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

Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden, PhD, is a psychologist, behavioral geneticist and professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. We discuss how genes interact with your upbringing to shape your level of risk-taking and morality. We also discuss how genes shape propensity for addiction and impulsivity in males versus females. Finally, we discuss how biology impacts societal views of sinning, punishment and forgiveness. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Pre-order Protocols: https://go.hubermanlab.com/protocols Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Lingo: https://hellolingo.com/huberman Our Place: https://fromourplace.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Kathryn Paige Harden (00:03:10) Adolescents, Genes & Life Trajectory; Adolescence Ages (00:06:44) Puberty, Aging & Differences; Epigenome; Cognition (00:14:05) Sponsors: BetterHelp & Lingo (00:16:45) Puberty Onset & Family; Communication & Empathy (00:22:26) 7 Deadly Sins, Substance Use & Conduct Disorders, Genes (00:27:33) Family History; Genes & Brain Development (00:33:05) Personality & Temperament, Motivation, Addiction; Trauma (00:37:59) Knowing Genetic Risk & Outcomes; Understanding Family History (00:46:06) Sponsor: AG1 (00:46:57) Genetic Information & Decision Making; Personal Identity & Uncovering Family (00:52:12) Nature vs Nurture, Bad Genes?; Aggression, Childhood & Males (01:00:17) The Original Sin; Whitman Case & Brain Tumor; Genetic Predisposition (01:10:31) Free Will; Genes & Moral Judgement; Skillful Care for Kids; Social Cooperation (01:21:03) Breaking the Cycle; Genetic Recombination & Differences; Identity (01:25:21) Sponsor: Our Place (01:27:01) Status, Dominance, Science; Positive Attributes of Negative Traits (01:36:15) Relational Aggression & Girls; Male-Female Differences & Conflict (01:40:36) Genes, Boys vs Girls, Impulse Control (01:45:00) Behavior Punishment vs Rewards, Responsibility (01:51:29) Sponsor: Helix Sleep (01:53:03) Accountability; Suffering, Cancel Culture & Punishment (02:00:01) Life Energy & Punishment, Prison (02:08:16) Backward vs Forward-Looking Justice; Forgiveness, Retribution, Power, Choice (02:16:11) Reward, Unfairness & Inequality (02:21:59) Punishment, Reward & Power; Online vs In-Person Communities (02:29:49) Identical Twin Differences; Genetic Influence & Age; Sunlight & Genes (02:39:24) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they see someone suffer if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer. So ordinarily, if you see someone be shocked, you have interior insulin. 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.

• 0:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Catherine 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

• 1:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, et cetera, drive

• 2:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  what choices are available to people and Which ones they tend to make. I've long been a fan of Dr. Catherine 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. Catherine 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.

• 2:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Catherine Paige Harden. Dr. Catherine Paige Harden, welcome.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Hi, thank you for having me.

• 3:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Few things are as interesting to people as the relationship between genes and behavior, or what we call genotype and phenotype, the expression of all the stuff downstream of genes. And few things are as interesting as adolescence and puberty and the home we grew up in and how our genes interact with our choices, et cetera. You work at the intersection of all of those, which is a very brave thing to do. Could you just frame for us why you selected to study the relationship between genes and outcomes, using adolescence as the time point in which you jump off from those questions? Because it could have been from infancy or in old age.

• 3:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why adolescence?

• 4:00Speaker 00

  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 first psychotic episode, that's going to be in late adolescence, early adulthood. So, from a clinical perspective, adolescence is really interesting. And then I'm also was trained as a lifespan developmental psychologist. So, thinking about how does what's happening early in the life reverberate really through

• 4:44Speaker 00

  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 rule breaking, or aggression, or again, risk for alcohol and drug use. So, my research program was really based on, okay, well, what's happening in this period of life where the genes we're born with and the family environments we were raised with?

• 5:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  What ages constitute adolescence?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  I mean, that's changing, I think, right now. 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.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  This may be outside the scope of what you work on, but I've always been struck by the fact that while kids, including myself, generally hit puberty somewhere, as you said, between 10 and 13, or maybe 14. Some seem to go through puberty for a much longer period of time. And I think of puberty as perhaps one of the biggest developmental milestones because the brain changes, hormones change, of course, but perceptually, and how people perceive you, changes completely. And the acquisition of what we know as secondary sex characteristics seems to occur at such different rates. So, I mean, I can be open about this.

• 7:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  I know I hit puberty by, I know, at 14. But then I didn't, you know, I didn't really shave until I was almost graduating college.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I had grown, right? Whereas there were other kids that we went home for the summer.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  And they came back.

• 7:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  And they came back, like, not a grown man, but looking like, this guy's like-

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Looking like a grown man.

• 7:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, and kicking our butts in soccer. And he's just, you know, just in terms of- Everything, right? But then, and I don't want to out this person, but then when I look at us now, it seems that the people that went through puberty more quickly may have aged more quickly in general. Is there any notion of a clock? And the rate of that clock turning can be sort of visualized in puberty and predict longevity? Is there any relationship there?

• 8:15Speaker 00

  We are working on this right now. So we can think about individual differences in puberty in three ways. We can think about pubertal timing. So when does it start? For girls, 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.

• 8:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Early onset of puberty.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  Early onset of puberty.

• 8:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's not looking at the sort of rate of characteristics?

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. For boys, 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? 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.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  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 epigenome changes during this period of time. So the genome is your DNA. It's the DNA sequence in your cells, and that doesn't change with development. But the epigenome is everything on top of the genome that affects how DNA is used by the body, used by the cells. And there's one epigenetic mechanism known as DNA methylation, which is, you know, a methyl group is basically like this chemical tag, and it can get kind of tagged on to the genome. So there's great work in aging

• 10:11Speaker 00

  that shows that the epigenetic clock, measured by DNA methylation, starts ticking.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  In infancy and faster biological aging as measured by the epigenome predicts shorter lifespan, worse health, earlier mortality. What we looked at is, well, instead of training an epigenetic clock on age, can we train it on pubertal development? So how physically mature you are. And what we found is you can. So there's these, the clock is ticking as you get older, but 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 do seem to be

• 11:04Speaker 00

  related to aging more rapidly even in older life. So our reproductive development is, I think, very tied at a cellular molecular level with our lifespan development. And we see that 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.

• 11:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fascinating. I also like the way that answer lands because I had a very protracted puberty.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I feel grateful for that.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  In retrospect, because, you know, in terms of 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. And I looked very different at 30 than I did at 20, like markedly different, without doing anything except existing. Some people seem kind of frozen in their adult look at this earlier age.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  This earlier age.

• 12:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  And in, from the animal literature, and I'm thinking the studies from my colleague Eric Nudson in particular, where he was looking at plasticity in barn owls, but it's been looked at elsewhere, there's this really striking correlation between the onset of puberty and the end of the so-called critical period for neuroplasticity. Of course, plasticity can go on throughout the lifespan, but the plasticity that occurs until and around puberty is, yeah, an order of magnitude greater than the plasticity that's available as, say, a 30-year-old or 40-year-old. So. They've done the experiments of like overreacting animals or taking the testicles out of animals and preventing somewhat preventing puberty and it doesn't seem to

• 12:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  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?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  That's a really interesting question and it's complicated. In part because it's like, well, what part of plasticity you're looking at, what part of brain development are you looking at? And also with humans, we can't, unlike animals, manipulate the onset of puberty in quite the same way. So it does seem like there are some cognitive functions, like if you're thinking about executive function ability, your ability to shift attention or update. The things that are tested by a standard IQ test, those seem to be much more age related, whereas your ability to learn from peers versus your

• 13:46Speaker 00

  parents, your sensitivity to risk and certain types of emotions, that seems to be more tied to 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.

• 14:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing therapy for a very long time and I can tell you that it's a lot like physical workouts. There are days when I want to do it and there are days when I don't want to do it. But when I finish a therapy session, every single time, I come away feeling better and knowing that the time was well spent. And typically, when I finish therapy, I come away with a valuable insight or new perspective on something I'm working through, whether that's with work, with relationships, in my personal life, or simply in my relationship with myself. There's just so much benefit that comes through effective therapy. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist who can help provide the benefits

• 14:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  that come from effective therapy. They have a short questionnaire to help you match to a therapist that's right for you. And while BetterHelp has an industry-leading match rate, if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. Also, because BetterHelp is done entirely online, it's extremely time efficient. There's no driving to a therapist's office, looking for parking, etc. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Lingo. Lingo helps you track your glucose to support better metabolic health, mental clarity, and sustained energy. Glucose directly impacts our brain function, mood, and energy levels, and it may even affect our levels

• 15:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  of tenacity and willpower. This is why I use the Continuous Glucose Monitor from Lingo. I absolutely love it, and I'm thrilled to have them as a sponsor of the podcast. Lingo helps me track my glucose in real time to see how the foods I eat and the actions I take impact my glucose. When glucose in your body spikes or crashes, your cognitive and physical performance do too. In fact, large glucose peaks and valleys lead to brain fog, fatigue, irritability, and hunger. What you eat, of course, plays a major role in your glucose. Some foods cause sharp spikes and big crashes, and others do not. But not everyone is the same in terms of how they respond to particular foods. Seeing your glucose in real time helps you build eating and other habits that support metabolic health, mental clarity, and sustained energy. Lingo has helped me to better understand

• 16:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  what foods to eat, when to eat, and how things like a brief walk after a meal can help keep my glucose stable and much more. If you'd like to try Lingo, Lingo is offering Huberman podcast listeners in the US 10% off a four-week Lingo plan. Terms and conditions apply. 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 expose young, prepubescent mice to older males, they enter puberty earlier. Does that exist in humans as well?

• 16:59Speaker 00

  So this is a controversial area of research. It is true that...

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Girls, human girls, who are raised with a non-biological father, do, on average, tend to go through puberty earlier. And some have hypothesized that it's a similar sort of cue from the environment about the stability and availability of resources. If dad is gone, maybe the provisioning of the environment is going to be less stable. Maybe evolution would favor a reproductive strategy where you go through puberty earlier, rather than this continued... 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.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  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?

• 18:31Speaker 00

  That changes her reproductive life, and then she's more likely to be in this certain family structure and pass on those genes to her daughters? It seems to be a little bit of both, which is kind of the standard answer to all of our questions about nature and nurture, that there's a very strong genetic effect on the timing of puberty for both boys and girls, but that also the environment is pushing it in different directions. And that's part of why we're seeing that the age of puberty keeps going 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.

• 19:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm realizing that you have a very, very difficult job because the languaging is so delicate.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I'm just gonna jump on the bed of nails for you.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, I think the human brain just works this way, right? For understandable reasons, like, oh, you know, these young girls that were supposed to go into puberty at 14, they're now going to puberty at, you know, 10 because the dad was absent.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  They pathologize it.

• 19:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  They pathologize it and they write a script.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then, as you point out, you know, there's things related to the situation as it relates to the mother and her choices and her genes. And it's a real barbed wire mess for the typical person to try and pull apart. You're pulling these things apart beautifully, but it's also fodder for anyone that wants to drive a narrative. That's tough. How do you navigate that? Because I'm gonna ask you about adolescence and genes and sexual promiscuity, right? We're talking about, today we're gonna talk about sin.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  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?

• 20:43Speaker 00

  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-olds? How would I explain this to my undergrads? And with a sense of awe and respect for...

• 21:11Speaker 00

  How amazing a human body and brain is, right? Like, to think about, we as women, as 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 bodies to change in these amazing ways that is puberty." I feel like I keep coming back to,

• 21:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I appreciate you saying that. I didn't ask that to kind of inoculate against anything, but now we can really get into the, get into the tangle.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Now you can let her rip.

• 22:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. I have long thought that the hypothalamus, right, these various clusters of neurons above the roof of our mouth that drive hunger and sex behavior and thirst and aggression and a bunch of other interesting things, is sort of the seat of the seven deadly sins.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  I have heard you say this before.

• 22:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  And of course, all those brain circuits and structures interact with other brain circuits and structures. That's, there's no one location in the brain that governs a behavior entirely, with some rare exceptions. How do you think about the genetic programming of the hypothalamus in terms of people's proclivity for...

• 23:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Addiction, promiscuity, aggression.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Being overly passive in a way that might harm them or other people as well.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  I don't really think that much about the hypothalamus, per se, actually, in relation to those behaviors. So, just stepping back one step, when you made this reference to the seven deadly sins, right? So, if I can 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? What those behaviors all have in common is, I mean, I'm going to accept envy for a second, is doing something that might be pleasurable in the short term,

• 23:57Speaker 00

  to the extent that there's negative consequences. Negative consequences to yourself or negative consequences to other people. I think envy is interesting because you're seeing other people enjoying pleasures and you're like, I want that one, right? So, it's kind of looking at other people, other people's pursuit of things.

• 24:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think of envy as a severe opportunity cost. Because as long as you're envying what someone else has or is doing, then you're missing all the stuff that's happening now that you could build your life on.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great question.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  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 engaging that behavior.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  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 clinical language or diagnoses where the predominant symptoms that you see are people engaging in behaviors that are impulsive, that are 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 ingesting a substance, it feels good,

• 25:47Speaker 00

  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, are there genes that affect the likelihood of developing these disorders? Yes. Are there genetic overlaps between these different things? So do the genes that make it more likely

• 26:31Speaker 00

  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 cross-cutting effects on all of them, what are they? Like, what are those genes? Where are they active in the brain? When are they expressed in development? So that's work that our group has been doing for eight years now, to try to discover what these genes... We have a good idea from twin and adoption studies that there are genetic influences on these things. And now we want to figure out,

• 27:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll update my messaging. And I did couch it as a hypothesis. I never said that there were, you know, that you could lesion one of the sins. There are genes that vary between individuals

• 27:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  that predict addiction, predict impulsivity and other things.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're exploring how the genes that predict addiction might predict impulsivity for other types of behaviors.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think I heard that the answer is yes. Indeed, there's overlap.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I'd be very curious to know what those genes encode for. What are the protein systems and neural circuit systems, hormone systems downstream of those genes?

• 28:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. If we go back one step, just why did we think that there were going to be genes that overlap between this? The biggest set of results that supported this hypothesis were adoption and pedigree studies. So these big data registries, you get them in Sweden, you get them in the Scandinavian 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 be arrested for a violent crime. Even if you were never raised by that parent,

• 28:50Speaker 00

  and it's not just substance use to substance use or violence to violence or, you know, risky sexual behavior to risky sexual behavior. It seems that having a family history of any of these things increases your likelihood of manifesting any one of them. So that's why we thought that there was this genetic commonality across them. So what we found is that there's many, many, many genes that affect all of these behaviors. It's massively what we call polygenic. So it's not just one thing in one part of your genome. It's distributed throughout your genome. And that those genes are most expressed in neurodevelopment in utero, in second and third trimester.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  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 neurodevelopmental that's going on them. And it seems to be affecting the brain's balance of inhibition and excitation. So as your brain is developing while you're in utero, the GABA system, which is inhibitory, and the glutamate system, which is excitatory, sort of being tuned, like in the balance between those two things is is being worked out. If children are born preterm, part of the reason that that affects their psychological

• 30:20Speaker 00

  development negatively is because it affects this balance between inhibition and excitation. So I think we're still very at the beginning of this, understanding the bioannotation of it, the biological mechanisms of it. But what it suggests to us is that, you know, sometimes you hear like ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder. I think that substance use disorders are every bit as a neurodevelopmental disorder as ADHD. I think conduct disorder, which is characterized by impulsive aggression, is every bit a neurodevelopmental disorder as ADHD. 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

• 31:05Speaker 00

  inhibition and excitation.

• 31:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fascinating. I mean, I have to be careful not to go down this rabbit hole. But I started off as a developmental neurobiologist.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, fetal brain wiring is.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  We've never really talked about it on this podcast, but it's we've talked about the effect of fetal exposure to hormones.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the brain in particular, in terms of sexual differentiation. But yeah, there's a ton going on in there.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  At these stages. And when I hear you talk broadly about, you know, the balance between excitation and inhibition and some disruption in that or some alteration in that, setting up a probability of the expression of some behavioral disorder or choice. Set of choices. It makes me wonder, you know, about brain function more broadly is, you know, does that somehow make these choices to use a given substance or to do an impulsive behavior? Is it? We have to be careful not to project, but is it an attempt to restore some sort of order to that balance? Or is it an expression of an imbalance system?

• 32:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's just a seesaw that doesn't tilt all the way to one side or the other?

• 32:18Speaker 00

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

• 32:58Speaker 00

  I don't think we know the specifics of those links to the extent that they exist, yeah?

• 33:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  My colleague Anna Lemke, who wrote "Topo Meme Nation," she once said that many addicts, behavioral addictions, I guess they call them process addictions or chemical addictions, that they have this feeling that unless they're experiencing something really intense, like, life isn't really happening. They crave this intensity of experience. They want peak experience.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Either to numb themselves, I mean, it could be a trough experience in the case of sedatives, but that stuck with me. Impplied in that is that not everyone is seeking these kind of extreme states. And so layered on what you just described in terms of excitation-inhibition balance, I kind of wonder if people who struggle with addiction are, they're craving getting out of too much inhibition or too much excitation, but this is probably an overly simplistic hypothesis.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  So, just thinking about that sensation-seeking thing, that driving for intensity, usually when we think of people who are chronically engaging in some behavior 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.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  We can typically think of three dimensions of sort of personality and temperament that are often at play. And one of them is this sensation-seeking drive for intensity. So, "I want it, I want it, and I want a lot of it." And then one is this disinhibition, failure of self-control. "I can't stop myself." And then another, which I think is less well-studied, is what people call antagonism or callousness, which is, "I know this has negative consequences for other people, but I don't really care. Like, that doesn't bother me."

• 35:00Speaker 00

  And I think what you see is that the combination of factors that goes into any one person's behavior can really vary. So for some people, it's like, "This feels great, this feels good, I want the high, I want it to be intense. I'm not disinhibited, I'm deliberately seeking out this behavior." You know, "I plan the drugs that I'm gonna use for the club the whole week, and I plan my week afterwards." 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."

• 35:41Speaker 00

  But these negative consequences that people keep harping on, you know, the fact that my partner doesn't like this, or the police don't like this, like, "Oh, you know, I'm indifferent." And so, all of that to say, I think we need to be aware of the complexity and the heterogeneity of different people's motivations when they're doing these behaviors.

• 36:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, and these days, we hear a lot about the role of trauma in addiction. I mean, I can't do a single post or podcast about addiction and the biology and... And not hear, well, it's trauma related. But of course, genes come from our parents. And we'll talk about that, heritability. And so generational trauma, or just childhood trauma, doesn't even have to be transgenerational. It can get layered in there in a complicated way.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 one cliche that seems to, you know, stand the test of time.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  There's the threads that go this way and this way. And I think that's how I think about the relationship between genes and trauma, early experience, is that really they both are woven together to build the brain and the body and the personality that then struggles with these behaviors later on in their life.

• 37:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  So if we were to have access to our genomes heading into adolescence, or to our kids' genomes, and we know, based on your work and the work of others, presumably that some of the genes that predispose to impulsive behavior, addictive behavior, promiscuity, et cetera, that would be useful information, I would think, right? Then one could... Think carefully about friend choices, situational choices. Install buffers, you know, it sounds so mechanical. But, you know, I have people around who can help buffer against this, these genetic predispositions, which no doubt, as you just said, weave into situational predispositions. Why don't people want that information? Or do they want that information?

• 38:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because I remember in the eighties, hearing, oh, you know, soon we're gonna have genomes. And you can know if you're gonna get Huntington's.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  This, you know, very destructive degenerative disorder. And then people said, well, I wouldn't wanna know. I mean, I think many people would also want to know. And especially parents, you know, if they can just get past their guilt that it has something to do with them. I think they'd want to help their kids avoid these predispositions, given that most of what we're talking about are maladaptive predispositions.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  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 23andMe or some sort of direct-to-consumer genetics company, you might have gotten like, this is your genetic risk for Crohn's disease, or this is your genetic risk for Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. And now there are more companies that are expanding into that genetic information around many gene indices, we call them polygenic indices or polygenic scores, that are correlated with someone's risk for developing an alcohol use disorder, say.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  I think there's a couple of 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 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 point four, point five. You can know that if you're trying to think about, okay, well, which cities are colder on average than others?

• 40:30Speaker 00

  That's not going to tell you, do you need to pack a sweater if you're going to Montreal next Tuesday, right? Like, that's a specific weather incident. Polygenic scores right now are like, I can tell you that, you know, in general, like, these people have a higher risk 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. 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

• 41:15Speaker 00

  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 a risk of 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's a great study after the wall came down in Berlin that was conducted on whether or not people want to know the contents of their Stasi files. Like, who was reporting on them?

• 41:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 42:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is what other people were saying about them.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 42:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Don't read the comments.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Deliberate ignorance. Don't read the comments is also a form of deliberate ignorance.

• 42:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is like an avid debate between podcasters. You know, Rogan is the mister, don't, don't read the comments. Lex Friedman, I go back and forth on this.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  On, on regarding the comments.

• 42:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, yeah, it can be useful.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 43:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  This isn't a pushback, but I feel like most people, even if they don't understand genes inheritability, understand that they got their genes from their parents.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 gotta be really careful because obviously this runs in my family."

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then someone say, "Well, your mom doesn't have an issue with alcohol. She could have a couple of drinks, no big deal. So you're protected." And we don't know how gene dosing protects us or makes us vulnerable. No one knows, but we all do this.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Yes, I think we do.

• 43:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, we'll get into discussions about genes inheritability, but you know, like, the topic of eugenics and genetic selection, even within embryos, is super dicey nowadays. Everyone's, you know, like, you know, it's so scary to even have the discussion. But then I've always said, I mean, people do a kind of genetic selection. They pick sperm donors and they pick partners.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 44:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oftentimes based on a combination of traits, which are clearly involved genes. You know, so people are doing a genetic selection and 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 an issue with alcohol or both of them have an issue with alcohol, I have to be very careful with alcohol."

• 44:36Speaker 00

  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. 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 prospective mates, in our

• 45:20Speaker 00

  children. And most of the research can also act as if you would be returning genetic information about a child or about a person to that person, and it's the only thing that they know. And that's not true. So I think that we really are at a place where we need more meta-science, science about the science, in what is the most responsible way to give people access to their genetic information in a way that permits them to make the best choices. But we're not going to be able to do that if we're pretending 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.

• 46:05Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 46:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, and they, not everyone grows up thinking they could be an amazing athlete if they chose that path.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  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 making when we have more variables at hand? That's a very scientific way to think about genetic information, whereas I think for many people in the broader public, 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, my heart rate variability doesn't have about it. Often, I think that people can fall into these really essentialist stories about genetics,

• 48:34Speaker 00

  that it's telling them something about their, like, their deepest or truest selves. And that's when the delivery of genetic information, without correcting their perception of what genes are really telling us, can start to be dangerous. I mean, I think about 23andMe, their tagline for many years was, "Welcome to you." Spitting this too, 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.

• 49:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  I never did 23andMe, but they were just right up the road, but somehow never did it. But I did hear that one of the surprising results of 23andMe and companies like it was that a not insignificant number of people discovered they have relatives that they didn't know they had.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Yes, or that their father isn't the father that they thought they had.

• 49:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which is a pretty major psychological frame shift.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I gave a talk at a college, a small college, and it was a writing class. And they had to write about a book, and they chose my book to write about, which is great. It's like, you know, freshmen, and they all have to actually write something, and they chose a book that was deliberately, you know, a little bit controversial to give them something to push off on. And I asked him, I said, why, how, you know, you're a writing professor, how did you find my book? And he said, well, I did 23andMe, 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,

• 50:25Speaker 00

  because this guy had been doing it in his practice for years. He's now, the doctor is now deceased, and I just was like, that's so much more interesting than I'm going to talk about, like, anything I'm going to talk about with these freshmen, this story and that. And I think that speaks to, 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 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 fam, his family story and his identity in the light of that information.

• 51:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's so interesting because I've heard of people learning something unfortunate, bad, about their grandparent or parent that they weren't aware of, and then internalizing that somehow they are bad. Especially young kids can internalize that message.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is a message to all people who may end up divorced. Don't badmouth the other parent because you're essentially telling your kids that they come from bad, there's badness in them.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, and we all think that this is about people's behavior. But my understanding of, I've spent a little bit of time with this literature, just how people interpret information and how kids interpret information is that they're like, oh, 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 other movies, you know, like our genetic origins and how those played out in previous generations can frighten people about themselves.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Yes. So to go back to your earlier question about how do we talk about 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 us something essential about ourselves and that it might turn out that that essential thing is a bad thing.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  I write in my new book about this letter that I got from

• 53:00Speaker 00

  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 sexually violent crime 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 at 15, and he's been in prison ever since then. And he read about my lab, my, you know, our behavioral genetics lab at Texas, in 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.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Like, let me tell you about myself. I've been in prison my whole adult life, even before then. What do you think makes a child go bad? Nature or nurture?" And that question haunted me because I could give him a technical answer, which 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." But I think when he's writing me, he's not just asking for a science lesson, right? He's someone who's done something horrible, and he's saying, "I feel like I'm inherently a horrible person, and that might be because of my genetics.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Do my genetics make me bad?" And I think that's a story about genetics, which has no scientific basis, but really pops up in a lot of places in our culture. 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.

• 55:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  The bad seed.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 55:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  I have so many questions, but I think the first one I want to ask is a developmental one.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:33Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Yes. And that's one of the biggest predictors of what people have called a life-course persistent pattern of antisocial offending, which is onset before the age of 10, antisocial behavior that's not just destruction of property, but also aggression against other children. And when we're thinking about aggression, oftentimes we discriminate between aggression when provoked versus proactive, kind of cold aggression. So the worst prognosis we would anticipate would be a male child who begins to aggress against other children or against

• 56:44Speaker 00

  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-regulated behavior into adulthood. So of those kids who have conduct disorder, especially before the age of 10 with these callous emotional features, we would expect that 50 to 75% of them will have a substance use disorder in adulthood. A non-trivial percentage will have meet criteria for antisocial personality or another personality disorder in adulthood. And so, again, I think we're looking at a subset of children where There's clearly a heavy genetic component.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  There's clearly a heavy nurture component. It's very neurodevelopmental 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 neurodevelopmental liabilities and we really need to figure out how to help them. You know, what are the treatments we can offer them? And when people see something as a moral failing, they're less likely to see it as a biomedical problem, that we can, you know, throw the weight of science behind.

• 58:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  What percentage of these kids younger than 10 that show this antisocial behavior are male versus female?

• 58:19Speaker 00

  The sex ratio varies, but sometimes it's two to one, sometimes it's as high as four to one.

• 58:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that can't be explained by post-uterine testosterone because they haven't hit puberty yet.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it either is an early organizing effect in utero, or there's something on the Y chromosome.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  That creates a susceptibility.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  And we really don't know. Actually, one of my former post-docs is working on this now, the analysis of the X chromosome. Because most genetic studies just focus on the autosome, so just focus on the, you know, the non-sex chromosomes. The other thing is, we also see this in animals, that male guinea pigs are much more vulnerable to the effects of preterm birth than female guinea pigs. Again, preterm birth disrupts that same kind of gabataglutamate excitatory inhibitory balance that we're also seeing popping up in the genetic research. Also, I've just, I 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

• 59:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are the guinea pigs sociopathic?

• 59:35Speaker 00

  Guinea pigs, I mean, all of these things you can, you've used to work with non-human animal models.

• 59:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 variety reasons.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  That's how I ended up in a clinical psych program.

• 59:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, where it's necessary. I also think there's an excess, in particular, and I'll lose some friends with this, but in particular, with some of the larger primate work, one really needs to justify. And there are instances where there's good justification, but yeah, I've worked with a lot of different animals. But I was about to say, I know we both are dog lovers, there's this saying, there are no bad dogs, just bad owners. But we don't say that about humans. We don't say, oh, you know, they're no bad people. Everyone is a good person. They're just bad parents.

• 1:00:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  At some point, usually 18, we say, you're responsible for your actions, regardless of what happened to you, regardless of the genes you came into this world with. And things shift, where people understandably are responsible for their behavior in a different way. It sounds like in Texas, it can come in earlier, depending on the crime. But I assume all dogs are good dogs, that they're trustworthy, that they would never harm you or another dog, maybe an animal, because I've seen what happens when certain dogs get a hold of certain animals. But I don't think we make the same assumption about people.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  I don't think we do either. I titled my new book, Original Sin, to really spotlight this exact thing. You know, before I was a scientist, the first 20 years of my life, I was an evangelical Christian. So I was raised in a very fundamentalist household, Southern, praise God and pass the ammunition in lots of ways. And And in my, in my brand of Christianity that I was raised in, which was Protestant, Reformed, Calvinist, I really was raised with this idea of original sin, which is that humans are born bad,

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  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 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 they're, 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.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  So you can be raised with a religious tradition 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, 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 shit.

• 1:03:21Speaker 00

  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 their childhood experiences.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  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 are responsible for ourselves and responsible to each other, while also keeping in mind the fact that no one created themselves from scratch. By the time he was an adult, he was already in prison for the things that had happened to him while he was still technically a child. I wrote this book, my new book, because I was really attempting to wrestle through that question.

• 1:04:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think I'm getting this story right. It's a true story that was told by our former director of neuroscience is at Stanford, Bill Newsom, about the guy who went up in the tower at UT Austin and shot a bunch of people.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  The tower shooter.

• 1:04:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  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. 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...

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  It was amygdala.

• 1:05:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  It was actually in the amygdala. So you know the story clearly.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's where you work.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:05:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 were just going up into Vegas hotel window and hosing people with bullets. 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, 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." And I mean, it's like the cartoon or movie with the angel and the devil on the shoulder or in each ear. What are we to make of that?

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, gosh, the Whitman case is so, it's so interesting because he did say that he, there was something wrong with him. He did ask for help. When, after he died, the state of Texas ordered an autopsy and they found that they had this tumor. And the whole thing was basically labeled like, almost like a natural disaster had occurred. So the, the report talks about like the catastrophe or the, you know, the, this incident that happened. So the, they ultimately, when, when trying to make sense of Whitman's shooting people

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  from the tower at Texas, took what 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're viewing him as kind of a machine that's gone haywire, right? He got a tumor in his amygdala and he wouldn't have done it if he hadn't had this tumor. How would they have made sense of his behavior if he hadn't asked for a brain autopsy? If they didn't know about this tumor?

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  How many other people have something going on with them in a specific location that, if we knew about it, might help us understand how this behavior came across? I, I write in my book, the 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.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  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 mutated version or the non-mutated version? I mean, I find this study fascinating on so many levels, right?

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  That the single letter change in your DNA could have this massive effect on your behavior. But also that all of these men were in the criminal justice system and had not been obviously flagged as something organic or biological or mental illness going on with them. And later, there was another group that found this, you know, ostensibly rare mutation in several other impulsively aggressive boys that had been referred to their hospital. And they ended their scientific paper on what I find one of the most haunting notes in the scientific literature, which is, is this actually rare?

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  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 a genetic or neurobiological, from an organic way? Which I think that's a really, really chilling thought. So how do we, you know, in the absence, I think the question that you're asking is an important one, which is in the absence of some smoking gun, you know, the mutated gene, the amygdala tumor, how do we put together our knowledge as scientists, as people who read the science, that Yes, it's genes. Yes, it's environment. Yes, it goes into the behavior.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  And also, we're humans. We have this outrage and this, naturally, this blame towards people that harm each other. How do we, as humans, hold both of those truths at the same time? I think that's the real challenge.

• 1:10:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think once somebody is harmed, our empathy shifts to the victim.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or victims.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  In a way that occludes our, maybe even at times, depending how close we are to the victims, or how much we identify with it, that occludes our even care.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like, OK, this guy went up on this, I'm describing it historically, this guy went up on this tower, killed two, the 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 was, you know, freshman year or whatever, you know, she's dead now.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  She's gone.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:11:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 will say that. I'm not necessarily, you know, I guess in some sense, if I just stand back and my reflexive response is like, this guy killed a lot of people. I understand he was driven to it. He was stricken with something. And I, the, but it's hard for me to get to, OK, well, there's a genetic thing that set him up from a glioma in the amygdala of all places, like, he, bad luck. But because we assume that people can intervene in their own behavior. This gets down to kind of free will type.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:11:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Stuff that my colleague, Robert Sapolsky.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, he'll argue, to the end of time, that there's no free will, which is a frustrating one for many of us, but, you know, he's a hell of a smart guy. You know, I think that the issue... For many people is that genes are fairly far upstream from behavior.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, if I said, okay, there's this guy down in, 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 three days later, you know, he randomly committed this crime, he killed somebody. You'd say, well, he had rabies, he was rabid. Like, we can make the connection very easily, but that's a, you know, a neural virus that hits the amygdala, among other things, and causes people to get very aggressive. We'd go, okay, you know?

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  Well, you can imagine him without the rabies. So there's, there's, you, 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?

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  We can't imagine, we can imagine what Whitman would have been like if he didn't have the tumor. We could have imagined 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.

• 1:13:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll say some, 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, 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." Good riddance implies, good, those genes were now stopped.

• 1:14:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, we don't know if they reproduced before that. So there's something, which makes the example you gave before, especially.

• 1:14:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Eerie of the IVF doc that was literally seeding these eggs with his own genes. And then somebody is like, I mean, the implication is not that that person was killing themselves, but whoever that physician was, I mean, not somebody, A, it's terribly unethical at every level.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  And then he's replicating.

• 1:14:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  He's replicating his bad genes, whereas if somebody who has a genetic predisposition to be sociopathic or really destructive is eliminated, for lack of a better word, or taken out of society, I mean, sure, I can orient to the empathy around this person who feels stricken, but I think we are, I believe we are more hardwired to think about inheritance and propagation of genes than maybe we are consciously aware of.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, growing up, I mean, my dad'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 gonna 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 inheritance implication, like, if they're kind people, if, you know, what do you look, are you looking for pathology? No, you might be, but you're mainly looking for good features or 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,

• 1:15:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  you know, if the guy in prison had four kids before he went to prison, does that worry you?

• 1:16:09Speaker 00

  I feel like those kids statistically would need more, like, you know, they're...

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  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 then, 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 we can think of that very

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  clearly. So like, my dog, 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, wow, 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.

• 1:17:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  My friend Whitney Cummings would be on her way. She's constantly adopting, they're like rescuing pit bull after pit bull. 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 are many sweet, sweet, sweet pit bulls that come from fighting camps.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  I mean, in many ways, I feel like, as soon as we get out of 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 terrible, and even if the parent did terrible things, the offspring are still not bad puppies. They're puppies that are higher needs puppies, or they're puppies that need a more skillful care. And that's how I also think about this. I don't know about hardwired to pay attention to charitable traits. I do think we are evolved to matter to each other in a way that we

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  call moral. I think that we are a social species that evolved to cooperate. And at every point in our evolutionary history,

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  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 environment that they all need, the others will send out signals to try to hurt that one. And they're like, "Stop doing that. Stop freeload and stop taking too much." If we go all the way back to the beginning of 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.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  So, Sapolsky can make all his arguments that we're not supposed to feel moral outrage at people. And for me, I'm like, that's telling me that everyone should be abstinent. It's just, I think that mattering to each other in the way we call moral is 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

• 1:20:06Speaker 00

  also a victim here. Maybe he needs to be rescued from blame. Oh, but he did it. He was so bad." And we go back and forth about ourselves. If you've ever done something that you really regret, you have probably done this, where you're like, "Here's all the reasons that I was trying, and these were my good intentions, but, oh, I can't believe..." 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.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  But holding people accountable doesn't have to mean harsh punishment. That 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.

• 1:21:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm letting that sink in. Everything you say resonates, and I therefore am updating my hypothesis. Again, just a hypothesis that people have an inherent desire to stop the progression of the bad seed. I'm intentionally using this language. Like, we want to, like, if that person is, sure, stuff happened to them, but guess what? Stuff happened to them because their parents were bad. And guess what? They're bad because their parents were bad. And like, those are, they're a bad seed. At the extremes, of course. I'm just, I also think, because based on your dog example of adopting puppies from, you know, fighting parents, that in that example, there is this notion that with the

• 1:21:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  appropriate amount of love and care, that we can rescue them. But also, we can choose whether or not they have puppies.

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:56Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  They're cycle breakers.

• 1:22:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're cycle breakers. So you can, I think we understand this without understanding genetics.

• 1:22:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like, we don't have to take a class and understand Mendelian genetics, you know, to understand that in one generation, something can start or stop in a family line.

• 1:22:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 sociopathic-ish narcissistic traits.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  They were not trying to be cycle breakers.

• 1:23:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, they were trying to maintain the cycle that had fed them in their, in their, you know, niche.

• 1:23:17Speaker 00

  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 risk 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,

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  because our genes are getting recombined in these novel ways with every generation. That writer Andrew Solomon says that we should never use the word reproduce. Reproduce is something that lulls parents into thinking that they're copying themselves, but that every child is produced. Every child is a new product and it's unpredictable what that product's gonna be.

• 1:24:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, that's interesting. I never thought about that word in that way.

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wild. Who said that?

• 1:24:31Speaker 00

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

• 1:25:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Beautiful.

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  He's a great writer.

• 1:25:21Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 1:26:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  With a 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns, you can try Our Place with zero risk, and you can see why more than 1 million people have made the switch to Our Place kitchenware. I like to believe that despite the fact that humans have some selfish wiring, that we are all inherently good, can be drawn toward goodness, can...

• 1:27:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the right conditions and with the right amount of effort can direct ourselves in ways that are really beneficial. Learn from mistakes, be benevolent, all that. So I think I believe that. I think most people believe that. We want to believe that. If we step a little bit away from the extremes of like severe psychopathology and sociopathy and, you know, some people are more mercenary than others. And our society in certain careers tends to favor that. When I was coming up in science, I don't know what it was like in psychology, but there was this cohort of scientists, neuroscientists in New York. They were called the New York Neuroscience Mafia. One of them, two of them have Nobel Prizes. I'm friendly with these guys.

• 1:27:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 done brilliant work. But for a lot of people coming up, it was sort of a pressure test. Like, do you think we could make it in this field? Like, we're gonna have to either wait till these guys die or, you know, somehow integrate with this scene.

• 1:28:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  And they would pick favorites and they would decide who was, who they'd go to drinks with and who, I mean, it was very hierarchical.

• 1:28:26Speaker 00

  Every scientific field is like this.

• 1:28:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, okay, good, okay. All right. So I'm both relieved and dismayed that every field is like that. And very different than the West Coast version of it, because we are a little softer on the West Coast, but on the West Coast, there was a more cryptic version of it.

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Southerners are like that, too.

• 1:28:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:28:42Speaker 00

  It's not that they aren't mercenary, it's that they hide it. Right? Under, under a blanket of softness.

• 1:28:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is the Midwest the only place where people are truly decent?

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  Have you ever seen that thing where it's like, it divides the country into quadrants and it's like, acts mean is mean, like, acts nice is mean, that's the South. And then I think it's the Pacific Northwest is acts nice is nice. But I don't know about the Midwest, but.

• 1:29:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  What was California?

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  I don't remember.

• 1:29:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, probably acts nice is mean, is that the sort of?

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  Probably.

• 1:29:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  It could be, could be. I mean, here we're focusing on, on the dark, but there's good people in every field. But, but I remember thinking, you know, like going to a meeting meant you had, you had to, you couldn't get, you couldn't let your guard down.

• 1:29:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:29:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  And, and I now know, because I'm, you know. I'm adjacent to it now because I'm not, I don't depend on them for grant reviews. I don't need anything from those guys anymore. I remember the moment where they sort of invited me in was based, where one kind of took a little jab at me and I jabbed right back, but I hit him harder. Why would it be that like you get invited into a group with special resources by virtue of being kind of a jerk?

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like, I'm gonna be a jerk to you and if you can be a jerk back, like, we can be jerks together.

• 1:29:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a status dominant.

• 1:30:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  It really sucks.

• 1:30:02Speaker 00

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

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  And you bit back. So you were like, no, I'm higher in the hierarchy than you think that I am.

• 1:30:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm a big pack of guys, like, I never was the aggressor. But like, if you don't bite back...

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, when somebody kind of with more power than you pokes on you, you...

• 1:31:02Speaker 00

  But you were saying, I'm not acting like you have more power than me. I'm acting like I can poke back, right?

• 1:31:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it doesn't feel good, right? We would all like to believe that we can ascend in our fields, settle into our place without having to, like, do that.

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  Throw elbows.

• 1:31:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, because, anyway.

• 1:31:21Speaker 00

  So I think one thing that you, the story gets at too, is, you know, we talk about impulsivity and desire for intensity and disagreeableness, like, I don't actually care who's, who I'm hurting in this, as unambiguously bad things.

• 1:31:40Speaker 00

  But a little bit of those is actually can be very adaptive in some circumstances. Like, you don't want your surgeon to be like, "Oh, am I hurting them by cutting them open?" Like, you want someone who's a little bit callous to your physical pain because they're focusing on you as a body and doing this. If you look at studies of who is a successful entrepreneur by the age of 30, they are white men, so social advantage, high IQ, as measured by a standardized test, history of a little bit of adolescent delinquency, right? And that makes sense if you're thinking about adolescent delinquency was a manifestation

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  of risk tolerance, of sensation-seeking. And who are the people who are not going to be real great at having a boss, but able to tolerate the risk of starting a business, right? Like, academia is full of, full of people like that, that are like, "I want to think about what I want to think about, and I don't want anyone telling me what to do, and I don't really care if other people think this is useful, and I'm really, I'm willing to be really competitive to get resources."

• 1:32:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'll use taxpayer dollars, thank you, to do it with.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. So I have this thought experiment in my book where I, I think, again, thought experiment, I'm not recommending this, where I think, what if we did have the means to select every, every baby that was born? Every, every reproducing couple is going to do IVF, they're going to create as many embryos as they can, and we're going to select the ones that have the lowest antisocial behavior of substance use genes. And we have a generation that is the most puritanical, risk intolerant, non-sensation-seeking, controlled, not disinhibited, you know, very inhibited. Is that a good thing?

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  Like, is that a world that we would want?

• 1:33:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  You don't want my opinion on this.

• 1:33:43Speaker 00

  To live in? I do, I would, I could, I would love to hear your opinion of this. I mean, I-

• 1:33:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, I don't want sociopathy. I mean, the really dark examples are so salient. We have to be careful not to end up there, but I watched that-

• 1:33:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I didn't watch the Dahmer thing on Netflix. I would pay money to not see that.

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  No, no, I don't have the time for that.

• 1:34:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  I did watch the Richard Ramirez Night Stalker story a few years before that was on Netflix. And it was done exceedingly well at the level of it scares the shit out of you. And he was a true, like, he was a true sociopath by all measures, you know? But then, when you hear the history of his childhood, you know, and just horrible treatment of being, I think, if I think I have this right, like, being tied to a gravestone in a cemetery overnight as a young kid, like, three or five, and just left there, like his father did. I mean, just horrible things. But again, it doesn't change, what I see is the guy with the pentagram written on his hand in the court, like, the mental imagery, right?

• 1:34:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, taking away guys like that, people like that, I think you go, okay, yeah, I mean, he was a sadistic killer at every level. But then, a bunch of just pure passivity everywhere, I don't know. I mean, I guess it depends on how far it goes, because in the earlier example, when we were talking about this academic interaction, I, my friend Jaco Willink, former Navy SEAL, he's very active in, and now talking about kids' health and education, and his, he's doing a lot there. And he reposted something recently that I had a good chuckle at. It was certainly true for me, which was that it said, 90% of being a dude

• 1:35:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  is making fun of your friends to their face and cheering them on behind their backs. And I think every guy that had a lot of guy friends, or has a lot of guy friends growing up, or even just a couple of good ones, knows that that's true. And the inverse of that are the people you're trying to select out.

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? You don't want somebody who's nice to your face, and then behind your back is trying to backstab, right? Or be kind and then backstab. But, yeah, a lot of being a dude is, like, making fun of each other, but then rooting each other on at the same time. That's kind of how we grow up. So, I wouldn't want a society where people wouldn't make fun of me, and I couldn't make fun of them. But the encouragement part is also really important.

• 1:36:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I don't know what it is for girls, I mean, I have a sister, and... I mean, she's a very, very, very kind person. And I was always shocked the way that girls treated one another. So they can be really mean.

• 1:36:29Speaker 00

  Girls can be very mean.

• 1:36:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  They can be really mean.

• 1:36:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, relational aggression, there's, there's literature on this. You know, when we talk about aggression, we so often think in terms of physical aggression. You know, I'm, I'm punching you, I'm stabbing you, I'm hurting you. You know, relational aggression where you're destroying someone's reputation or social standing or making them feel isolated is just as painful as physical aggression, if not more so. I mean, there's few things that humans are more attuned to than that feeling of, oh, am I being pushed out of the group? Right? Because that means, like ancestrally, that means death. And so what we see research is that the same genes that predict physical aggression in boys predict relational aggression in girls. And relational aggression can be every bit as damaging,

• 1:37:17Speaker 00

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

• 1:38:01Speaker 00

  than your average teenage boy is by the time they reach adolescence. And I was just completely thrown and fascinated by this experience.

• 1:38:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, boys sorted out in such primitive ways. I mean, I can remember Dirtclaw Wars where somebody broke the fundamental rule, which is you can't throw rocks. They threw a rock, then someone gets upset, then they get into a scrap. And then sometimes somebody went home and then, but the longest it lasted in terms of a fracture in the group or the relationship was like a day, maximum. And then we just kind of forget about it.

• 1:38:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. And it was kind of understood that someone was going to push the boundaries.

• 1:38:41Speaker 00

  I'm not completely confident that I'm remembering the study correctly. So if you're on, you know, if your listeners are like, no, Paige, you got this wrong. But I remember hearing about a study that was about marital conflict, where they had married partners keep diaries of their interactions. And then also, I think maybe like spit into a tube every morning and evening. And they looked at how long did men's cortisol remain elevated after an argument compared to the wives' cortisol? I was basically like, they had the fight has spiked up and then it went down, like classic Trier curve of, and hers was elevated for like 24 hours afterwards.

• 1:39:26Speaker 00

  And there, if you think about what that means for their psychological sense of what's happening in their relationship, she's like, I'm still amped about this. And he's like, what are you talking about? Like, we had that fight and then my cortisol, like, we're over it, right? So I do think there's some interesting sex differences in the relationship between our physiological arousal and our conflict styles and just the timeline that that plays out.

• 1:39:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fascinating. Yeah, so many ideas.

• 1:39:56Speaker 00

  You're thinking of all the examples.

• 1:39:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I'm thinking of some examples and yeah, and of course, what the evolutionary benefit is of those different cycles. I mean, there's certain interactions you don't want to forget. It can be damaging to self to forget fights so quickly.

• 1:40:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, I can say I've had interactions where at the moment it felt so like vital. And then a day later, it's like, I'm like, how is it that I'm like, this might not be good that I'm not still thinking about this. But life is carrying on, the conveyor belt's still moving.

• 1:40:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think it's only fair that I ask about, you know, we talked about pathology as expressed in boys, and it always seems to come out as aggressive violence, et cetera. In girls, you're saying that the social dynamics can be benevolent, right? Because you did say conflict and repair.

• 1:40:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  That sounds healthy.

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  But in terms of genes that predispose for addiction, do those show up differently in girls? Is it, you know, I think the assumption that some people have is like, oh, it's always going to be promiscuity. But nowadays, especially because of access to prescription drugs, and I was told this by a former guest, Heath Humphries, you know, if you look at addiction, men and women, it tended to lean more towards men than women until you get to prescription drugs, because there's something, I don't know, less seedy?

• 1:41:29Speaker 00

  The social opportunity is different.

• 1:41:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, what we see in the twin studies and the adaption studies, and then also in the newer studies where we're looking directly at people's DNA, is that the manifestations of at least the genes we've discovered so far are remarkably consistent between men and women. So if you have, you know, a genetic liability towards disinhibition, problems with self-regulation, that can manifest as alcohol use, that can manifest as aggression and antisocial behavior. But there aren't really strongly sex-typed manifestations, where it always looks like this in women and always looks like this in men. You know, we haven't discovered all the genes, and we haven't looked at the sex chromosomes

• 1:42:17Speaker 00

  yet, so there might be something different. But the theory so far that seems to have the best evidence is that the underlying etiology is remarkably consistent across men and women, and it's just really the mean that differs between men and women. So you just get higher rates of all of these behaviors in men, but the underlying disposition is really similar across the sexes.

• 1:42:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  So if we were to say sensation seeking, novelty seeking, equally distributed.

• 1:42:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  But men act out more.

• 1:42:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. So what you see is that men show slightly higher sensation seeking. But the genes that predispose a man towards sensation seeking seem to be similar in women. If a woman has a fraternal twin who's a boy, his sensation seeking will protect hers just as well as if she had a twin sister. So similar genes, just a mean shift. What you see is that actually in adolescence, boys and girls have very similar trajectories of sensation seeking. Where they differ is in the evolution of their inhibitory control. So girls mature in terms of their impulse control faster than boys do. We did a study, maybe 10 years ago now.

• 1:43:33Speaker 00

  It was basically, it took until men around the age of 24, until around the age of 24, to be as controlled as your average 15-year-old girl was. There's like a decade-long gap in the maturation of impulse control. You're nodding and I used to be a 15-year-old boy.

• 1:43:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, yeah, that tracks. I think the point is that men develop more slowly.

• 1:43:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  But presumably they catch up, but then they die earlier, so.

• 1:44:01Speaker 00

  Well, they go through puberty later and they have a more extended, you know, increase up to having adult levels of reproductive hormones. I mean, men's testosterone is increasing. Puberty is over, but their testosterone is still going up through their teen years and into their 20s. And they die earlier, but they, women have that long, you know, they're alive, but they're not healthy, you know, on average at the end of their life. Like their health, the difference in health span is less than lifespan, as you know. So there's, there's something interesting about the ways in which men seem to be slower developing in uterus.

• 1:44:44Speaker 00

  They're, they're getting to reproductive maturity later and they're getting to adult levels of personality later.

• 1:44:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  We need more patience. Women are all thinking, we've given you enough patience, you know. We require more patience. That's, that's the right phrasing. Let's talk about punishment.

• 1:45:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  But maybe also talk about rewarding good behavior. A while back, I think it was Zimbardo at Stanford was talking about, you know, that we're everyday heroes, you know, or that we were supposed to start orienting towards, you know, rewarding the everyday heroes of life. This was kind of a thing in the early 2000s, as I recall. And there's the positive psychology notion. And I feel like psychology is kind of split into dark and light. The people who like to look at the dark stuff versus the light.

• 1:45:28Speaker 00

  Oh, that's probably true.

• 1:45:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  And we call it morality, but I'm an outsider. I don't know. But we spend a lot of time thinking about whether and how we should punish people. And of course, at the extremes, it's obvious, right? The legal, to the legal system, it's obvious. But the middle ground is the interesting ground. Penalty boxing, people.

• 1:45:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe not even with social isolation, but who we reward and place into positions of leadership. I mean, this is very salient right now.

• 1:45:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it comes with a lot of assigning of labels about psychopathology from people that may or may not be qualified to assign those labels, right?

• 1:46:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  How do you think about the genetic and evolutionary, but also the societal labels of punishment and forgiveness?

• 1:46:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, such a good question. So first of all, let's just define punishment because that actually can mean different things to different people. So as a, you know, a psychologist, I think about punishment is applying an aversive stimulus in an attempt to reduce the frequency of a behavior, right? So it's, the rat is in its Skinner box, and every time it goes into this area, you give it a shock, and that's a punishment to make it not go into this area of the box. If you have a child, punishment is you're going to be in timeout, or I'm going to spank you, I'm going to give you some sort of thing that I know you're not going to like

• 1:47:05Speaker 00

  in order to try to reduce the frequency of this behavior.

• 1:47:10Speaker 00

  From psychology, we know from decades of evidence that punishing bad behavior doesn't work nearly as well for shaping behavior as rewarding the behavior that you want. Right? So if you reward a rat for pressing a lever, he'll do that all day long. If you give a rat alcohol every time it presses a bar, and then you stop mid-experiment and you start shocking it, some rats will stop pressing the bar, and other rats will actually increase the rate of behavior. They will be like, maybe this time, maybe this time it'll be. It's the same thing with kids, right?

• 1:47:54Speaker 00

  We know from, you know, all of our research on corporal punishment that children who are spanked do not behave better than children who aren't spanked. And if anything, they behave worse. So you've had Dr. Becky Kennedy on here. You know, she has been, I think, so influential in that you need to have consequences. But attempting to to help your child behave better through harshness is on average going to be a losing strategy. And then I think you said, you know, it does, you know, maybe at the extremes with the criminal justice system, but we also see that in the criminal justice system,

• 1:48:37Speaker 00

  that increasing the harshness of criminal penalties doesn't predict a decline in crime. The thing that seems to predict it is the likelihood of getting caught and having other potential opportunities to get the rewards that you want in your social structure. But just increasing penalties for crime doesn't, on average, reduce crime. So, you know, whether we're talking about rats or children or prisoners.

• 1:49:05Speaker 00

  Adding more harshness is not, we know, the most effective way to get the behaviors that we want. This is also true, going back to dogs, right? Like, what is the best dog training method? It's never harshly punishing them or applying pain for behavior you don't want, right? It's firmness, boundaries, but rewarding the behavior that you do want. And also in the context of building, you know, trust and a relationship with your dog. So I feel like no luck doesn't obviate responsibility. Like, we are still responsible for the people that we are, even though we're shaped by factors that aren't in control. But in terms of holding people responsible,

• 1:49:50Speaker 00

  punishing them harshly doesn't bring about what we really want, other than just satisfying that retributive itch. It's giving them opportunities in their reward structure to be rewarded by the things we do want, that we know is the most effective strategy, all in all. So I think the slide that people make is, if someone's responsible, if someone had agency, then they deserve to be punished. And what I'm trying to separate is those two things. Can someone be responsible? They had agency. We want to hold them accountable. But how do we do that without immediately jumping to,

• 1:50:35Speaker 00

  "And so therefore, they deserve to suffer. And so therefore, they deserve to hurt." And there's no, like, one-size-magic bullet to making that happen, right? Like, you know, that's how do we relate to each other as people? But as a mother, my strategy with my own kids has been really heavily influenced by thinking about, like, punishment is not the most effective way. That doesn't mean we live in a no, like, there's no rules, anything goes household, right? Like, we have consequences, we have accountability, we have boundaries. But there's always space to say, "Reflect on what you did. Reflect on what needs to be different for your behavior to be different in the future. And how can we create an environment that helps you grow?

• 1:51:20Speaker 00

  Helps you, helps that happen." I'm pretty anti-punishment. I'm pro-responsibility and pretty anti-punishment as a way of holding each other responsible.

• 1:51:30Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 1:52:14Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 1:52:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off. The last few years, there's been a real shift, it seems, in how we hold people accountable for their behavior in teen years. And I think it's with all the cameras and everything. There've been a few examples, for instance, of text message threads were unearthed of people who are now in their 20s and 30s from their teen years. You know, I think in one instance, it was a group of friends, and people were making... Racist comments. And then I think the ultimate decision was, okay, if this person apologized,

• 1:53:40Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 1:54:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  A different example, perhaps, that I'd like your thoughts on is like Kanye a year or two ago made a bunch of really anti-Semitic remarks. He was wearing a swat t-shirt and then recently he published an apology. He said he was sorry, he wasn't in, you know, in the right state of mind, et cetera. He's talked about some mental health challenges and things of that sort. And he seems to be largely forgiven. At least that seems to be the sentiment. Now, of course, he also brings something that a lot of people want, which is music that people love to hear. So there's always this kind of value add, value subtraction thing when we punish people versus the anonymous person, right?

• 1:54:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  What are they, they're not doing anything for people. So they're more quick to just say, well, just punish them, lock them away. It's fascinating because we, even though these are public facing examples, we use these as a template for how to deal with, you know, someone who, you know, got too drunk at the dorm party on Friday and said something really stupid and got a bunch of offended people. Do you kick them out of school? Maybe, or her? Or do you sit them down and go, hey, that was really insensitive? And they have to do a bunch of sensitivity training and, you know, and then you go, okay, like they're healed. You know, like, I mean,

• 1:55:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't have any answers to this, but this is how it seems to play out in the real world. It's sort of like very salient examples, not at the super extremes. I mean, racism's bad, but he didn't kill anyone. So then the punishment is either do we keep him or do we isolate him? And then what happens does set the course of what happens at, at more everyday levels.

• 1:55:55Speaker 00

  So I think what you're pointing to. Is America is an incredibly punitive, retributive culture. There is a reward that we can see in the brains of people when they see someone suffer if that person is first portrayed as a wrongdoer. So ordinarily, if you see someone be shocked, you have interior insula. It's like you're being shocked too. 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

• 1:56:39Speaker 00

  or lust for sexual partners. It is a desire people want to see people punished. Nietzsche was an amazing observer of human nature before there was a scientific psychology. And he wrote about how, what, why do we use monetary terms to describe people being punished? Pay their debt to society. People shouldn't get off scot-free. Scot is a word for tax. What is that? And what he theorized is that what you're being paid back with is the pleasure of seeing a fellow human hurt. You hurt someone and we can't undo that hurt.

• 1:57:24Speaker 00

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

• 1:58:08Speaker 00

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

• 1:58:52Speaker 00

  during his trial, they had this whole debate about, is he insane, is he not insane? And they had a psychologist who gave testimony, and he said, no matter what's happening, he's one of us, he's part of our society. So how are we going to deal with him without exiling him, throwing away the key? And all of the examples that you described are people trying to make this decision about like, who do we keep in our group? Do they have enough for us that it's worth keeping them? And who do we get to exile and then feel entitled to feel the pleasure of watching them suffer? And I think that's a fundamentally inhuman way to look at our... I think that we are a society, and that means everyone,

• 1:59:37Speaker 00

  even people who do terrible, terrible things, they're still one of us, they're still one of God's creatures, they're still part of our human circle. But how do we shift our culture away from this glee at punishment? I don't know. I think it's... If you want to talk about sin, I think that's the original sin of American culture, is our delight in punitive-ness.

• 2:00:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Incredible, incredibly sad, incredibly important, and...

• 2:00:09Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 2:00:50Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 2:01:17Speaker 00

  Just think through it.

• 2:01:18Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 2:01:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  In society, somebody could be canceled, either permanently, or they gotta like take a break.

• 2:02:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or somebody's put in jail. They're taken out of society.

• 2:02:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Several examples came up already today of people who were able to propagate their genes or not propagate their genes, depending on honest, like finding a partner, making the decision about, you know, consciously or unconsciously, the genetics, their personality, etc. And, okay, I'm gonna create children with this person, I'm gonna create new life. Versus the IVF doc who cheated in one of the most egregious examples I've ever heard, creating new life. And I think about, maybe the currency that is dopamine is about energy and the opportunity to create more life. It's like life energy. It gets a little bit woo, but when I think about it, it's like if somebody gets something by virtue

• 2:02:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  of their hard work, we expect and want them to be rewarded for it. If they lie to get it, you know, like a Bernie Madoff, who admitted to lying, so I don't think I'm gonna get in any trouble by saying, I think he agreed, he lied to get all that money, then he robbed people of currency. He got a lot of currency in that, and we hate that. He got more life energy. And when we're punished, we lose, even if there's not an explicit behavioral punishment, that hopefully the shame, the regret, it takes us out of the running a bit.

• 2:03:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, and people will play these games. They'll try and manipulate around this. But a lot of life is about doing things that give you more opportunity, that give you more life energy, that allow you to move forward. And a lot of the ways that we punish people is by trying to take away

• 2:03:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:03:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  life energy, forgive the term, that we feel you didn't deserve that.

• 2:03:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:03:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or you did something so that you shouldn't be able to continue to propagate your life energy. And so it gets in, I'm weaving it partially in with reproduction, but it's really about resources for your family, so that your kids can have more. But I do think that in the end, what we're competing for is energy. And what we're punishing for is people that we think got it unfairly.

• 2:04:06Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:04:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  And we definitely reward people that we, that we feel gave us energy through a song, through art, et cetera, with money, which is really opportunity. There's nothing inherently valuable about it. Even gold backing it doesn't do that. So, you know, so I feel like in the end, we're playing an evolutionary game for energy and the opportunity to propagate our genes.

• 2:04:32Speaker 00

  Responses to that, like as you were talking, I was reminded of certain things. If you look at punishment, I won't even say punishment. If you look at enforcement, if you look at enforcement of cooperative norms in non-human species, even not even in animals, a really consistent feature of that is reducing the punished organism's fitness opportunities. I'm going to block your access to mates. I'm going to eat your eggs so that, you know, I'm going to, wasps reproduce via figs.

• 2:05:13Speaker 00

  And if the fig tree attacks at the wasp as being a lazy pollinator, it will rot and wither away the figs that the wasp has laid its eggs in. It's denying it reproductive opportunity as a, you know, it's a retaliation against fitness. So I think what you're picking up on is like, you know, the ways that we punish people, rob them of fitness opportunities. That's something that we see as an evolutionary through line. If we think about, when we're trying to understand animal societies, what counts as a punishing behavior? Is it reducing their fitness opportunities of the punished thing?

• 2:05:55Speaker 00

  The thing about our language is just saying like penalty box. You know, a hockey player is put into a penalty box. They don't get beaten with a red hot poker when they're in there. They're just not allowed to play the game for a period of time. And I think this is where people get somewhat confused between retributive punishment and boundaries to keep the person and their teammates, which is all of us, since we're in a society, safe, right? So I'm not against people being in prison necessarily. The prison abolitionists will be mad at me for saying that, but we've never had a society of any sort where there isn't some mechanism to say, we need to be protected from this

• 2:06:40Speaker 00

  person and this person needs an opportunity to have a timeout from society while they reflect on how they're going to behave differently in the future. But we don't have to design that system the way that we designed it here, right? There's this Instagram meme, which is, is this a Scandinavian prison or a London hotel room? And people can't tell the difference. It's just the surveillance dome on the ceiling. And that speaks to something, which is that the purpose is not to make the person suffer. The purpose is to put them in the penalty box to protect the rest of us from their behavior.

• 2:07:16Speaker 00

  How do we get it so that our reactions to each other when we're holding boundaries is more like you're in the penalty box and less like, I want to make you suffer and I'm going to feel delighted that you're suffering.

• 2:07:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  The Danes are wonderful people and do seem to have this like sense of morality and decency.

• 2:07:35Speaker 00

  And social contract.

• 2:07:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  And social contract. Although in fairness, I think there's been some criticism that some northern European countries have been too lenient on violent offenders and it's made society more dangerous.

• 2:07:48Speaker 00

  This is a very complicated literature and it's, you know, I'm not saying that it's just their prison system, but they, their rates of violent crime are astonishingly low compared to America as a whole and particularly as compared to Texas.

• 2:08:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I think that these templates for punishment versus reward, because we haven't really talked much about reward.

• 2:08:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Realizing, you know, that the punishment piece can be scaled, penalty box versus

• 2:08:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  flogging. I, forgive me for telling you another story. I've been reading a history of the counterculture movement in, mostly in California.

• 2:08:22Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:08:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  But also the, the human, the human psychology evolution movement. And, and it takes us to Big Sur inevitably. And some interesting, Joseph Campbell was there and, and worked there and wrote there. But Hunter Thompson was a security guard up there at a.

• 2:08:40Speaker 00

  A security guard?

• 2:08:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, at 20 years old, he was hired as a security guard because he had a gun and he could keep order on this place where people would come to use the baths. And it was, it wasn't quite counterculture yet, but there's a story, and I believe it's true, that he was making some homophobic remarks and there were some gay bodybuilders up from Venice, California. So the group decided what his punishment would be. His punishment would be that these bodybuilders were going to hold him over the. Cliffs above the ocean, which is maybe three, 400 feet to his drop.

• 2:09:13Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 2:09:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Until he renounced homophobia, which eventually he did.

• 2:09:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then they let him back on and then he was able to live on and work and like they're like, okay, he's cured.

• 2:09:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, I mean, it's a ridiculous example. On the other hand, everyone participated in this decision. And apparently he was very frightened. And I don't know, I didn't know him, but apparently he adjusted at least his behavior.

• 2:09:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Kind of an interesting, silly.

• 2:09:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, funny enough, but serious enough example. Nowadays, it would be very different, right? He would have lost his job and no amount of apology would have rescued his job. Which, on the one hand, you could say, okay, well, he's homophobic. They didn't want anyone homophobic working there. On the other hand, the opportunity to potentially convert his thinking is lost. And so I think that's what you're talking about, that there are certain forms of punishment that give the opportunity not just to protect others, but to, um, to really help people evolve their moral concept.

• 2:10:13Speaker 00

  Yes. I think sometimes people talk about this as the difference between a backward looking conception of justice versus a forward looking conception of justice. So a backward looking conception of justice, you're, you are often caught in this, again, this rescue blame trap, which is, um, does he deserve to be punished? Or maybe he doesn't deserve to be punished that badly because of these insinuating circumstances. Oh, but he did this horrible thing. He made these homophobic comments. Whereas a forward looking conception of justice is, given that we are where we are today, and given the harm that he has caused, and given the brain and the body that he has,

• 2:10:55Speaker 00

  how do we best maximize our chances of other people being protected from future harm? And him changing, him having, uh, if, even if he doesn't change in his heart of hearts, changing the words that come out of his mouth, taking responsibility for what he says. The rule in my house with my kids is, you're not allowed to tell me about what your brother did. Your brother will tell me about what your brother did, and you'll tell me about what you did. And then we're going to talk about what you want to happen in the future. And then we're going to talk about what everyone needs to do so that we can not have this argument. But this constant, like, attempt to figure out, like, how much does he deserve to hurt?

• 2:11:39Speaker 00

  I feel like it's an abyss. You know, you just drown in it. And you drown in it with yourself, too. Like, if you've made comments that you regret yourself, like, how much do I deserve to be punished for that? Versus, but I can remember all the extenuating circumstances. No, it's, what do I need to do better in the future? And what do other people need to know that they are safe around me now? Which might be, you know, might be a penalty box. But, you know, thinking about punishment, not as, again, this is, it's not about some, you know, justice for, attempt to weigh the scales in the past. It's about how do we make things better in the future? How do we keep people safe and repair things in the future?

• 2:12:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Before moving to reward, one thing that occurs to me is people seem to integrate what people deserve now on the backdrop of all the shit they had to put up with in the past.

• 2:12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:12:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not just from that person. I feel like we are, we're all integrating on the backdrop of how we were treated,

• 2:12:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  how much pain and frustration we've had to endure. And that weaves in with how much forgiveness we have for when people screw up, or when they're, like, being just jerks, or they're being outright awful. So I feel like it's an almost impossible problem to wrap our arms around, except at the very extremes.

• 2:13:06Speaker 00

  So I think when people feel that they've been victimized...

• 2:13:12Speaker 00

  Accurately or inaccurately, that amps up that retributive urge. And again, I'm not saying that, you know, this is just some people. I think this is part of being human, that when we feel hurt, we want to hurt back and we want the person that hurt us to be hurt. And we're trying to keep some ledger of power and victimhood in our minds. I think that's, to some extent, an inescapable emotion of being human.

• 2:13:46Speaker 00

  But we don't just have to respond to our emotions. We don't have to let that lead, right? We don't have to let that run the show. So I do think that you're right, that in all situations, we're thinking about the situation and also the backdrop of the situation, and thinking very much about power. I mean, going back to what we can learn about punishment from looking at non-human animals, or not even not animals, even trees, even bacteria, is who is punished and who is the punisher is always a statement about the social roles within a group. And those social roles are structured by power. I talk in my book about how

• 2:14:30Speaker 00

  you can have alpha queen wasps, and they eat some proportion of the eggs of the beta queens in their colony. But if she eats too many of the eggs, her sisters will bite her. They will be like, okay, you're allowed this much power, but no more, and we're going to enforce those limits. So I think a lot of the debates that we're having about punishment in our society, who should be punished, are really debates about who gets to have power and to what degree in our society. What's interesting to me is how much the language of choice is leveraged or used in those debates.

• 2:15:13Speaker 00

  People so commonly, once you listen for it, it's really, really common that as soon as someone wants to justify punishment, they don't say, I'm justifying this to prevent harm, or I'm justifying this to maintain or change a power structure. They say something about how the person being punished chose that. They chose to be there. They chose this thing. I think a lot of our... Focus on choice in American culture is really an interest in being entitled to punish people. If you're on a plane and they're like, they're trying to get people to check their bags. They'll never say that the airline chose to overbook the plane.

• 2:15:57Speaker 00

  They'll say, if you've chosen to bring more than one bag with you, then you're gonna need to check it. Right? Which is like, you chose, so therefore you can be inconvenienced. You'll hear it everywhere now.

• 2:16:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm gonna listen for this. Okay, reward.

• 2:16:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  The good stuff. When I was a kid, we'd go to dinner. And we didn't go out to dinner very often. We just wasn't our family. But when we did, we could get soda. We couldn't have it at home.

• 2:16:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I would drink some soda. Then my sister would make sure that she drank a little less soda. So that at any point in the meal, she had more soda than me. Even though we started off with more soda.

• 2:16:37Speaker 00

  That is such a classic sibling thing.

• 2:16:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so she's a wonderful person. I adore my sister. And yet, she had to win that competition.

• 2:16:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  And so.

• 2:16:47Speaker 00

  That's some primal stuff there.

• 2:16:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's some primal stuff. I don't know if it's the hypothalamus, but it's definitely.

• 2:16:54Speaker 00

  Do my parents love me more?

• 2:16:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Exactly. And if you feed two dogs at once. You know, because I had a bulldog Mastiff. My girlfriend at the time had a pit bull. And whoever got food first, and I swear they're paying attention to the size of the little. They are processing that at laser speed. What's going on? We pay attention to how much people are rewarded.

• 2:17:18Speaker 00

  Yes, we do.

• 2:17:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And we get something about rewards that go beyond just the reward.

• 2:17:25Speaker 00

  I mean, again, we are a species that's evolved in cooperation. And there's really nothing worse for a cooperative society than freeloaded. Someone being rewarded without putting effort into the collective. There's this great study that was run by these economists. Where people were put into these online, basically like online, you know, kind of societies. Where they could interact with one another. And you could pick which village did you want to join? And you could switch villages at any time.

• 2:18:05Speaker 00

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

• 2:18:50Speaker 00

  to see how much other people donated and could pay to punish people who they didn't think had donated enough. So we're in a society, and if we're in the punishing society, then I can see that you got rewarded with this and then you didn't contribute enough of it back to the collective good. And then I could pay my own money to take away some of yours. And in the other society, people got to make their decisions, but they were anonymous and you couldn't respond to other people's decisions. The rules are transparent. It's not mysterious what's happening. And at the beginning of the experiment, participants are allowed to pick,

• 2:19:33Speaker 00

  like which village do I want to be in? And they think, "I'm against punishment and I don't want other people to know my business. So I'm going to go to the non-punishing society." And then it basically collapses in like three rounds because everyone's keeping their stuff to themselves and not contributing to the good. A few people pick the society where they have the opportunity to punish from the very beginning. And they immediately establish a strong norm of you. If you get a lot, you give a lot. There's not going to be some asymmetry between how much you're taking,

• 2:20:15Speaker 00

  how much you're keeping for yourself and how much you're contributing to our collective society. By the end of the game, the non punishing society has collapsed and everyone has migrated to the punishing society. And they are incredibly attuned to freeload. So your sister is like, he's not getting more soda than me, is he? And I want to, if I'm going to feel something, I want to feel like I have more soda than my brother does. I told my kids last week, I was like, I'm going to just start acting like a capricious dictator and just like make no more attempt to keep things even Steven so that you can understand what unfair really feels like. Because I'm so sick of this like,

• 2:20:57Speaker 00

  Jonah got half a chocolate chip more than me in his cookie. Why is seeing someone punished if they've done something wrong? Why dopamine? Why that? It's because it is so foundational to our survival as a cooperative species to, to have social norms and see that they're enforced. And, and seeing someone get rewarded when it doesn't feel like it's fair, I think activates all of our freeloader alert, freeloader alert, like we cannot have this module. Paul Bloom, who's a child psychologist, has a great paper where he says,

• 2:21:39Speaker 00

  people prefer inequality to unfairness. It's not things being unequal that they necessarily dislike. It's things being unfair. It's when the inequality feels unfair that people are like.

• 2:21:57Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:21:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  These days, I love observing online behavior.

• 2:22:02Speaker 00

  That makes one of us.

• 2:22:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's the scientist in me. You know, I just, well, I feel like there's something to be learned from it. If one has a little bit of, like, if you

• 2:22:11Speaker 00

  If you can have some distance.

• 2:22:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Have some distance from it. And I think, I don't spend all my time in the comment section. But it's sometimes interesting things play out. And you can see this, you know, and it's, it's really, yeah, this, this concept of, of kind of who gets money, attention, etc., which is really life energy and gets to keep playing the game of life.

• 2:22:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:22:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Versus who's getting batted back and penalty boxed. And I think fairness lets us rest, like the sense that there's fairness lets us rest.

• 2:22:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:22:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think that some people more than others, like the, the sense of seeing injustice, feeling injustice activates people. And it activates them in a direction typically that they don't get paid for, that is taking away from their other life energy. I mean, the media, I'm not gonna blame social media, but, or the algorithms. That's no longer a good argument, in my opinion. But I do think that there are monetization systems that try and hijack people's sense of injustice to drive more clicks and views, more advertising. And that's how you, that's how you get people moving forward. But they're not really, the illusion is that they're moving forward.

• 2:23:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  The, in fact, the, the financial incentive there is to just keep people on a treadmill where they feel like they see more injustice and they're angrier and angrier and they just continue and nothing changes. And I, I, I'm not dystopian, but I think we're, one has to be careful not to get caught up in that. It's very different than a, a game, like a game of football, or who gets more soda. I think that right now, who gets rewarded seems to be more under control than who gets punished. Like, we feel like the, I think a lot of people feel like the bad guys and gals are outside of our control. So now it's a question of just making sure people don't get rewarded.

• 2:24:04Speaker 00

  As you're talking, I'm thinking again about that study I was describing, where you have the two villages.

• 2:24:12Speaker 00

  And the people who are, who were most influential in setting the norms of the society that ended up thriving in this online game were people who engaged in a lot of punishing and rewarding, public punishing and rewarding behavior from the very beginning. And again, I think this goes back to punishment and reward is, is a way of establishing power, right? What is, it is a way of asserting power over what are the rules? What are the rules in this society? Like, what are we doing here? I'm picking a society that has these rules and I'm going to enforce them. We now live in this, this community collapse where we don't live in isolated villages.

• 2:24:57Speaker 00

  We don't live in small tribes where we interact with each other reciprocally over time in dense Ken networks. We are massively connected with a lot of one-time interactions between strangers. And as you were talking, I was just like, is that taking a psychology that's evolved to be in connection in a small community where the purpose of rewarding and punishing is to establish the norms for your group? But now there isn't a group. There's no one group. There are not a cohesive group. And so people are, they're essentially arguing about what are the rules are going to be. But it's like they're playing a game and they're arguing about what the rules are in the middle of the game.

• 2:25:42Speaker 00

  And if you feel like the only tool available for you is to just ratchet up the consequences and, and yell louder, right? But yell louder into the void, it's not a real community. Like X is not a, it's, it's the internet, right? Like, that is not who you're living next to.

• 2:26:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love doing this podcast, but the reason I continue it is for the opportunity to have conversations like this.

• 2:26:08Speaker 00

  In person, yes.

• 2:26:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, with you. I get more intellectual stimulation from this job, frankly, than I did when I was in my office at Stanford every day.

• 2:26:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:26:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because people were, we were all so busy.

• 2:26:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it's also so people can hear the conversations because what you're describing is very real. Things are so diffuse now.

• 2:26:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And there isn't really an opt out option. Is that legitimate? Can you say that? You can't really opt out. I'm opting for an opt out option being a legitimate statement. You know, where would one go? It's a, I'm not sure we can get completely offline. I think it's possible in small amounts, but certainly younger generation. You know, I've talked to my niece about this, like, no, no dice. It's not happening. It's a question is, I guess, how big is your sphere of visibility?

• 2:26:58Speaker 00

  I think that's a really hard question. There's a British writer, Oliver Berkman, who has written, he has this great newsletter called The Imperfectionist. And one piece of advice he gives is about, you know, letting your energy in your heart be local. And for me, I feel like that's a real struggle to think about, how do you not harden your heart to people that are suffering? Right? At the same time, how do you let, if you're keeping yourself tender, if you're keeping yourself attuned to caring about fairness, caring about injustice, caring about the vulnerable? Where is that energy going?

• 2:27:43Speaker 00

  And if it's just going back to the internet, I'm not necessarily sure that it's really helping. But if it's to, how does my neighborhood organize a winter coat drive? Or do I make sure that, you know, I fill up a stocking for children whose families can't afford Christmas gifts for my children's preschool? That feels so much more satisfying than any amount of yelling on social media everywhere. So it's, how do you be tender to the world, but act in your own neighborhood? Feels like the balance that I feel the best when I'm there, but it's a very difficult balance to maintain.

• 2:28:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Winning the game of everyday life is exactly what you just described. I think one can be online, see what's happening in the world, but there has to be a buffer there. There has to be an emotional buffer in it, because otherwise you... Lose our minds. I mean, to steal your words from earlier, although I won't say it nearly as eloquently. I mean, it's a new technology that's forcing us to reevaluate our morality.

• 2:28:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:28:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Our hardwiring hasn't changed. Our ability to softwire our brain and modify it hasn't really changed in tens of thousands or more years. So I think it took about 10 years of smartphone use for us to arrive at this place. We're like, oh shit. How often should we be on this thing? And how much I like, what aspects of this are beneficial and healthy and which aren't?

• 2:29:13Speaker 00

  A lot are not. Yeah.

• 2:29:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, and the whole world migrated into this, the position right?

• 2:29:17Speaker 00

  But then also I say that. And then I'm like, but it's given me such incredible opportunities. Like, would I have written a book without, you know, it was Twitter at that time? Like, would I be here and getting this opportunity to talk to you, one of my best friends I met online? So to the extent that it is a tool for real life connection and real life action, then I think it's good. And to the extent that it takes you out of real life, then it's bad. At least for me, is how I have come to think of it.

• 2:29:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm certainly immensely grateful for the work you do. It's, you're a brave one.

• 2:29:54Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:29:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Uh, willing to go into these, uh, these corners of the psyche, corners of, uh, human, um, reflexes, for better or worse. And, and to be willing to, you know, talk about issues of morality, sex differences, reward and punishment. There's some questions from, quote unquote, the audience, from the dreaded internet.

• 2:30:14Speaker 00

  Speaking of the internet that we've just been talking about this whole time.

• 2:30:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  I trust in people. They're like dogs. They just need to be treated right. That's a compliment, by the way. At least coming from me. Okay. Questions from the interweb. Always a fun and dangerous thing. Now, these are excellent questions, and you've answered many of them in our conversation already. A couple of people asked, how can identical twins be so incredibly different?

• 2:30:41Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 2:30:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  What's going on there?

• 2:30:43Speaker 00

  So this is not just identical twins. We see this in other genetically identical animals. There's studies of inbred mice. There's studies of, we were talking earlier about armadillos who give birth to four identical quadruplets. There's studies of clonal fish.

• 2:31:02Speaker 00

  And what there seems to be is what some scientists have called developmental noise, which is this emergence of individuality that's neither nature nor nurture, but is something about the like initial chaos and then path dependence of development. One of my favorite studies about this, they raised these mice, inbred mice genetically homogeneous, they raised them in identical rearing environments and then at a certain point, put them together in this big vivarium where they could interact. And you saw almost immediately, just very, you know, variability, which might have been

• 2:31:42Speaker 00

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

• 2:32:25Speaker 00

  50% is way higher than 1%, which is the base rate, but it's not, not destiny. If someone wants a fiction treatment of this, I Know This Much Is True is a novel by the novelist Wally Lamb. And it's written by the perspective of an unaffected identical twin whose identical twin has paranoid schizophrenia. And it's very scientifically interesting because it captures a lot of the, did one of them get exposed to a virus? Did one of them get kind of singled out for maltreatment by the stepfather? So some things that might have gone into that difference, but also just the phenomenology of being genetically identical to someone who's having such a different psychological experience as you in life.

• 2:33:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Twins fascinate me. Just as the nature nurture thing.

• 2:33:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:33:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which by the way, we are only saying now in this podcast.

• 2:33:15Speaker 00

  I know.

• 2:33:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing, right? Are there specific periods in development when genetic influence is at its strongest? And how does that influence shift relative to environment across the lifespan?

• 2:33:27Speaker 00

  Oh, this is a really interesting question with a complicated answer. So in some ways genetics matter most when they affect fetal development, because that's laying the groundwork for how the brain is wired over time. When you look at heritability estimates, so when you're estimating how much of the differences between people are due to genetic differences, you can estimate that using twins by looking at how much more similar are identical twins versus fraternal twins. And what you see is actually that heritability goes up with age. So the heritability of cognition, intelligence test scores, goes up until around age 12,

• 2:34:10Speaker 00

  in which case it stays pretty heritable from then. Heritability of personality continues to increase until around age 30. And so how can that be that the older you are, the more your genes matter? Because you've been acquiring experience all this time? And part of the answer to that is that people are picking their own experiences. So people are picking their environments. They're responding to their environments according to their genetically shaped temperament, personality, neurobiology. And what that means is that identical twins actually converge over time, even though they are acquiring experience over time. So when do genetics matter more? It kind of depends on what you mean by matter.

• 2:34:54Speaker 00

  When are genetic differences most predictive of your phenotype? Once you're an adult? Because you've had a chance to pick your own life experiences.

• 2:35:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  There are several questions that I'm going to merge into one.

• 2:35:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:35:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Earlier, at the very beginning of the conversation, we were talking about possible pheromone, but if not pheromones, and odor effects of timing of puberty because of the presence or absence of a male. It's kind of an interesting example, but I'm sure there are other examples where something about the environment at a chemical level impacts whether or not gene expression is turned on or off. And so this is an infinite space to consider, but depending on where one is born in the world, maybe you're getting longer days and shorter nights for a portion of the year if you're near the equator, or less of that. If you're in Scandinavia, you're getting some extended periods of lack of sunlight.

• 2:35:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  And there were a number of questions about how sunlight can impact gene expression. So If you take two identical twins and you raise them in very different environments, let's say equator versus closer to the North Pole, is there any evidence that amount of sunlight, day length across the years can impact expression of what would otherwise be called genetically determined traits?

• 2:36:15Speaker 00

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

• 2:36:53Speaker 00

  The human being is both developmentally programmed in this very resilient way. The fact that we managed to grow such a complicated nervous system and psychology from so humble beginnings is really amazing. And also, we are incredibly adaptable creatures. And the reason why we're adaptable is because our genotype, that developmental programming, can respond so flexibly to the environmental inputs that we're in. So that's a kind of a non, I mean, that's a very vague answer, but your DNA is a molecule that's sitting in your cells.

• 2:37:35Speaker 00

  It's not doing anything until it's acted on to be read, to be transcribed, to be expressed. And so that always requires an environment and is sensitive to an environment.

• 2:37:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you so much for answering those questions. And I mean, you've really expanded. Everyone's thinking about genes and morality. And I know that people, including me, but many, many people will really appreciate the thoughtfulness and the rigor that you approach these things because they are dicey topics, but they're central to who we are and how we're functioning. And it's also very clear from everything you've said that there's a ray of optimism thread through all of it.

• 2:38:14Speaker 00

  I hope so.

• 2:38:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, that like that we can make positive choices for ourselves.

• 2:38:18Speaker 00

  Yes. Well, I really appreciate the conversation. You know, I'm an academic, so I'm used to giving talks and getting a Q and A. But it is rare to have an interviewer that is so delightfully varied in their questions and so careful in the questioning, too. So I really appreciate the conversation.

• 2:38:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, thank you. Well, we certainly have to have you back again. Before I forget, you have books. We'll put links to those.

• 2:38:43Speaker 00

  Great.

• 2:38:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  What are you most excited about now? I'm sure you're working on something right now.

• 2:38:47Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm really excited to talk about the book. My new book is coming out on March 3rd, and I'm just really excited to be in conversation with people about these issues that I've thought about for a long time.

• 2:38:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  What's the title of the book? Sorry to interrupt, but I want to make sure.

• 2:39:01Speaker 00

  The book is called Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. And it's out in early March.

• 2:39:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing. All right, I am gonna go purchase it. Don't send me a free copy. I always tell people, don't send me a copy. I want to buy the book to support, but also to read. Amazing.

• 2:39:19Speaker 00

  Okay, awesome.

• 2:39:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you. We'll have to have you back again.

• 2:39:22Speaker 00

  I would love to.

• 2:39:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Catherine Paige-Harden. To learn more about her work and to find a link to her new upcoming book, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness, you can simply go to the link in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific, zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that

• 2:40:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep. To exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best.

• 2:40:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one- to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.

• 2:41:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Catherine Paige Harden. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

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