"I Started Crying When I Realized How Beautiful the Universe Is” | People I (Mostly) Admire Ep. 2: Mayim Bialik

She’s best known for playing neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory, but the award-winning actress has a rich life outside of her acting career, as a teacher, mother — and a real-life neuroscientist. Steve Levitt tries to learn more about this one-time academic and Hollywood non-conformist, who is both very similar to him and also quite his opposite.

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

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:25Speaker 01

  I struggled all the way through undergrad, and I struggled all the way through grad school as well, because I'm not a natural science learner. I'm a person who wants to understand deeply the mysteries of the universe. And even if you're a stay-at-home mom after that, even if you become an actor on a TV show, the knowledge that I have as a scientist has transformed my understanding of my religious life, my parenting life, and really, everything about the world that I live in.

• 2:52Steve Levitt?

  I'm so excited to get to speak with Mayim Bialik today. I've never talked to her before. This will be the first time we've met. But in a strange way, I kind of feel like I know her, having watched her on Big Bang Theory for so many years.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

• 3:13Steve Levitt?

  I'll be totally honest with you. I'm not sure that I have much to talk about with a typical Hollywood star, but I'm hoping that Mayim is going to be different. She's got a PhD in neuroscience, and she really seems to play by her own rules. And I just can't wait to get to know her a little bit. And let's hope I'm right, and she's interesting. We'll find out.

• 3:37Steve Levitt?

  It's such a pleasure today to talk with Mayim Bialik, renowned actress, neuroscience PhD, a bestselling author, a mother of two teenage boys, the producer and a director. And all of that's incredibly impressive. But the real reason that I wanted so badly to talk to you is because it seems like you've managed to succeed by breaking all the rules, by being true to yourself and by being authentic. And I don't see very many people who have the courage to be him or herself and to make their way in the world. So I'm just really excited to talk to you today, Mayim.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm very honored to speak with you.

• 4:14Steve Levitt?

  All right, already by the time you were, I don't know, maybe 10 or 11, you were an incredibly successful child actor. You had tons of roles on TV. Even before you landed the role of Blossom and were in primetime network TV for five years, you were maybe 15 years old when you started that?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I was 14 to 19, yeah.

• 4:34Steve Levitt?

  14. How does all that get started?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Let's see.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  I actually don't have kind of a typical child actor story in that most child actors start when they're toddlers. That was not my story. I wasn't raised in the industry. I didn't have Hollywood parents. My parents are actually first generation Americans. I did not grow up with money. So I went to public school in Los Angeles and I was part of the busing program of the 1970s and 1980s where kids from not so great neighborhoods were put on buses early in the morning and they sent us to neighborhoods with more opportunity. And some of those schools had enrichment programs like drama. And what I found was that I really liked being on a stage. So what I said to my parents is I really, really like this and like, there's kids on TV and why can't I be that kid?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  And I was cast in a movie called Beaches about a year after I started acting and I played Bette Midler's character as a young girl and got a lot of, I guess, notice for that. It was from that that I was cast in Blossom. And to be perfectly honest, no one looked like me on television. You know, there was something called All American Kid in the 80s. I did not look all American. I had the blonde hair and I had the blue eyes, but I was a very prominent featured child. I'm a, you know, a Polish Hungarian mix. So I ended up getting kind of character roles, which is the euphemism for the roles they give to people who don't look all American.

• 6:04Steve Levitt?

  You talk about character roles, but you seem to have been working nonstop on TV. That must be rare. There must have been hundreds of kids showing up to each of these auditions and you just kept on getting the parts?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  I mean, I didn't get more parts than I did. You know, this is part of the reason that my parents really weren't interested in me going into acting is, you know, it's an industry of rejection. It's an industry of being told, you're too this, you're too that, you're not enough that. I mean, it's really a ridiculous way for anyone to live, an adult, much less a child. But you know, I definitely was successful enough that I needed to, at some point, you know, do a kind of homeschooling, you know, program, starting in high, starting in 11th grade. But, you know, otherwise, honestly, I lived a pretty standard issue, you know, life. I still had to do chores. My parents were very strict. Most people didn't, I don't

• 6:57Speaker 01

  want to say they didn't like me, but I was a strange kid and I was a strange teenager and I'm a strange adult.

• 7:02Steve Levitt?

  What was strange about you as a kid?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I was bookish. I'm a rule follower. You know, I wrote with a glass pen and an inkwell and I read Dostoevsky and Sartre at 15. You know, I was a very tortured soul. And also, I had a very strong and terrifying sense of mortality. Since I was 10 years old, I've cried on every birthday. I grew up in a, in a home, to be quite honest, riddled with the shadows of the Holocaust. There's mental illness on both sides of my family. I had OCD as a child and also probably, you know, the very high level of anxiety. I had a lot of psychiatric challenges, really all through my teen years and into my 20s. And it's something I live with all the time.

• 7:46Steve Levitt?

  It's amazing that you felt at home in front of the camera because I think many people who would share some of the challenges you just talked about are absolutely terrified of public speaking.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  So I actually am a very nervous public speaker. I'm also a very nervous performer. My therapist has many opinions about why I liked to be, we like to say, you can hide on a stage. And I also wasn't the kind of kid who liked acting because I liked the applause. I really liked getting it right.

• 8:18Steve Levitt?

  It's interesting you say that about hiding on stage because I was the exact opposite kid. I was terrified of speaking in public. So for instance, in college, I did not raise my hand once in four years. I didn't volunteer talk. But then after I had some success in academics, people wanted me to speak. And I learned how to, I created a persona that I would go into, that I would be on stage and present. And then one day, something happened that was very eye opening for me. I didn't fully understand this whole persona thing until I was going to give a TED Talk. And as I was waiting to go on stage, The person who introduced me, introduced me by saying that, among other things, I was the father of a child who had died. And my son had died at the age of one, maybe a year earlier.

• 9:03Steve Levitt?

  And I had gotten very good at putting on my public speaking persona. And when she made that comment, I was shocked back into my regular, I'm Steve Levitt persona. And if you watched that TED Talk, you can see for the first like 30 seconds, I like literally don't know where I am or what I'm doing. Because I'm struggling to try to get out of my own body and into this fake persona that I live in.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  First of all, I'm very sorry for your loss. You know, you touch on a very kind of significant aspect, not just of an actor's life, but you know, it really is true. We, we wear masks and we're sort of acting all the time. I think some people do it more seamlessly than others. But that notion of kind of having to find yourself in yourself again is terrifying. And it is something that performers do under exceptional circumstances as our job, you know?

• 9:58Steve Levitt?

  So I've watched a lot of the videos you've put up on your YouTube channel, where you talk about things happening in your life, whether it's the decision to homeschool your children or, or growing older. And it seems to me that you've made a choice over time to reveal a lot of yourself to the public, but not in a senseless way like reality TV, but in a very thoughtful way, where in measured doses, you really open yourself up for people to see. For instance, some of your videos, you know, after the COVID lockdown, when you're clearly in the COVID doldrums, or when you decided to talk many years later for the first time about being divorced. How do you approach your relationship with the public?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Well, I'd like to thank you for making a distinction between, you know, sharing willy nilly and what I consider to be mindful, meaning even if my audience doesn't always agree, the decisions behind the scenes are often heart wrenching and, and complicated. But what I have tried to do is really highlight, in a lot of cases, mental health. And also a perspective of someone who really exists because of the resources I've been able to have access to, to support my growth as a human being and not just a human doing, as we say. One of the things that I've decided to gear my life towards

• 11:17Speaker 01

  right now, definitely motivated by being at home and seeing how we're all being impacted. But I've decided to start a podcast and we're calling it My and Be Alex Breakdown, both because it's just going to be fun to say, I'm My and Be Alex and welcome to my breakdown. But the notion being that I'd like to break down a lot of our preconceived notions and misperceptions about mental health. And the idea is to, you know, present a topic, a specific topic around mental health and have either an expert or someone who's an expert because they are living it, to understand where mindfulness plays into these things. What are the, you know, the holistic things that many people dismiss as hippy dippy? What's the science behind them? What are the things that we can actually

• 12:01Speaker 01

  do to have a better understanding of our mental health so that we literally can, can live without breaking down? I'm a person who feels very, very deeply, kind of all the time. It's a superpower and it's also a curse.

• 12:16Steve Levitt?

  My wife has a term, she uses the word sensitive to refer to people like you, as you've described yourself and her. I don't know if it's a clinical term or not, but there's some people I think that are very empathetic to the suffering of others.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they call us highly sensitive people, HSPs. In children, they're often called indigo children. I actually wasn't so much like this as a child. I was very analytical. I was a problem solver. But as an adult, I'm one of those people who, and I don't think there's necessarily anything mystical to it. There are people who have said to me, wow, you have a lot of information about people from knowing very little. It is a strange superpower. My younger son seems to have inherited it. It can feel very burdensome, I'll be honest. And also beautiful.

• 13:04Steve Levitt?

  I'm actually have the opposite gift, if you want to call it a gift of being a little bit on the spectrum. So I kind of have a hard time actually remembering that other people are alive and are not merely created on the planet to entertain me and my existence. And so that also is both a superpower and a curse. But it seems to be, if you're sensitive, being an actor is a kind of a crazy choice, isn't it?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, I left the industry for 12 years to get a doctorate in neuroscience, partly for this reason, less so that it was necessarily triggering and more that I'm a person who really wants to be appreciated for what's inside and the industry does not really highlight that. It's not made to, it's not supposed to. I don't mean to sound pretentious about it. I'm an artist. I'm a person who feels a strong need to create, to write, to perform, to emote, to make you feel something. That is really where I tend to thrive. It's where people seem to want to employ me. And it is all the other parts

• 14:13Speaker 01

  of the industry that are the most trying for me. The publicity, the demands on women, the obsession with appearance and youth. And, you know, I'll be perfectly honest, I am grateful for my job beyond explanation. But for someone with social anxiety, I absolutely live in a career that does not match my personality. And I do not feel filled up from being around people and talking about myself. I do not get filled up from being complimented, from getting dressed up, leaving my house. These are all things that have

• 14:54Speaker 01

  really nothing to do with the fact that I can play dress up really well, right? I can pretend to be someone I'm not in a way that makes you believe it and feel something. To me, that's my job.

• 15:06Steve Levitt?

  It's interesting that you call it a job because you did say earlier in the conversation how when you were acting in school plays, it was really fun. Did it transform from being really fun to being a job?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Because when you are a child actor, and this is the reason I am not a huge fan, honestly, of people getting their children into acting, you are not allowed to have a bad day. You're not allowed to be grumpy. You are really responsible for managing your emotions in a way that makes other people happy. And that's actually exactly what we want to teach our children not to do as humans.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  And it's precisely what you're being taught to do as an actor. And, you know, thinking from a strictly consumer capitalist perspective, it's absolutely necessary. You know, if you want to stare meaningfully into a cow's eyes before you slaughter it, you're not going to slaughter many cows in a day, right? The way we get things done is to essentially depersonalize them. I mean, Marx and Engels figured that out a long time ago. So you essentially become part of a system that is an industry. And on any given day, if you're sad, if you're... I mean, my first TV acting job was the day that my grandfather was buried. My grandfather died the night before my first TV acting job.

• 16:31Steve Levitt?

  Wow.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  And you don't get a hiatus for that. It's a job.

• 16:36Steve Levitt?

  Yeah. Usually, if you ask people who've succeeded at something, they always will say, oh, yeah, follow your dream. You know, they've been the winners in this big lottery. But it sounds like with you, you are almost saying, you know, even if you win, quote, "the lottery", it's not as pure of a victory as people might perceive.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  I mean, correct. And I happen to be a person of faith. And what I have found, that my tradition teaches, is that there is not an amount of money in the world that makes you not want more. There's not an amount of possessions in the world that makes you feel done consuming. And at the end of the day, and when you are buried, your gravestone will not tell any of those things. We live in a hyphen. We live in the hyphen between the year that we were born and the year we died. And that's, you know, I once heard a rabbi say, what will you do with your hyphen? That's the purpose of my being on this planet, is to figure that out. Not to make money, and not to make you happy, and not to win an award.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  There are things that we do in life that we hopefully will find pleasure and joy from. But we're one of the first generations to actually have that luxury. Also, falling in love with someone, also pretty recent in human history. So when my older son says, I really think I kind of, I'm really into Shakespeare. I said, great, when you can drive yourself to auditions, you're welcome to go and pursue that. But what's your other skill set that you're going to do in the meantime? Because I don't mean to sound like a terrible mom, but I'm not really into like, follow your passion. We all need to get things done on this planet. And the life of a struggling actor is a life of having another job and living off wages that are often not sustainable.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  It means putting off having children, if you're a woman, because that completely curtails your higher ability. What kind of life do you want?

• 18:47Steve Levitt?

  So you've written that as a young teen, you believed science and math were for boys. And actually, I suspect that has to do with you being this highly sensitive type, that you picked up on subtle cues that society was giving off that I think I would have been too tone deaf to have heard. But then something happened, obviously, that shifted you out of that mindset. Do you want to explain what that was?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, part of it absolutely was this cultural notion. And, you know, boys in the 80s and 90s would say to your face, like, girls are stupid. Girls can't do math and science. Like, we didn't know about girl power back then, you know? So there was definitely a lot of that. Also, I didn't have any real role models. I didn't see any women who were scientists. That's not how our culture represented it. I will also say that everyone learns differently, and the way that math and science were being taught to me was not working for my brain. Do I think that the way it was being taught doesn't work for a lot of girl brains? I'm going to go ahead and say yes, because I think that we need to have a different way to approach how we teach.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Because contrary to a lot of current belief, male and female brains are different. We do have different skills. And while those aren't absolute, there's absolutely different ways to teach that can, I think, please more male and female brains.

• 20:08Steve Levitt?

  How would you teach? Differently, how should we be teaching STEM stuff differently?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Well, so it actually leads into how I got interested in science. I had a female tutor when I was 15 years old on the set of Blossom. She was at that time 19. She was a dental undergrad at UCLA and she came from a prominent Persian Jewish immigrant family. And she came from a family of girls where they were all encouraged to do science or math or be doctors or be dentists. And this was the first time that I heard a person, and a woman yet, talk about science as if it were poetry. No one had ever said to me, "The world is this unbelievable place and look at the details that we can understand as humans."

• 20:56Speaker 01

  The only place I had gotten that was in my religious and spiritual upbringing. "The world is this unbelievable place. The reason it's unbelievable is because of science," right? That's its own divinity, is kind of what I learned as a teenager. So one of the things I think about teaching STEM is I think we need both male and female voices in the mix. I think that a lot of people think that a career in science and math is an isolated kind of lifestyle. You know, the kind of lone scientist in a laboratory is what many of us are taught. And I think that for girls who tend to be more social, meaning more engaged in social interactions and more verbal, that doesn't sound interesting to sit alone in a laboratory.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  But if as a young girl I had been told, "Oh, you love animals? Listen to the dozen careers in math and science regarding working with animals. Oh, you're interested in saving the planet? Look what it's like to be an environmental biologist. Wouldn't it be cool to get to take samples, you know, from ponds and animals?" Like, you have to present the full variety of the possibility of STEM. In order for us even to see where men and women want to fall in terms of their interest, and those are things that I was absolutely missing. And I was so grateful to meet this woman, Fierza was her name, because no one had ever also taken the time to teach me the way I needed to learn. And I was getting lost in those big classes,

• 22:25Speaker 01

  you know, and by highly gifted magnet, I was getting lost in those classes where the boys were finishing their math requirements in eighth grade because they were so accelerated and so fancy, I couldn't even get the basics. And no one took the time to say, we're leaving all these kids behind, and most of them are the girls. So having a one-on-one tutor and having someone say to me, you get to learn about the cell, we're going to draw it, we're going to model it. I still remember the parts of the cell from the lessons when I was 15 years old. I can learn it. I needed to be told how to. And in the 70s and 80s also, we knew nothing about different styles of learning, at least not in public schools that I went to. We knew nothing about learning disabilities that people learn differently.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  This is one of the greatest revolutions, I think, in the educational awareness we have. Not everyone learns the same.

• 23:18Steve Levitt?

  What did Fierza end up doing? Did she become an incredible dentist, or did she go on to do something else?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  She did. She became a dental surgeon. She has four children. We're still in touch. And she changed my life. That was it. That woman changed my life. And just for me to have, again, a female role model, a woman who was, you know, accessible to me. She was young. I mean, she was as hip as I was, which was to say that I was nerdy and started crying when I realized how beautiful the universe is. That's who I needed to hear it from. And she not only gave me the skill set to become a scientist, she gave me the confidence that even if it's hard for me, I still deserve to have a shot.

• 23:56Steve Levitt?

  I think we're still so terrible today at communicating the value or what you can do with a STEM career. Why do you think it's so hard for us as a society to bring that message to people?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  I mean, you might have a better answer than I do. I'm assuming you would. But I think that a lot of people do see STEM careers as laborious or expensive to excel in. And I also think that we have a huge component of this country that is lacking access to the education required to pursue those jobs. And that's where we're getting this disproportionate representation of individuals in the STEM fields. I mean, honestly, for me, a lot of it does go back to what does our society value? And the fact is, we value a very, a very kind of shiny productivity. I think that especially now, I think there's a lot of drive to make a lot of our lives

• 24:55Speaker 01

  very kind of like sexy and successful in ways that I don't think are always smooth paths.

• 25:03Steve Levitt?

  I have come to believe that the way that we teach what an economist would call a production function of teaching is archaic. Another way of organizing education would be to use technology and essentially to do away with the traditional role of the teacher. And so it seems to me that there are people like you who are thoughtful and who are brilliant communicators and who are respected for other things they've done in their lives. And imagine if you could be teaching 11th graders neuroscience, not in one classroom, but literally the entire country, right?

• 25:43Steve Levitt?

  If we had a system set up where there were, you know, 100 or 200 amazing teachers whose words were broadcast to every student. My own personal view is, number one, that would be transformative because I know other people can teach economics far better than I could ever do it. It's wasteful, both of my time and of the students' time, to suffer with me when there are others who could do it better. But also, I think it gets at the point you made about access and how that could really level the playing field for people who are, you know, not as privileged as you and I have been.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  First of all, I think we should talk about this off the air because I think it's an amazing idea. And it's like, I'm sure you didn't want a global pandemic where we have all been stuck in our homes and our children are needing to learn through technology. But I actually have taught a bit online during this pandemic. And I did teach neuroscience. I did two separate sessions. We had thousands and thousands of people. It's a beautiful, beautiful, and also very, very doable thing. I think that you know best what the limitation is going to be. How do you pay for this and who pays for this? We're still really creating a class system and a prison of our class system.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  And that's something I would love to see remedied. You're absolutely right.

• 27:07Steve Levitt?

  I also think what we teach should be up for reconsideration. And I think we teach a lot of the topics we teach because it's what we taught in the early 1900s. But like you said, we've learned an enormous amount about the mind and about what makes people content and maybe even about the soul. And I think that curriculum has not kept up with that. And if I were to redo curriculum, I think I would radically change away from learning facts towards maybe self-understanding as the goal of a high school degree.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Well, my children happen to be homeschooled, which is unusual from two graduate people who are raising them. My now ex-husband has a master's in political theory. But one of the reasons that we did homeschool our children, well, the first reason was that we couldn't afford private school. You know, I was in grad school when I had my first son. And the public schools in Los Angeles are very, very different than they were when I was a kid. And we had two very atypical developing children. And we knew that if we put them into any sort of standardized school, they'd be forced to do therapies, which we did not believe were necessary because we wanted them to progress in their own way and their own pace. That being said, one of the other reasons that we homeschool is that we want to raise

• 28:24Speaker 01

  thinkers and not regurgitators. And while there are places in the country where you can have that experience, the city that we live in really does not have the ability to do that. But what I'm interested in, also in what I'm interested in other people being able to have access to, which means not raising children who essentially are soldiers, you know, soldiers of education.

• 28:50Steve Levitt?

  I was about as good a student as a person could be through high school and college. But it wasn't until my first day in the real world on the job in management consulting, where my boss, actually, he gave me a stack of documents that had some numbers about FDA submissions, new drug applications to the FDA. And he said, so by the end of the week, I want you to tell me how our client can get their drugs approved faster. And I said, but I don't know anything about the FDA. And like, how do you want me to do it? And he looked at me and he said, and it shows that how old I am. He looks at me and says, look, we're not paying you $32,000 a year to tell you the answers.

• 29:30Steve Levitt?

  And I remember I broke out in a cold sweat and it was the first time really that anyone had asked me to think rather than to regurgitate. But what I realized is I love to think and I had never, I'd never taken the luxury of thinking because it didn't serve me because thinking wasn't helpful for getting an A. Regurgitation is what you needed to do. So I couldn't agree more about the regurgitation versus thinking.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Steve, we just became best friends. Look at that.

• 29:56Steve Levitt?

  Well, that's an accomplishment because when a highly sensitive person and an autistic person can be friends, it's like the possibilities are really infinite.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  You're listening to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt and his conversation with actor and neuroscientist Myam Vialik. They'll return after this short break.

• 30:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 32:52Steve Levitt?

  So, whenever young people ask my advice about getting a PhD economics, I almost always try to talk them out of it. Getting a PhD sounds fun and romantic. It's not fun. It seems like it will open all sorts of doors, but the truth is really is it's brutal and it's hard. It destroys many people's self-confidence and sense of self-worth. And people who love a topic as an undergrad often end up unloving it by the time they finish their PhD. And in the end, six or seven years later... Your job prospects aren't even very good. So does that describe your PhD experience at all?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yes, it literally, I mean, it near broke my spirit. And imagine also, you know, giving birth to a human in that time. Literally near broke my spirit.

• 33:46Steve Levitt?

  Do you remember what drove you into a PhD program? You've already said that you weren't that great a student at UCLA in science. What kind of a person subjects herself to the punishment that comes with doing a PhD in a subject where you weren't even that good as an undergrad?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Well, what I said was that things didn't come as easily to me as other students. So I didn't party. I studied all the time. I went to every office hours. I was a very diligent student, but organic chemistry was the death of me. And I will say, though, I excelled in physics. I excelled in calculus. I did great in biochemistry. Not a very precise lab technician, but really, really like loved, loved what I studied. It just took a lot of extra effort. I think that your assessment of me, Steve, is absolutely correct. I don't do things the way you're quote, "supposed to do."

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And I would be hard pressed to find any region of my life that feels in any way typical. I was born different. I was born butt first. My mother will tell you. I was backwards from the beginning and I missed being creative, but still did a lot of creative things. I led a Jewish a cappella group at UCLA at our Hillel for years and I composed music for that group. I still did a lot of fun, creative things. But what I ultimately realized is that the level of understanding that I wanted to have of the universe was the level of the electrophysiology of the neuron. That is where I put my, my life, really.

• 35:27Steve Levitt?

  So you wrote about Prader-Willi syndrome. Can you explain what that is and what got you interested in the topic?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I studied secretions from the hypothalamus, which is a structure about the size of four peas, kind of right in the middle of your brain. And the hypothalamus connects to the pituitary gland, which a lot of people have heard about. And that region of the brain has been implicated in obsessive compulsive disorder, specifically for oxytocin and vasopressin secretions. And those might sound familiar because oxytocin is the feel-good hormone. It's the one that happens when you have an orgasm. It is also what is necessary for the milk ejection reflex, for labor, and for human bonding. So it's a very, very important hormone. And individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome have very high rates of obsessive compulsive disorder. And Prader-Willi syndrome is about 1 in 10,000.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  It's a spontaneous mutation on chromosome 15. It was the first evidence of genomic imprinting, which means if you're missing this region from your father, you get one disease. And if you're missing this region from your mother, you get a different disease. So it's a very special syndrome. And individuals with Prader-Willi syndrome have puberty problems, sleep problems. They often have skeletal issues because they are lacking growth hormone, cardiovascular issues, and also a bunch of psychiatric features that occur with that. It's a fascinating population. They tend to be very, very combative. They will do anything to obtain food because they specifically do not know when they're full. And their drive to pursue food

• 36:58Speaker 01

  will lead them to all sorts of very, very aggressive and often very violent behaviors. But their obsessive compulsive disorder is separate from their desire to pursue food. And that was the population that I worked in. And I did what's called a pilot study, where you're taking a pretty small number of people, I think we had 26 in mine, to see if we can make correlations between their behavior and the amounts of oxytocin and vasopressin in their saliva and in their blood.

• 37:24Steve Levitt?

  This sounds highly empirical. It sounds like you went out and found the folks with Prader-Willi syndrome. How did that work?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the reason that I studied Prader-Willi syndrome is I'm a vegan person. And there are not many neuroscience departments that do not involve working with... Animals. So the kind of choices for those of us who want to work with humans is often the field of mental retardation. And that is how I found my advisor is that she studied all sorts of different syndromes of mental retardation. And when I read about Prader-Willi syndrome, I thought, well, that needs not just a geneticist, but a neuroscientist. So that's kind of how I picked it. And part of learning to work in these kinds of fields is getting connected with the organizations that want to be helpful in essentially providing

• 38:15Speaker 01

  data. So I worked with the Prader-Willi Syndrome Association of the United States, that's PWSA. And essentially, we would recruit. I would go to fundraiser walks and I would take a phlebotomist with me and we would collect samples. And then we would also have them do behavioral tests and I would do the testing for that. There's a scale of obsessions and compulsions and they would do a variety of tests.

• 38:38Steve Levitt?

  And what did you find? And has it been the basis of a strand of research or not so much?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Well, this is something that in my field is very, very typical. We found enough correlations that would merit further study. And that's about all you can hope for, you know, in a pilot thesis study. So what we found is that there were some correlations between those hormones. We also looked at cortisol, which is a stress hormone. But essentially, you would need a much larger scale, you know, project to be able to have really strength from a larger sample size. So yeah, I remain, you know, a particular kind of expert of a very, very specific thing.

• 39:16Steve Levitt?

  And so you made this decision not to pursue a postdoc, essentially to get off of the track to have kids.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  As a woman at that time, it was extremely unfavorable to choose to have a child. It was like a scarlet letter. And I think it was very, very difficult. But I knew that as a scientist, I knew I wanted to have my first child before 30. That's just how some of us, you know, science geeks who know a lot about statistics and eggs like to do things.

• 39:44Steve Levitt?

  It seems to me another example where, at least in economics, there is enormous social pressure.

• 39:51Steve Levitt?

  Not to do that, was that difficult?

• 39:54Speaker 01

  Very difficult. I mean, I would say it was one of the most difficult decisions of my adult life, for sure. I got pregnant with my first son after I finished my course requirements. I wrote my thesis literally laying down while nursing and I got pregnant with my second son the week that I handed in my dissertation. That's our mazel tov baby. And I took my doctoral hood about seven months pregnant. Yeah. But this was a case of really listening to, you know, my God given instincts as a primate mama. I really wanted to be with my children. And especially because I, you know, trained in the field of psychoneuroendocrinology, I was studying the hormones of attachment and bonding. I wanted to be with my kids.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Did I feel like I was an overqualified block stacker? Of course I did. And I can't say that my children might not have been better with someone else parenting them. But this is who God gave them. This is who the universe gave them. They gave them me. I'm their mom. And I wanted to be there for those years. You get one life to live. This is not a dress rehearsal. This is it. And that's ultimately why I left academia was to be home with my kids. And I, you know, taught Hebrew, I taught piano, I taught neuroscience for five years before running out of health insurance and figuring like, gosh, if I can just get

• 41:22Speaker 01

  my Screen Actors Guild insurance, at least we'll be insured. I had no idea I was going to be on a TV show again. That was not the plan. This is a crazy life.

• 41:32Steve Levitt?

  Well, I'll tell you what's the crazy thing of all is that someone who's trained as an academic ends up opting out because acting is a safe choice. I mean, that's kind of turns the whole world upside down.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Well, if you think about scheduling, you know, being an academic means you're really beholden to a very specific way of life. And what I realized was I was going to be hiring someone essentially to raise my children while I taught other people's children. And working on a sitcom, I essentially work school hours and it really did allow me to be with my kids for a tremendous amount of time. So it was more about scheduling and flexibility.

• 42:13Steve Levitt?

  You starred in The Big Bang Theory as neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler for nine years, and I know nothing about how TV gets made. Could you just explain to me what the rhythm, the weekly life of a sitcom is like?

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, we work usually three weeks on, one week off, and we do that from about August to April. And we have three days of rehearsal and two days of filming. The second filming day begins at noon and we tape in front of a live audience. So that ends around 10pm. But the other days of the week, and I don't mean to make it sound like it's easy, but let's be honest, we're working school hours and only having to really not be in your pajamas two days a week. It's not that different from being a science graduate student.

• 43:00Steve Levitt?

  Well, I would have thought it was much harder, much more of a grind.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  That's the secret we just revealed. It's not that hard to be a sitcom actor.

• 43:08Steve Levitt?

  Okay. And do you have much input at all into the script?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  No. Whatever you're about to say, I don't have much input at all. No.

• 43:17Steve Levitt?

  So you don't, do you do a read through and say, wait, my, Amy would never say that, or that's just not the way it works?

• 43:23Speaker 01

  I mean, technically, our writers know the characters even better than we do because they created them. That's their baby. Yes, there are times when we have conversations where I say like, oh, can I say this word? I was consulted for neuroscience specific things. We had a physics professor from UCLA, Dr. David Salzberg, and he was our physics consultant and he and I would work out stuff about neuroscience. If Amy had to be in the lab, or sometimes there'd be stage direction of like, Amy's doing something in her lab. And I would say, well, why don't we, you know, I'll be running a PCR or, you know, whatever it was. But no, on a show where you're a hired actor, you are essentially, you're a tool, you know? I mean, I don't mean you're a tool in a bad way. I mean, you're a tool in a toolbox of people getting things done together. The show that I'm working

• 44:05Speaker 01

  on next, which is called Call Me Cat, I'm producing that with Jim Parsons from The Big Bang Theory, and I'm starring in that. I am an executive producer, and that's a very different level of commitment. That's like, meeting the writers before we hire them, reading the scripts in their first draft, approving outlines. That's a lot more kind of labor, as it were. But I also have a production company and it's Sad Clown Productions.

• 44:29Steve Levitt?

  It says something about you that you named your production company that.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Well, there's a joke where a guy is very depressed and he goes to his doctor and he says, "I'm really depressed. I don't know the purpose of living. I don't know what to do anymore." The doctor says, "There's this circus and there's this unbelievable clown and if you go see this clown, "he will give you a reason for living." And the man looks at the doctor and he says, "I am that clown."

• 44:52Steve Levitt?

  I love that.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  And that is how we got Sad Clown Productions.

• 44:57Steve Levitt?

  So I know you're getting into directing and screenwriting and again, I don't know anything about Hollywood. Could you explain what a director does? And then could you also explain why there are so few female directors? Because it makes zero sense to me.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  So I've never written a screenplay before. I've written books. I've written four books. Two of them are New York Times bestsellers about puberty and like, I know how to write, but I've never written a screenplay. So what I did was after my dad died, images started bubbling up and stories started bubbling up. And I thought, is this what it feels like to be a writer? Like I'm seeing things. Like I was seeing images from my childhood and I started to write them. And I ended up writing a screenplay that I didn't even show to anyone for quite some time. And I finally showed it to my manager and to my agent and it's not an autobiography, but it's, it's a, you know, it is a story, you know, based on my life and a lot of people's lives

• 45:55Speaker 01

  of growing up in a house with mental illness and what gets left over, you know, and what you pick up the pieces of. And I figured we would find a writer to fix it. Apparently it's fine the way it is. And Dustin Hoffman would like to play my father and Candace Bergen would like to play my mother and Simon Helberg from Big Bang Theory would like to play the brother character and Olivia Thurlby is gonna play the character that would have been in theory me. And I thought, okay, so now we'll get a director. But then I realized, well, I know what happened. Like I know what these images look like. How am I gonna explain that to? It's a waste of time. And that's what I was told. Okay, that means you're the director.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  So what a director does is a director is in charge of the vision and the tone of a film, whether they write the script or not. And a director kind of oversees the, everything about filming it, from the angles to, you know, the crew that is in charge of the lighting. A director also worked directly with the actors to help bring out the performances that tell the story best. I think that there are not a lot of women directors, for the same reason that there are not a lot of women, a lot of things. This is about, you know, our culture's trajectory of women, where we were expected to be, what skill sets we were expected to need. I'll be honest, the fact that women's fertility peaks when their career fertility also peaks is a very, very difficult thing.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  A lot of careers sound a little bit difficult to women who may want to pursue being a parent, especially a younger one, you know? I believe that we are seeing shifts. I believe that we need more mentorship possibilities for women. I could also have a very similar conversation about people of color.

• 47:45Steve Levitt?

  Yeah. I mean, directing seems especially strange to me to be so male dominated because it's measurable. In general, I tend to think that this cultural discrimination can survive really well when you can't really measure whether someone's good or not. And honestly, I think it's very hard to measure whether a CEO is good or not, because there are so many other variables going on. But with directing, you get to see at the end of the day whether people wanted to go to the movie or not. And I think it really speaks to the powerful cultural factors that are at work.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  There is nothing inherently spectacular about being a director that means that white men do it best, I promise. There's also nothing about white men that makes them better CEOs. Like, we just, we need time and we need to do better to increase the opportunities for people in underrepresented populations, period. We don't need to fight about it. You don't need to say, am I a feminist or not? We need more opportunities for more people so that we can see more women's voices, more women's eyes, more women's visions. I'm also not a 50/50 person, meaning there may be more men who want to be directors. I don't know, but right now, we actually don't know that. So let's try and figure it out together.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio network and is produced by Freakonomics Radio and Stitcher. Matt Hickey and Allison Craiglow produced this episode, with sound design by David Herman. Our staff also includes Greg Rippon and Corinne Wallace. Our intern is Emma Terrell. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. All of the music you heard on the show was composed by Louis Scarra. To listen ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium. We can be reached at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.

• 49:44Steve Levitt?

  Would you give almost everything to be anonymous?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Since we've become best friends, I can tell you, I look terrible at the supermarket. And, you know, some celebrities, you see them and you say like, wow, they really look good even without makeup. I'm not that person. I've gained and lost hundreds of pounds, right, over the course of my life, nursing children for six years straight, so.

• 50:15Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 50:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility, it's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company, building the future of energy.

• 51:25Speaker 04

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• 52:09Speaker 04

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• 52:24Speaker 05

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