to be very clear that this is not a tap dance around the big issues episode. Today you are going to hear a very direct conversation about what the best science says about the role of genes and environment on human choice and how the biology meaning genes and everything downstream of them neurotransmitters hormones etc drive what choices are available to people and which ones they tend to make. I've long been a fan of Dr. Katherine Paige Harden's work because I know of no one else researching these topics with the level of rigor that she is. And as you'll soon hear, she is an exceptional educator. She's clear. She's direct to the question and her compassion and belief in people's ability to better themselves no matter what their genes are and to better the world is woven into everything she says and it's all backed by data. I should also mention that I learned during today's episode that Dr. Katherine Paige Harden has a new book coming out soon. It is entitled Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problems with Blame and the Future of Forgiveness. And you can find that anywhere books are sold. It's now available for pre-sale. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zerocost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Katherine Paige Harden. Dr. Katherine Paige Harden, welcome. Hi, thank you for having me. Few things are as interesting to people as the relationship between genes and behavior or what we call genotype and phenotype, the expression of all the stuff downstream of genes. And few things are as interesting as adolescence and puberty and the home we grew up in and how our genes interact with our choices etc. You work at the intersection of all of those which is a very brave thing to do. Could you just frame for us why you selected to study the relationship between genes and outcomes using adolescence as uh the time point in which you jump off from those questions? Because it could have been, you know, from infancy or in in an old age. Why adolescence? Yeah. So, I did my PhD at the University of Virginia and I was trained as a clinical psychologist. And if you're looking at when does mental illness emerge, when does this risk for mental illness really start to increase, it's in adolescence. So most cases of substance use disorders or addiction begin in adolescence. That's when people's risk for depression goes up. If you're going to have a for psychotic episode, that's going to be in late adolescence, early adulthood. So from a clinical perspective, adolescence is really interesting. And then I'm also was trained as a lifespan developmental psychologist. So thinking about how does what's happening early in the life reverberate really through the rest of your lifespan. And if you think about when in life do individual differences between people emerge, canalize, get deeper. When are people's life trajectories really starting to be apparent? It's in adolescence. So I came into this field really interested in teenagers, late childhood in the teenage years. So thinking about puberty, sexual behavior, but then from there what's happening in adolescence, it's also rulebreaking or aggression or again risk for alcohol and drug use. So my research program was really based on okay well what's happening in this period of life where the genes we're born with and the family environments we were raised with how do they combine to shape people's lives by the time people finish their teenage years they begin adulthood they're beginning adulthood on such different life trajectories what ages uh constitute uh adolescence [laughter] I mean that's changing I think right Yeah. Um, we typically think of adolescence as beginning with the physical changes of puberty, right? Adolescence is this period of transition to reproductive and social maturity. So, we're thinking of adolescence as beginning between 10 and 13 when people are going through puberty. I think more controversial is when does adolescence end? because historically we've defined that as you're an adult when you take on the social roles of adulthood and that keeps being you know for various reasons economic social reasons pushed back later and later so I've typically studied people between 10 and 25 so that kind of 15-year period a 10-year-old is clearly a child a 25-year-old is about to be kicked off their parents insurance they can finally run a car they can technically take on the social roles of adulthood And that's a long period of time where a lot of things are happening in the body, in the brain. This may be outside the scope of of what you work on, but I've always been struck by the fact that while kids, including myself, um, generally hit puberty somewhere, as you said, between 10 and 13 or maybe 14. Some seem to go through puberty for a much longer period of time. And I think of puberty as perhaps one of the biggest developmental milestones because the brain changes, hormones change of course, but perceptually and how people perceive you changes completely. And the acquisition of what we know as secondary sex characteristics um seems to occur at such different rates. So I mean I can be open about this. I I know I hit puberty by I know at uh at uh 14. Uhhuh. But then I didn't, you know, I didn't really shave until I was almost graduating college. Yeah. But I had grown, right? Whereas there were other kids that we went home for the summer and they came back and they came back like not a grown man but looking like this guy's looking like a grown man. Yeah. And kicking our butts in soccer and he's just, you know, just in terms of everything, right? But then, and I I don't want to out this person, but then when I look at us now, it seems that the people that went through puberty more quickly may have aged more quickly in general. Is there a any notion of a clock and the rate of that clock turning can be sort of visualized in puberty and predict longevity? Is there any relationship there? We are working on this right now. So, we can think about individual differences in puberty in three ways. We can think about pubertal timing. So when does it start? Um for girls, pubertal timing seems to be early pubertal timing seems to be the best predictor of risk for mental health problems, physical health problems, earlier menopause, shorter lifespan, early onset of puberty. Early onset of it's not looking at the sort of rate of characteristics. Yeah. For boys, you it seems that the difference in pubertal pace or pubertal some people call it pubertal tempo. So, not just how early does it start, but how long does it take for all of those changes to unfold? Um, we did a study many years ago where we found that boys were less affected by when it started but more affected at least for their emotional development by how quickly it happened with boys where they changed overnight having the hardest time sort of assimilating all these changes that are happening because your cognition is not necessarily maturing as quickly as your height or your musculature or your hormones. And so it seemed that boys seem to be particularly sensitive to going through puberty very very quickly. What we've been looking at recently is how the epiggenome changes during this period of time. So the genome is your DNA. It's the DNA sequence in your cells and that doesn't change with development. But the epiggenome is everything on top of the genome that affects how DNA is used by the body, used by the cells. And there's one epigenetic mechanism known as DNA methylation, which is, you know, a methyl group is is basically like this chemical tag and it can get kind of tagged onto the genome. So there's great work in aging that shows that the epigenetic clock measured by DNA methylation starts ticking in infancy and faster biological aging as measured by the epiggenome predicts shorter lifespan, worse health, earlier mortality. What we looked at is well instead of training an an epigenetic clock on age, can we train it on pubertal development? So, how physically mature you are? And what we found is you can. So, there's these these the clock is ticking as you get older, but the clock is there's another clock that's also ticking as you become more physically mature. And those two things are correlated. So the epigenetic changes that we see as you go through puberty faster um do seem to be related to aging more rapidly even in older life. So our reproductive development is I think very tied at a cellular molecular level with our lifespan development. And we see this across species. If you genetically engineer mice to go through puberty earlier they die earlier. So, we have this trade-off between reproductive maturity and lifespan across species within species. And I think now we're beginning to see that at the molecular level, too. Fascinating. I also like the way that answer lands because I had a very protracted puberty. Yeah. Uh and I feel grateful for that. In retrospect, because, you know, in terms of um athletic ability and things like that, I was I wasn't really delayed, but I sort of couldn't get past the sort of middle of the distribution. But then over time it's like this is kind of wild. I feel like I'm I look very different. I looked very different at 30 than I did at 20. Like marketkedly different without doing anything except existing. Some people seem kind of frozen in their adult look at this earlier age. Earlier age and in from the animal literature and I'm thinking the studies um from my colleague Eric Nudson in particular where he was looking at plasticity and barn owls but it's been looked at elsewhere. There's this really striking correlation between the onset of puberty and the end of the so-called critical period for neuroplasticity. Of course, plasticity can go on throughout the lifespan, but the plasticity that occurs until and around puberty is, you know, an order of magnitude greater than the plasticity that's available as say a 30-year-old or 40-year-old. Mhm. So they've done the experiments of uh like overreacttoizing um animals or taking the testicles out of animals and preventing somewhat preventing puberty and it doesn't seem to extend that window. So in humans is there any relationship between cognition, brain flexibility and the onset of puberty, the timing of the onset of puberty? That's a really interesting question and it's complicated. um in part because it's like well what part of plasticity are you looking at? What part of brain development are you looking at? And also with humans we can't unlike animals manipulate the onset of puberty in quite the same way. So, it does seem like there are some cognitive functions like if you're thinking about executive function ability, your ability to shift attention or update, um the things that are tested by a standard IQ test, those seem to be much more age related, whereas um your ability to learn from peers versus your parents, your sensitivity to risk and certain types of emotions, that seems to be more tied pubertal development than with age. But they're so confounded within observational studies in humans that it's a continuing challenge to try to pull these apart. 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Visit hellolingo.com/huberman for more information. The Lingo Glucose System is for users 18 and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for the diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. individual responses may vary. I recall some mouse data showing that if you um expose young uh pre uh pubescent mice to older males, they enter puberty earlier. Does that exist in humans as well? So, this is a controversial area of research. It is true that um girls, human girls who are raised with a nonbiological father do on average tend to go through puberty earlier. And some have hypothesized that it's a similar sort of cue from the environment about the stability and availability of resources. If dad is gone, maybe the provisioning of the environment is going to be less stable. Maybe evolution would favor a reproductive strategy where you go through puberty earlier rather than this continued, you know, childhood is so costly, right? Like a human childhood is long. It takes a lot. I have three kids. It takes a lot to feed them, to grow an adult. And so it might make sense to say, okay, well, if resources are going to be scarce, or if resources are going to be unpredictable, it might be better for me to have this strategy where I go through puberty earlier. What's difficult about that is that people don't end up in family structures at random. And moms who go through puberty are more likely to have sex at younger ages, more likely to end up in non-marital childbearing family structures, and are likely to have daughters who are being raised without a biological father. So, is it the biological father absence that's causing the earlier puberty, or is it that mom has genes that predispose her towards early puberty that changes her reproductive life and then she's more likely to be in this certain family structure and pass on those genes to her daughters? It seems to be a little bit of both, which is kind of the standard answer to all of our questions about nature and nurture. That um gene there's a very strong genetic effect on the timing of puberty for both boys and girls, but that also the environment is pushing it in different directions. And that's part of why we're seeing that the age of puberty keeps going down with every successive cohort. I mean, it's been falling for the last basically as long as we've been keeping data. people have been going through puberty earlier. I'm realizing that you have a very very difficult job because the languaging is so delicate. Yeah. So, I'm just going to jump on the bed of nails for you. Okay. I've also heard that if the biological father is present, it provides a quote unquote protective effect against this earlier onset of puberty in the presence of the non-biological father. But just that language protective effect implies that a one-year shift or two-year shift earlier puberty is somehow bad. Like immediate I think the human brain just works this way, right? For understandable reasons think, oh, you know, these these young girls that were supposed to go into puberty at 14, they're now going to puberty at, you know, 10 because the the dad was absent. They we the humanize it. They pathize it and they write a script. And then, as you point out, you know, there's things related to the the situation as it relates to the the mother and her choices and her genes, and it's a it's a real barwire mess for the typical person um to try and pull apart. You're pulling these things apart beautifully, but it's also um fodder for anyone that wants to drive a narrative. That's tough. How how do you navigate that? because I'm going to ask you about adolescence and genes and and um uh sexual promiscuity, right? We're talking about today we're going to talk about sin, you know, and so how do you how do you look at these things? I know you look at them objectively, but then how does one choose to communicate about these things in a way that doesn't arm people to kind of run their own agendas whether they realize it or not? Yeah, I'm not sure I'm the best person to give advice about that. I, you know, I'm a scientist. I'm a mother. I'm a college professor. I teach intro psych at UT. And so I'm always thinking about what does the science say? How would I explain this to my 13-year-old? How would I explain this to my undergrads? And with a sense of awe and respect for how amazing a human body and brain is, right? Like to think about we as women as as at one time girls are equipped with a brain that's you know looking out into the environment and integrating all of these signals about internal and external about you know resources and stress and body weight and light and integrating that to say okay now's the best time for us in our situation to go. Now is the time for our our bodies to change in these amazing ways. That is that is puberty. I feel like I keep coming back to if we have respect for the amazingness of the human body and the brain and I'm trying to communicate it with clarity and empathy in the way that my 13-year-old son would understand it. I don't always succeed at that goal, but that's really my I feel like that as an educator, that's how I'm approaching these topics. Well, I I appreciate you saying that. I'm I didn't ask that to kind of inoculate against anything. Um but now we can really get [laughter] in get into the get into the tangle. Yeah. I have long thought that um the hypothalamus, right, these this various clusters of neurons uh above the roof of our mouth that drive hunger and sex behavior and thirst and aggression and um and a bunch of other interesting things. Um is sort of the seat of the seven deadly sins. I've heard you say this before. Um and of course all those brain circuits uh and structures interact with other brain circuits and structures. That's uh there's no one location in the brain um that governs a behavior entirely with some rare exceptions. How do you think about the genetic programming of the hypothalamus in terms of people's proclivity for addiction, promiscuity, aggression, being overly passive in a way that might harm them or other people as well. I don't really think that much about the hypothalamus per se actually in relation to those behaviors. So just stepping back one step when you you made this reference to the seven deadly sins, right? So if I kind of kind of remember all of them, there's wrath, there's envy, there's lust, there's greed, there's sloth, and what do the seven deadly sins have in common? How can we operationalize that more scientifically? You know, what those behaviors all have in common is, I mean, I mean, accept envy for a second. is doing something that might be pleasurable in the short term um to the extent that there's negative consequences negative consequences to yourself or negative consequences to other people. I think envy is interesting because you're seeing other people enjoying pleasures and you're like I want that one right so it's kind of looking at other pe other people's pursuit of of things. I think of envy as a severe opportunity cost because as long as you're envying some what someone else has or is doing, then you're then you're missing all the stuff that's happening now that you could build your life on. I think of envy as like a clue to what do you desire that you haven't admitted to yourself. One question I ask graduate students when I'm recruiting them is whose career do you want? Whose career do you envy? because that tells me more about where they really want to go with their lives than you know their kind of prepared speech that they have for me. Good question. Yeah. You know, let's take wrath or let's take lust. You know, anger is an emotion that's useful. Sexual desire is an emotion that's useful. When do they become sins? They become sins in our minds when people are are engaging that behavior um in situations where we think it's going to be harmful not just to themselves but to other people. From a clinical psychology perspective, we would never say we're going to study the seven deadly sins, but we do have um clinical language or diagnosis where the predominant symptoms that you see are people engaging in behaviors that are impulsive, that are um maybe immediately pleasurable, but in the long term harmful to themselves or other people. So the obvious constellation of this is substance use disorders, right? So it's I'm I'm ingesting a substance. It feels good and I'm doing that at significant cost to myself and other people. We can also think about in childhood what would be called conduct disorder which are people who are children who are engaging in wrath. They're engaging in aggression towards other people that hurts other people, their parents, their teachers, their schools. The law is mad at them and they're doing it anyways. So, what we're interested in scientifically is um are there genes that affect the likelihood of developing these disorders? Yes. Um are there genetic overlaps between these different things? So, do the genes that um are the genes that make it more likely for you to become addicted to substances also make you more likely to have many sexual partners also make you more likely to engage in impulsive aggression? That also appears to be the question? Yes. And then if we're looking at genes that have these associations not just with substances or not just with sexual behavior or not just with aggression but have crosscutting effects on all of them. What are they like? What are those genes? Where are they where are they active in the brain? When are they expressed in development? So that's work that that our group has been doing for eight years now to try to discover what these genes we have a good idea from twin and adoption studies that there are genetic influences on these things and now we want to figure out what are they and where are they active in the brain and it turns out that it's not just hypothalamus it's really broadly distributed you know throughout your brain I'll update my messaging [laughter] and I did couch it as a hypothesis I I never said that there were you know that you could leion one of the the sins. There are genes that vary between individuals. That predict addiction, predict impulsivity, and other things. Um, you're exploring how the genes that predict addiction might predict impulsivity for other types of behaviors. Yes. I think I heard that the answer is yes. Indeed, there's overlap. So, I'd be very curious to know what those genes encode for. But what are the protein systems and neural circuit systems, hormone systems downstream of those genes? Yeah, if we go back one step, just why did we think that there were going to be genes that overlap between this? The biggest um set of results that supported this hypothesis were adoption and pedigree studies. So these big data registries, you get them in Sweden, you get them in the Scandinavian countries that keep track of every single one of their citizens. And what you see is that the seven deadly sins run in families. So if you have an adoptive parent who's addicted to alcohol, you are more likely to have many sexual partners. And you're also more likely to be diagnosed with conduct disorder or um be arrested for a violent crime even if you were never raised by that parent. And it's not just substance use to substance use or violence to violence or you know risky sexual behavior to risky sexual behavior. It seems that having a family history of any of these things increases your likelihood of manifesting any one of them. So that's why we thought that there was this genetic commonality across them. Um so what we found is that there's many many many genes that affect all of these behaviors. It's massively what we call polygenic. So it's not just one thing in one part of your genome. It's distributed throughout your genome. And that those genes are most expressed in neurode development in uterero in second and third trimester. So if you if you look at genes that are associated with all of these things and you see okay when in the human lifespan are they most active? They're active during cortical development in the second and third trimester. So there's something very like early neurodedevelopmental that's going on there and it seems to be affecting the brain's balance of inhibition and excitation. So [clears throat] as your brain is developing while you're in uterro the GABA system which is inhibitory and the glutamate system which is excitatory sort of being tuned like and the balance between those two things is um is being worked out. If children are born pre-term, part of the reason that that affects their psychological development negatively is because it affects this balance between inhibition and excitation. So I think we're still very at the beginning of this understanding the bioanitation of it, the biological mechanisms of it. Um, but what it suggests to us is that, you know, sometimes you hear like ADHD is a neurodedevelopmental disorder. I think that substance use disorders are every bit as a neurodedevelopmental disorder as ADHD. I think conduct disorder, which is characterized by impulsive aggression, is every bit a neurodedevelopmental disorder as ADHD. Because if you look at the genes that are causing them, they seem to be affecting this pattern of brain development very very early in life and this balance between the brain's inhibition and excitation. Fascinating. I mean, I have to be careful not to go down this rabbit hole, but I started off as a developmental neurobiologist. So, um, you know, fetal brain wiring is, uh, yeah, we've never really talked about it on this podcast, but it's we've talked about the effect of of fetal exposure to hormones. Yeah. Uh, in in the brain in particular, um, in terms of sexual differentiation, but yeah, there's a ton going on in there um, at these stages. And when I hear you talk broadly about um you know the balance between excitation and inhibition and some disruption in that or some alteration in that setting up a a a probability of the expression of some behavioral disorder or choice set of choices. It makes me wonder, you know, about brain function more more broadly is, you know, does that somehow make these choices to use a given substance or to do a impulsive behavior? Is it we have to be careful not to project, but is it an attempt to restore some sort of um order to that balance or is it an expression of of an imbalance system? It's just a seessaw that never that doesn't tilt all the way uh to one side or the other. I think that's a really good question and I don't know the answer to that. When you talk to people who are, you know, experiencing a substance use disorder, sometimes you hear narratives that are very much in this um kind of self-medication frame, right? Like I took this substance and it made me feel normal and I didn't feel normal before I had that. But that's not everyone. I mean, addiction is a very heterogeneous disorder. And so I think people's um perceptions of their motivations to engage in substance use that's harmful for them. And then how does that um relate to the brain mechanism and then how does that relate to early neurod development? I don't think we know you know the specifics of those links to the extent they exist. My colleague Anna Lumpky who wrote to Nation Yeah. She once said that um many addicts, behavioral addictions, uh I guess they call them process addictions or chemical addictions, that they have this feeling that unless they're experiencing something really intense like life isn't really happening. Like they crave this intensity of experience. They want peak experience. Either to numb themselves. I mean it could be a trough experience in the case of sedatives but um that stuck with me implied in that is that not everyone is seeking these um kind of extreme states and so layered on what you just described in terms of excitation inhibition balance I kind of wonder if um if people who struggle with addiction are um they're craving getting out of too much inhibition or too much excitation in but this is probably an overly simplistic hypothesis so just thinking about the that sensation seeking anything that driving for intensity. Usually when we when we think of people who um are chronically engaging in some behavior despite it having negative consequences for themselves and other people. So this could be drug use, this could be aggression, this could be risky sexual behavior. Um we can typically think of three dimensions of sort of personality and temperament um that are often at play. And one of them is this sensation seeking drive for intensity. So I want it, I want it and I want a lot of it, right? And then one is this disinhibition um failure of self-control. Um I can't stop myself. And then another which I think is less wellstudied is what people call antagonism or callousness which is um I know this has uh negative consequences for other people but I don't really care like that doesn't bother me. And I think what you see is that the the combination of factors that goes into any one person's behavior can really vary. So for some people it's like this feels great, this feels good. I want the high. I want it to be intense. I'm not disinhibited. I'm deliberately seeking out this behavior. You know, I plan the drugs that I'm going to use for the club the whole week and I plan my week afterwards. It's not it's not disinhibited at all. It's very purposeful. And then there are people that are like, I wasn't planning, but now I'm at the club and someone offered this to me and I can't stop myself. And then other people are like, I'm not I like it. Okay. and I could stop myself, but these negative con consequences that people keep harping on, you know, the fact that my partner doesn't like this or the police don't like this, like, oh, you know, I'm indifferent, right? And so, um, all of that to say, I think I think we need to be aware of the complexity and the heterogeneity of of different people's motivations when they're doing these behaviors. Yeah. And these days we hear a lot about um the role of trauma in addiction. I mean I can't do a single post or podcast about addiction and the biology and um and not hear well it's trauma related. But of course genes come from our parents. We'll talk about that irritability. Um and so generational trauma or or just childhood trauma doesn't even have to be transgenerational. It can get layered in there in a complicated way. Yes. And I'm not trying to say that trauma doesn't play a role. Clearly, it does. But it seems that genes could be primary. Trauma in the parents, trauma in the children, traumatizing, you know, hurt people hurt people kind of, you know, it's the the one cliche that seems to, you know, stand the test of time. Yeah. I think it's very hard to say that something is primary or secondary because everything's interacting with everything else. One of the scientific challenges and then also one of the very human tragedies that we often see is that the parents who have genetic risks who are passing those on to their kids are also the caregivers for those kids. And so the kids who would most benefit from firm, warm, stable, nurturing parenting are also the least likely to get it because the parents themselves are also dealing with their own stuff and they're also leading their own complicated lives. And so it's a tapestry like there's a warp and a weft to a piece of cloth. There's the threads that go this way and this way. And um I think that's how I think about the relationship between genes and trauma early experience is that really they both are woven together to build the brain and the body and the personality that then struggles with these behaviors later on in their life. So if we were to have access to our genomes heading into uh adolescence or to our kids uh genomes um and we know based on your work and the work of others presumably that some of the genes that predispose to impulsive behavior, addictive behavior, promiscuity etc. Um that would be useful information I would think. Right? Then one could think carefully about friend choices, situational choices, install buffers. You know, it sounds sounds so mechanical, but you know, have people around who can help buffer against this these genetic predispositions which no doubt, as you just said, weave into um situational predispositions. Why don't people want that information? Or do they want that information? Because I remember in the 80s hearing, oh, you know, soon we're gonna have genomes and you can know if you're going to get Huntington's. Yeah. this, you know, very destructive degenerative disorder. And and then people said, well, I wouldn't want to know. I I mean, I think many people would also want to know and especially parents, you know, if they can just get past their guilt that it has something to do with them, I think they'd want to help their kids uh avoid these predispositions given that most of what we're talking about are maladaptive predispositions. So this is a complicated and really rapidly growing area of research which is what happens if you return people's genetic information back to them. So if you have ever done 23 and me or some sort of direct to consumer genetics company you might have gotten like this is your genetic risk for Crohn's disease or this is your genetic risk for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. Um and now there are more companies that are expanding into that genetic information around um many gene indices. We call them polygenic indices or polygenic scores that are correlated with someone's risk for developing an alcohol use disorder. Say I think there's a couple things to keep in mind here. One is that the our genetic information is rapidly improving. it's still not very good at the level of predicting an outcome for an individual. So, um, as an example, you can think cities that are at higher altitude tend to be colder. Like that's a correlation. That's a correlation of around 04.5. You can know that if you're trying to think about, okay, well, which cities are colder on average than others. That's not going to tell you do you need to pack a sweater if you're going to Montreal next Tuesday, right? Like that's a specific weather incident. Polygenic scores right now are like I can tell you that you know on in general like these people have a higher risk than these people, but they're not they're not a pregnancy test or even a Huntington's disease test. They're not prognosticators of like an individual person's risk for an alcohol use disorder. there's some uncertainty there. [snorts] The other question is what are the ethics of telling someone that they have a low genetic risk, especially if we're uncertain about that. Like you've talked a lot about how, you know, no alcohol on average is better for you than some alcohol. We think about the risks of telling someone that they're genetically predisposed towards a negative life outcome. But there's also risk to telling someone that they're not genetically proposed because is that going to are they going to interpret that as license to drink more? I don't need to worry about that. I need I don't need to worry about my consumption because this company told me that I'm at low risk. And then the other thing you're picking up on is that there are individual differences in desire for kind of deliberate ignorance. So there was a great study after the wall came down in Berlin that was um conducted on whether or not people want to know the contents of their files, like who was reporting on them. And some people were like, "Of course I want to know. Of course I want to know who was saying what about me." And other people were saying, "No, I don't. Deliberate ignorance. Ignorance is bliss. Deliberate ignorance is what I want. This is what other people were saying about them." Yes. Yes. Don't read the comments. Yeah, deliberate ignorance. No, read the comments. It's also a form of deliberate ignorance. This is like an avid debate between podcasters. You know, Rogan is the Mr. Don't Don't read the comments. Lex Freriedman and I go back and forth on this on guarding the comments. I [clears throat] mean, yeah, it can be useful. So, all of that to say, I think we're in a situation which the science is rapidly developing. It's not nearly at a point where it's going to be a a high confidence predictor. There's also risks to being told that you have a low, you know, a low genetic risk because it might act as a permission structure for behavior that might ultimately prove to be risky. And also, people's psychologies are complicated and not everyone responds to more information as a good thing. Not everyone wants to read the comments of their DNA. This isn't a push back, but I feel like most people, even if they don't understand genes inheritability, understand that they got their genes from their parents. So, there is an argument to be made perhaps that people are already doing this. Like someone whose father was an alcoholic, whose grandfather was an alcoholic, could say, "Well, yeah, I got to be really careful because obviously this runs in my family, right?" And then someone say, "Well, your mom doesn't have an issue with alcohol. She could have a couple drinks, no big deal. So, you're protected and we don't know how gene dosing protects us or makes us vulnerable. No one knows, but we all we all do this. Yes. Yes, I think we do. I mean, we'll get into discussions about genes inheritability, but you know that that like the topic of of eugenics and genetic selection with even within embryos is super dicey nowadays. Everyone's, you know, like you know, it's so scary to even have the discussion. But then I've always said, I mean, people do a kind of genetic selection. They pick sperm donors and they pick partners. Often times based on a combination of traits which are clearly involve genes, you know, so people are doing a genetic selection in partner choice anyway. And so to me, maybe it's just the scientist in me, the conversation feels unnecessarily scary. But when it comes to things like substance use disorder, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong. I think it makes sense to look at your parents and say, "Listen, if one of them has a an an issue with alcohol or both of them have an issue with alcohol, I have to be very careful with alcohol." And with your children too, right? I think as parents, at least as a mother, I look at my kids and I think they don't have the same temperament. They don't have the same personality. Um, I think the risks of cannabis use is different for my son and for my daughter. And so I think an attuned parent is going to be thinking about what do I know about my kid as they go into adolescence? How does that inform how I'm helping shape their environment? I think what you're picking up here is that oftentimes people treat genetic information as if it exists in a vacuum and it's the only thing we know about a person. And that's obviously not true. There are phenotypes that we see in our family members, in our perspective mates, in our children. And most of the research can also act as if you would be returning genetic information um about a child or about a person to that person and it's the only thing that they know and that's not true. Um, so I think that we really are at a place where we need more meta-cience, science about the science in what is the most responsible way to give people access to their genetic information in a way that permits them to make the best choices. But we're not going to be able to do that if we're continuing to pretend that genetic information exists somehow siloed from all the other things that people are paying attention to when they're observing themselves and their family members. If you're a regular listener of the Huberman Lab podcast, you've no doubt heard me talk about the vitamin mineral probiotic drink AG1. And if you've been on the fence about it, now's an awesome time to give it a try. For the next few weeks, AG1 is giving away a full supplement package with your first subscription to AG1. They're giving away a free bottle of vitamin D3 K2, a bottle of omega-3 fish oil capsules, and a sample pack of the new sleep formula, AGZ, which by the way is now the only sleep supplement I take. It's fantastic. My sleep on AGZ is out of this world good. AGZ is a drink, so it eliminates the need to take a lot of pills. It tastes great and like I said, it has me sleeping incredibly well, waking up more refreshed than ever. I absolutely love it. Again, this is a limited time offer, so make sure to go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get started today. I feel like the more information we have about our parents and their parents and their positive traits and their, let's just call them maladaptive, destructive traits to themselves or to others, the more informed our choices can be. But I do understand that it can start to set up some constraints in our mind of what we are capable of or not capable of. But I also feel like especially in the United States, there's this notion that we can become anything. It wasn't until I was in a relationship with somebody from Southern Europe that I realized that that notion growing up with that is kind of outrageous to some people in the world because in a lot of areas of the world, as you know, people get siloed really early on. Um, and they not everyone grows up thinking they could be an amazing athlete if they chose that path. They could be a billionaire if they chose that path. You know, they could, but in the United States, we love this notion of anyone can get to any position if they just work hard enough and believe in themselves and align with the right people. So, I think that you think of it probably as, you know, another source of data. And isn't more data better? Like, isn't we we improve our decision-m when we have more variables at hand? um that's a very scientific way to think about genetic information. Whereas I think for many people in the broader public there can be a temptation to see genes as a very special sort of information. There's a genetic has a myth around it that maybe this is my data on my heart rate variability doesn't have about it. I I often I think that people can fall into these really essentialist stories about genetics that it's telling them something about their like their deepest or truest selves. Um and that's when the delivery of genetic information without correcting their perception of what genes are really telling us can start to be dangerous. I mean I think about 23 and me their tagline for many years was welcome to you spit in this tube. welcome to you, right? That we are going to give we are not just going to give you another piece of information about yourself to add to all the things that you could be using. We are going to tell you who you really are. And it's when the genetic information lapses into these more essentialist stories that I think things get to be, in your words, a little bit thornier, a little bit riskier. I never did 23 and me, but um they were just right up the road, but somehow never did it. But I did hear that one of the surprising uh results of 23 andme and companies like it was that um a not insignificant number of uh people discovered they have relatives that they didn't know they had. Yes. Or that their father isn't the father that they thought they had, which is a pretty major psychological frame shift. Yeah. I gave a talk at a college, a small college. Um, and it was a writing class and they had to write about a book and they chose my book to write about, which is great. It's like, you know, freshman and they all have to actually write something and they chose a book that was deliberately, you know, a little bit controversial to give them something to push off on. And I asked him, I said, "Why? How, you know, you're writing professor, how did you find my book?" And he said, "Well, I did 23 and me." And I realized that my the man who raised me is not my biological father. My parents didn't know this. It was our fertility doctor who was my biological father. And I have something like 26 half siblings cuz this guy had been doing it in his practice for years. He's now the doctor is now deceased. And I just was like that's so much more interesting than I'm going to talk about like anything I'm going to talk about with these freshmen. story and that um and I think that speaks to he had a whole narrative about his life and his family and then he got this piece of genetic information and it blew that story out of the water because it there was something about the genetic lineage that is really important to our sense of of who we are and he really had to reconstruct you know his family story and his identity in the light of that information. It's so interesting because I've heard of people learning something unfortunate, bad about their grandparent or parent that they weren't aware of and then internalizing that somehow they are bad. Mhm. Especially young kids can internalize that message. This is a a message to all people who may end up divorced. Don't badmouth the the other parent because you're essentially telling your kids that they come from bad they there's badness in them. You know, and and we all think that this is about people's behavior, but but my understanding of spend a little bit of time with this literature just how people interpret information and how kids interpret information is that they like oh like I come from something bad and there's actually I mean there's all these movies about this. Star Wars has this and you know and and other other movies you know like our genetic origins and how those played out in previous generations um can frighten people about themselves. Yes. So to go back to your earlier question about how do we talk about gen genetics in relation to these phenotypes that are really part of our identities. Another thing is that I don't think anyone's bad. I don't think anyone's all good either. I think that humans are complicated and our behaviors are complicated and none of us can be reduced to one thing we've done or one gene we have or one aspect of our phenotype. But that is a really common perception that genetics is telling some genetics is some telling us something essential about ourselves and that it might turn out that that essential thing is a bad thing. Um, I write in my new book about this letter that I got from um, a man who is in prison. He's been in prison since he was 16 for a horrific crime that he committed. It's a, you know, a sexually violent crime um, that he committed when he was 15 years old. So, still an adolescent, still a growing brain, still not an adult. in Texas, you can be tried an adult as as 15 and he's been in prison ever since then. And he read about my lab, my, you know, our behavior genetics lab at Texas and an issue of Texas monthly magazine, which I guess the prison subscribes to. And he wrote me a letter and it showed up in my university mailbox and it was him saying, "I've done this thing like, let me tell you about myself. I've been in prison my whole adult life, even before then." Um, what do you think makes a child go bad? Nature or nurture? And that question haunted me because I could give him a technical answer which is I could say it's we know that nature matters. We know that nurture matters. We know that all of our behaviors are influenced by both nature or nurture. Um, but I think when he's writing me, he's not just asking for a science lesson, right? He's someone who's done something horrible and he's saying, "I feel like I'm inherently a horrible person." And that's might be because of my genetics and my do my genetics make me bad. And I think that's a story about genetics which has no scientific basis but really um pops up in a lot of places in our culture and it makes it very difficult to talk about because you know you're here saying these genetic variants are expressed at this point in prenatal development and that increases your probability of these having having these behaviors. But if someone hears that as I could be born bad or I could be born broken, that's absolutely not what we're saying. But that story about genetics is really, you know, woven through our culture. The bad seed, the bad seed, bad to the bone, natural born killer. We have I think the fact that we can come up with English idioms and phrases for this so easily tells us something about the way that we think about behavior, morality, a self and biology. I have so many questions but I think the first one I want to ask is a developmental one. Yeah. Um, I think most of us presumably carry this idea that it's during puberty and the activation of hormones, in particular testosterone, that takes a sweet kid and makes them a bad kid. I think that's not true. I I I don't believe that's true. But are there examples of um in the literature of kids prior to puberty being destructive in in a sociopathic way? Yes. And that's one of the biggest predictors of um what people have called a life course persistent pattern of antisocial offending which is onset before the age of 10. um antisocial behavior that's not just destruction of property but also aggression against other children. And when we're thinking about aggression, oftentimes we discriminate between aggression when provoked versus proactive kind of cold aggression. So the worst prognosis we would we would anticipate would be a male child who begins to aggress against other children or against animals before the age of 10 and doesn't feel guilt or remorse around that that has kind of this cold callousness about it. That's a poor prognosticator of having well- reggulated behavior into adulthood. So of those kids who have conduct disorder be before especially before the age of 10 with these callous emotional features we would expect that 50 to 75% of them will have a substance use disorder in adulthood. Um a non-trivial percentage will have meet criteria for antisocial personality or another personality disorder in adulthood. Um and so again I think we're we're looking at a subset of children where there's clearly a heavy genetic component. There's clearly a heavy nurture component. It's very neurodedevelopmental in terms of its origins and early brain development and currently we have vanishingly few effective treatments. And again, I think that's because people have maybe implicitly or unconsciously interpreted the genetic research or the biological research as these kids were born bad. Not these kids were born with a set of neurodedevelopmental liabilities and we really need to figure out how to help them. You know, what are the treatments we can offer them and when people see something as a moral failing, they're less likely to see it as a biomedical problem that we can, you know, throw the weight of science behind. What percentage of these kids younger than 10 that show this antisocial behavior are male versus female? The sex ratio varies, but sometimes it's 2 to1, sometimes it's as high as four. four to one. So, and that can't be explained by post uterero testosterone because they haven't hit puberty yet. So, it either is an or early organizing effect in uterero or there's something on the Y chromosome that creates a susceptibility and we really don't know actually one of my former postocs is working on this now the analysis of the X chromosome um because most genetic studies just work just focus on the autotosome. So, just focus on the you know the nonsex chromosomes. Um the other thing is we also see this in animals that male guinea pigs are much more vulnerable to the effects of preterm birth than female guinea pigs. Again, preterm birth disrupts that same kind of GABA to glutamate excitatory inhibitory balance that um we're also seeing popping up in the genetic research. Also, I've just I've I have have two three kids. I have two girls and one boy. And even with humans, the labor and delivery nurse will be like, "Okay, well, we got to keep him in longer because those early early boys, they struggle. They know that the male fetus seems to be more vulnerable to these insults than the than the female fetus. Are the guinea pigs sociopathic?" Guinea pigs. I mean, all of these things you can you used to work with nonhuman animal models. I for better or worse, I've worked with so many different species. I have to say I do not miss working with animals for [clears throat] a variety of reasons. That's how I ended up in a clinical psych program is humans humans can consent to be in an experiment. I as an animal lover it eventually wore on my soul too much and I understand the ne where it's necessary. I also think there's an excess in particular and I'll lose some friends with this but in particular um with some of the larger primate work I one really needs to justify and there are instances where there's good justification but um yeah I've worked with a lot of different animals but I was about to say um I know we both uh dog lovers um there's this saying um they're no bad dogs just bad owners but we don't say that about humans we don't say oh you know there no bad people everyone is a good person. They're just bad parents. At some point, usually 18, we say you're responsible for your actions regardless of what happened to you, regardless of the genes you came into this world with. And things uh shift where people understandably are responsible for their behavior in a different way. Sounds like in Texas it can come in earlier depending on the crime. Yeah. But I assume all dogs are good dogs, that they're trustworthy, that they would never harm you or another dog, maybe an animal, cuz I've I've seen what happens when certain dogs get a hold of certain animals, but I don't think we make the same assumption about people. I don't think we do either. I I titled my new book Original Sin to to really spotlight this exact thing. I you know before I was a scientist um the first 20 years of my life I was an evangelical Christian. So I was raised in a very um fundamentalist household southern praised God and pass the ammunition in lots of ways. And um and in my in my brand of Christianity that I was raised in, which was um Protestant, reformed Calvinist, I really was raised with this idea of original sin, which is that humans are born bad, that they're born depraved, that they're born broken. And I don't believe that's true, but that's the explicit teaching of some religious traditions. And that's a religious tradition that was really foundational to our culture and our institutions. So, I don't think it's a coincidence that um we talk about how there's no bad dogs, but we assume people can be inherently bad because I think many of us were taught that, you know, from a young age that that all of us or some of us, you know, if if you're thinking about Calvinist theology of some people are the elect and some people are that that some of us are inherently bad. Um, so you can be raised with a a religious tradition that that really is talking about inherent depravity and then you have a scientific tradition that's studying well how does genes how do genes affect bad things that people do and and then we have debates about how science should be used and that's where I think things get really thorny and really tricky which is how do we apply the science without lapsing into this really ancient way of thinking um which is interpreting the science as proof that we're broken that that people are broken at the same time. I mean, going back to this letter that I received, people do horrible Like, people do horrible things to each other. And I think about that man who wrote me a letter and I can say I think he did a horrible thing. And I think he probably, everything I know scientifically, I think he probably had horrible luck in terms of his parents and his genes and his birth experiences and his childhood experiences. And so, how do we put those together? What does it mean to hold someone responsible for how they behave? I do think that we're responsible for ourselves and responsible to each other while also keeping in mind the fact that no one created themselves from scratch. By the by the time he was an adult, he was already in prison for the things that had happened to him while he was still technically a child. I wrote this book, my new book, because I was really attempting to to wrestle through that question. I think I'm getting this story right. It's a true story that was uh told by our former director of neurosciences at Stanford, Bill Nuome. Um about the guy who went up in the tower at UT Austin and shot a bunch of people, killed them. The tower shooter, I think he was eventually taken out by a security guard. The remarkable thing about the story is, at least the way I remember it, is that this guy knew something was wrong with him. Thought that the sight of the problem was in his brain, was asking people to look at his brain and help him. I think I'm getting this right. We'll double check. um and then said at the point where he realized he was going to go through with this thing with this act that he wanted them to look at his brain and it turned out he had a tumor in a I think it was some temporal lobe region that it was amigdula oh it was actually in the in the amydala so you know the story clearly uh and it's where you work um fortunately occurred long before you work I mean terrible that it happened at all but in this age of school shooters and public massacres, right? People just, you know, going up into Vegas hotel window and, you know, hosing people with bullets. Th this case is a unique one because the guy knew there was something wrong with him. Want in some sense wanted help, but you can kind of create this picture of, you know, um, angel devil conversations in his head between neural circuitry that's saying, "Don't do this. Don't do this. Ask for help and do this, do this." I mean, it's like the cartoon or movie with the angel and the devil on the on the shoulder or in each ear. What are we to make of that? Yeah. Gosh, the women case is so it's so interesting because he did um say that he there was something wrong with him. He did ask for help. um when after he died the state of Texas ordered a autopsy and um they found that they had this tumor and the whole thing was basically labeled like um almost like a natural disaster had hurt had occurred. So the the report talks about like the catastrophe or the you know the this incident that happened. Um, so the they ultimately when when trying to make sense of Whitman's shooting people from the tower uh at Texas took what was some philosophers have called this objective view. So basically like he they weren't viewing him as an agent who's choosing who's doing something in the realm of good or bad a moral failing. They were viewing him as kind of a machine that's gone haywire, right? He got a tumor in his amydala and he wouldn't have done it if he hadn't had this tumor. How would they have made sense of his behavior if he hadn't asked for a brain autopsy? if they didn't know about this tumor, how many other people have something going on with them in a specific location that um if we knew about it might help us understand how this behavior came across. I uh I write in my book this story of this Dutch family where basically all the women in the family were functioning okay but half the men in the family were one raped his sister, one stabbed his boss with a pitchfork, one multiple one committed arson, multiple of the men were in prison. And at some point, I guess one of the women was like, "Y'all, you have to figure out what's going on with the men in our family. Like, this is too much to be a coincidence." And what they found is that on the X chromosome, they had inherited a rare mutation in the MAOA gene. So, MAOA is an enzyme that degrades monoamines that, you know, regulate how your neurons are talking to one another. And women have two X chromosomes. So if they inherit a bad version, they're still the other version. Whereas men only have one X. And so from their mom, they got a 50/50 shot. Am I going to get the the mutated version or the nonmutated version? I mean, I find this study fascinating on so many levels, right? That the single letter change in your DNA could have this massive effect on your behavior. but also that all of these men were in the criminal justice system and had not been obviously flagged as something organic or biological or mental illness going on with them. And later they there was another group that um found this this you know a sensibly rare mutation in several other impulsively aggressive boys that had been referred to their hospital. And they they ended their scientific paper on what I find one of the most haunting notes in the scientific literature, which is, is this actually rare? Or is it that when we're faced with people doing horrible things, we never even stop to look for what might be causing it from our genetic or neurobiological from organic way, which I I think that's a really really chilling thought. Um so how do we you know in the absence I think the question that you're asking is an important one which is in the absence of some smoking gun you know the mutated gene the amygdala tumor how do we put together our knowledge as scientists as people who read the science that yes it's genes yes it's environment yes it goes into the behavior and also we're humans we have this this outrage rage and this naturally this blame towards people that harm each other. How do we as humans hold both of those truths at the same time? I think that's the real challenge. I think once somebody is harmed, our empathy shifts to the victim. Or victims. Yes. in a way that oludes our maybe even at times depending how close we are to the victims or how much we identify with it that oludes our um even care that like like okay this guy this guy went up on this I'm describing it historically this guy went up on this tower killed these people that security guard eventually got him but the you know the parent of that kid that was just walking to class or you know the young woman who is, you know, freshman year or whatever, you know, she's dead now. Yeah. She's gone. And so I think that in a in a kind of healthy way, not kind of, in a healthy way, we just we think the hell with that guy. One less glad they killed him. People will say that, right? People say that I'm I'm not necessarily Yeah. I guess in some sense if I just stand back and my reflexive response, it's like this guy killed a lot of people. I understand he was driven to it. He was stricken with something. And I that the um but it's hard for me to get to okay well there's a genetic thing that set him up from a gloma in the amydala of all places like he he bad luck but because we assume that people can intervene in their own behavior. This gets down to kind of free will type yes stuff that my colleague Robert Seapolski you know he'll argue to the end of time that there's no free will which is a frustrating one for for many of us but you know he's a hell of a smart guy. You know, I think that the the issue for many people is that genes are fairly far upstream from behavior. You know, if I said, "Okay, there's this guy down in uh you know, Los Angeles, and you know, he I don't know, he he he got rabies from a dog he was trying to save from the LA River. And then 3 days later, you know, he randomly committed this crime. He killed somebody." You say, "Well, he had rabies. He was raid." like we can make the connection very easily, but that's a you know a neural virus that hits the amydala among other things and causes people to get very aggressive. We'd go okay you know well you can imagine him without the rabies. So there's there's you you can you there's some distance between the self that is the object of moral judgment and the cause that you're locating as the salient cause for this behavior. And if there's daylight between those, then you can say, "Okay, well, I can imagine what he was like before the rabies." Genes make it harder to do that because when we think of them as so essential to the making of the self that is the object of moral judgment, who is the person that has different genetics, right? We can't imagine what Witwin would have been like if he didn't have the tumor. We could imagine what the guy would be like if he didn't get with rabies. But who is the person who has a different genotype? It's very difficult to cast a different self. And so it's very difficult to rescue that self from our condemnation. I'll say some uh something controversial on the on the back of what you just said, which is there may even be I'm speculating here. You're the geneticist. Uh I'm there may even be some deeply hardwired unconscious notion around genes that we know that genes can be inherited that if somebody has a gene which makes them a quote quote unquote bad seed or predisposes them to a really bad behavior and then they engage in it and then they're in jail for the rest of their life or they get shot by the security guard. We hear the words good riddance. M good riddance implies good those genes were now stopped hope you know we don't know if they reproduced before that so there's something which makes the example you gave before especially um eerie of the uh IVF doc that was literally seeding these these eggs with his own genes and then somebody it's like I mean that the implication is not that that person was killing themselves but whoever that physician was I mean not somebody a it's terribly unethical you know, at every level, he's replicating he's replicating his bad genes, right? Whereas if somebody who is has a genetic predisposition to be sociopathic or or really destructive is um eliminated for lack of a better word or taken out of society. I mean sure I can you know orient to the empathy around this person who feels stricken but I think we are I believe we are more hardwired to um to think about you know inheritance and propagation of genes than maybe we are consciously aware of. Yeah. I mean, I growing up, I mean, my dad's uh he's I wouldn't say he's like super old school, but I remember growing up like one of the messages I got was, you know, if you're going to date someone, meet the parents. Like, you can learn a lot by meeting the parents, which on the one hand is really cool. It's like, oh, see how their family is and how they interact. But it has a genetic uh, you know, inheritance implication like if they're kind people, if you know, what are you look are you look looking for pathology? No, you're you might be, but you're mainly looking for good features or what what's there? No one talks about this openly these days. I feel like it's a really hot button issue. But if I asked you for instance, you know, um if the guy in prison had four kids before he went to prison, does that worry you? I feel like those kids statistically would need more like [clears throat] they you know there a lot of this research didn't pan out but as a metaphor I think it's really still useful is the idea of like dandelions and orchids that there are or sunflowers and orchids like I do think there are some children who by virtue of their temperament brain development are pretty resilient across a variety of different environments and And I think there are children who I mean back to dogs just like there are dogs that like you can you can be a lazy dog owner and the dog will be still be fine or you can have a dog where because of their size and because of their temperament and because of their breeding they need a skilled and loving owner and I we can think of that very clearly. So like my dog I I caught him as a rescue and we think he was being they were being bred as fighting dogs in Texas and you know you can be like well you you there's a vicious attack dog. He's being bred as a fighting dog and you found out he's had a litter of puppies. Does that make you feel appalled or like they're bad puppies or you're like no they need really good homes. We have to find really good homes. My friend Whitney Cummings would be on her way. She's constantly adopting. They're like rescuing pitbull after pitbull. Like I think she subscribes to the idea there I don't want to put words in her mouth but they're like no bad dogs just bad owners and there many sweet sweet pitbulls that come from fighting camps. I mean in many ways I feel like as soon as we get out of um how we relate to each other as humans and we think about this we can think about dog behavior more objectively than we can about human behavior. And we can think even if personality and temperament is heritable. And even if the parent did terrible things, the offspring are still not bad puppies. They're puppies that that are higher needs puppies or they're puppies that need a a more skillful care. And that's how I also think about this. I don't know about hardwired to pay attention to heritable traits. I do think we are evolved to matter to each other in a way that we call moral. I think that we are a social species that evolved to cooperate and at every point in our evolutionary history, every cooperative system has some mechanism of enforcement. If you have bacteria, colonies of bacteria, and one bacterium starts to soak up too much of the iron or some mineral in the in the environment that they all need, the others will send out signals to try to hurt that one. And they're like, don't stop doing that. Stop freeloading. Stop taking too much. If we go all the way back to the beginning of our, you know, our evolutionary history, we have cooperation and enforcement of failures. to cooperate. And I think that evolutionary history is a big part of why we feel so intensely when someone harms one another. So Seapolski can make all his arguments that like we're not supposed to feel moral outrage at people. And for me, I'm like that's like telling telling me that everyone should be absent. Like it just I think that that mattering to each other in the way we call moral is as deeply baked into the sauce of what it is to be human as sexuality is. And so of course we get caught in this what philosophers call this rescue blame trap which is they did a horrible thing. We think of humans as having agency. Of course they're to blame for it. They deserve to be punished. Oh, but wait. His genes, his brain, his trauma, his childhood environment. He was also a victim here. Maybe he needs to be rescued from blame. Oh, but but he did it. And like he was so bad. And we I you know, we go back and forth. We go back and forth about ourselves, right? Like if you've ever done something that you really regret, you have probably done this where you're like, "Here's all the reasons and I was trying and these were my good intentions, but oh, I can't believe, you know, and how do we find our way through the rescue blame trap?" And for me, it was thinking about bad luck doesn't negate responsibility. It might not have been my fault, but it's still my responsibility. But holding people accountable doesn't have to mean harsh punishment. That there accountability doesn't mean making someone suffer. And keeping both of those in the same mind is really what made me feel like I could push through this rescue blame trap. I'm letting that sink in. Everything you say uh resonates and I therefore I'm updating my uh hypothesis. Um uh again just a hypothesis that people have an inherent desire to stop the progression of the bad seed. I'm intentionally using this language like we want like if that person is sure stuff happened to them but guess what stuff happened to them because their parents were bad head and guess what they're bad cuz their parents were bad and like those are they're a bad seed at the extremes of course. I'm just I also think because based on your dog example of adopting puppies from um you know fighting parents uh that in that example there is this notion that with the appropriate amount of love and care that we can rescue them but also we can choose whether or not they have puppies. Yeah. So I do think that there is this idea that like if we see children in really horrible circumstances that I think it's a very human hardwired thing that we can rescue the lineage. Yeah. That we can rescue lineage. I mean one thing that's always fascinated me and and um encouraged me is I think yes there's lots of uh you know transgenerational trauma. Whether or not it's purely through genes or through experience is still debated but probably both. Um but that also in a single generation, you know, that the child of a of severe alcoholics who makes the choice not to drink or to quit drinking to then pair with somebody who can have a healthy relationship to alcohol, they're cycle breakers. They're cycle breakers. So you can I think we understand this without understanding genetics. Like we don't have to take a class and understand mandelian genetics, you know, uh to understand that in one generation something can start or stop in a family line. And I think most people are wise to the idea that family lines no longer exist in small tribes. I mean, you see shows like Succession, right? Where it's over like, oh, let's talk about the propagation of of sociopathicish [laughter] narcissistic uh traits. They were not trying to be cycle breakers. No, they were trying to maintain the cycle that had fed them in their in their, you know, niche. I mean, I think the other thing with regards to cycle breakers is also people people tend to think of genetics in terms of how it makes you like your parents. You know, you got your genes from your parents. But the other thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is genes recombine, right? You are not just like your dad or like your mom. you are a random draw of all the potential draws that you could have gotten from their genotypes. And so even within a family with the same parents, you see tons of differences. I have three kids and they are different personalities, definitely different risks for addiction and conduct disorder problems across the three of them. And so I think it's a mistake to think of lineage as genes being an unbroken lineage because our genes are getting recombined in these novel ways with every generation. The writer Andrew Solomon says that we should never use the word reproduce. Reproduce is a something that lulls parents into thinking that they're copying themselves, but that every child is produced. Every child is a new product and it's unpredictable what that product's going to be. Oh, that's interesting. I never thought about that word in that way. Wild. Who said that? Andrew Solomon. He wrote Far from the Tree, which is about children who are very different from their parents in some way. So, deaf children of hearing parents, um, Sants, whose parents were like, we don't know where this chess or music or math came from. And then also interviewed Dylan Klebold's mother. So, Dylan Klebold was one of the Coline shooters. So, normal suburban parents who ended up having a child who was a school shooter. And he talks about this idea of horizontal versus vertical identities. So, you get your vertical identity from your parents, but then you're not you are not your parents. You are not a reproduction of them. They produced you and that there's an identity that's separate from that lineage. Beautiful. He's a great writer. I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. Our Place makes my favorite pots, pans, and other cookware. Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as PASES or forever chemicals are still found in 80% of non-stick pans, as well as utensils, appliances, and countless other kitchen products. As I've discussed before on this podcast, these PASES or forever chemicals like Teflon have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues, and many other health problems. So, it's very important to avoid them. This is why I'm a huge fan of ourplace. Ourplace products are made with the highest quality materials and are all PAS and toxin-free. I particularly love their Titanium Always Pan Pro. It's the first non-stick pan made with zero chemicals and zero coating. 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I like to believe that despite the fact that humans have a, you know, some selfish wiring that we are all inherently good, can be drawn toward goodness, can um in the right conditions and with the right amount of effort can direct ourselves in ways that are really beneficial, learn from mistakes, be benevolent, all that stuff. I I think I believe that. I think most people believe that. We want to believe that. Mhm. If we step a little bit away from the extremes of like severe psychopathology and sociopathy and you know some people are more um mercenary than others. And our society in certain careers tends to favor that. When I was coming up in science, I don't know what it was like in psychology, but there was this cohort of scientists, neuroscientists in New York. They were called the New York neuroscience mafia. One of them, two of them have Nobel prizes. I I'm friendly with these guys. Um, but you'd go to meetings and like they would hold court in a way that was it was all about them. It was all about their displays. They're brilliant. They've they've done brilliant work. Um, but for a lot of people coming up, it was sort of a pressure test. Like, do you think we could make it in this field? Like, we're going to have to either wait till these guys die or, you know, somehow integrate with this scene. Yeah. And they would pick favorites and they would decide who was who they'd go to drinks with and who I mean it was it was very hierarchal. Every scientific field is like this. Yeah. Okay. [laughter] Good. Okay. All right. So, I'm both relieved and dismayed that every field is like that. And um very different than the West Coast version of it because we are a little softer on the West Coast, but on the West Coast there was a more cryptic version of it. Yeah. Southerners are like…

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