Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Genes & Free Will: Pedophiles, Ozempic & Self-Control” with Prof. Kathryn Paige Harden

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“Genes & Free Will: Pedophiles, Ozempic & Self-Control” with Prof. Kathryn Paige Harden · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans!
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  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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  Here's a dangerous question
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  for you.
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  How much are you a product of your genes and how much are you a product of your
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  experiences?
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  And how much are you neither, but a free agent who chooses better behaviours
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  even when your biology and your environment want to steer you astray?
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  The more that science
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  learns about genetics, the more we notice patterns between certain genes and certain behaviors,
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  like addiction and appetite and sex and violence.
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  Today's guest, Professor Catherine Page Harden,
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  is a psychologist and a behavior geneticist who runs the Development Behavior Genetics Lab
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  at the University of Texas, Austin.
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  And she found herself unintentionally at the center
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  of a bit of a cancel culture firestorm back in 2021, after she published her first book,
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  which was called The Genetic Lottery, Why DNA Matters for Social Equality.
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  You can imagine
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  how that landed into the peak fever swamp of wokeness at the time.
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  She was basically arguing
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  that people have different genetic predispositions to succeeding in society and at school specifically,
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  and that progressives shouldn't be afraid of studying this and of saying so in order to create
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  a fairer society.
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  But the very idea that any genetic basis to success might be relevant
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  was so anathema to many lefties in that moment of peak wokeness that many of her colleagues,
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  including William Darity, who was a professor of public policy at Duke and maybe America's
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  leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality, and should probably have known
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  better, compared her work, quite unfairly, to Holocaust denial research, to creationism,
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  to climate change denial.
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  The New Yorker magazine subsequently profiled her.
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  She ended up on a bunch
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  of podcasts, including Chris Williamson's and Sam Harris's.
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  But she continued to study how our genes
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  influence our behavior.
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  The result is her new book, Original Sin.
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  It's subtitled On the Genetics
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  of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness.
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  She joins me to discuss nature and
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  nurture, free will, genetic bases for behavior, and what taking acid taught her about being human.
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  I hope you enjoy, as much as I did, the one and only Professor Catherine Page Harden.
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  should we just start with maybe nature versus nurture since we're talking about family
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  something light something easy something light like um you know parents and children alike
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  of whom uh we're all the latter and some of us the former will note that there are differences
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  between human beings that don't seem to be explicable by uh you know our own prowess as
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  parents.
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  What do people understand correctly and what do people misunderstand about nature and
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  nurture?
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  So I think people understand correctly that nature matters.
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  There's this great study
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  that I love where they just ask people, you know, with no necessarily like scientific or technical
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  background, they just ask them, how much do you think genes make a difference for your height,
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  Your eye color, your intelligence, your personality, your risk for mental illness.
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  And then they compared people's estimates with what is the best published estimate from a good twin study on how much genetics makes a difference for these outcomes.
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  And what you see is that people's intuitions are actually pretty good.
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  So they know that genes matter for height and genes matter for schizophrenia and then maybe matter, you know, somewhat but not as much for body weight.
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  And the thing I love about this study is that the people who are most accurate were parents of more than one child.
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  And I think that makes so much sense because as a parent, you have this front row seat to like, I'm attempting to do things similarly.
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  I've got my style.
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  And yet these two people or more, I have three now, came into the world and
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  they are not the same, right?
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  They're their own people and that is not me.
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  So what is going on
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  with them?
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  That seems to be child-driven.
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  So I think that people are... And the three kids that
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  you have are with two different fathers, your first husband and your current partner.
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  And do
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  you notice any more difference just anecdotally in your own life between the ones who have the
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  same partner and the other i think what it's done is that i've blamed my first partner for certain
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  traits and then they've showed up in the third one right and i'm like oh like i'm the problem
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  it's me or it's just random or it's just you know whatever um but yeah i mean i think that they and
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  also none of my children look like me so they all look like they're um i have two are you sure
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  they're yours Catherine you know when you I had a c-section with all of them and they when you
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  have a c-section you know there's the drape and then at some point they like pull the drape down
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  and they just like push the child up like it's like this is your like tenderloin you're buying
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  from the grocery store yeah they could have given me anything I don't know what you were doing behind
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  the veil there yeah you could have thrown mine out and swapped it yeah so I I do I have this front
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  row seats to you know genetic variation and half siblings and then my older children have a have
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  two half siblings on their dad's side too so they're seeing you know there's like five children
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  between our kind of modern family here and they're all different from each other even though we all
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  parent in kind of roughly similar ways and so we do see this genetic diversity play out
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  in our own families from the time the kids are young.
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  Just to clarify for people, often when we think about genes,
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  I mean, let's talk about eye color because you mentioned it.
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  Obviously, eye color is 100% genes, right?
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  There's nothing environmental on eye color.
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  Not that I know of, yeah.
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  And yet it would not be true to say that you can predict the eye color
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  of a baby on the basis purely of its parents
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  because you don't know which genes it's going to get and which ones might be recessive unless you
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  looked unless you looked at their dna in its entirety and even then could you you could guess
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  yeah i mean if you've ever done 23andme they'll do things like you might have you probably have
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  blue eyes but you might have green eyes right and that's because eye colors um determined by
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  our genetics but it's determined by more than one gene and we get two copies of every gene and those
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  can interact with each other in ways.
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  And so even within families, you get the surprises.
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  So I think that's what people don't get right often is they tend to think of the gene,
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  like the eye color gene or their hair color gene.
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  But even for simple things, there's really the
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  gene.
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  And as soon as you get into psychology, we're talking about thousands of genes that are
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  interacting with each other.
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  And their actions can be somewhat unpredictable from how those genes
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  combined in the parents.
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  So I think the potential for surprise is something that people underestimate
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  when they're talking about genes.
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  Right, but I'm just trying to tease out the difference between
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  the surprise that two people who are combining their genes in the form of reproduction might
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  have about the strange shuffling of the genetic cards that comes out in their child versus the
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  surprise in the individual of the child once we know exactly what their genome is as to how those
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  genes get expressed does that make sense both yes so i think there's both um unpredictability
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  from the parental phenotype the parental traits that you know about unpredictability about what's
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  lurking in their DNA that might recombine.
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  And then for eye color, if we knew someone's DNA
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  perfectly, we could probably predict their eye color perfectly.
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  But as soon as we move to anything
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  psychological or behavioral, there's also this potential for surprise in the gap between what
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  the DNA is and what the outcome is.
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  I can give you an example that I think is useful.
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  So in Texas,
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  there was this couple and they had a bull named chance have you ever heard this story before
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  so chance was this like very docile bull it was very tame i think they took it with them
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  on like a like a late night talk show one time and then it died and they had preserved some of
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  its tissue and so they asked scientists at texas a&m to clone the bull that had died and then they
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  named the cloned bull second chance and then second chance gored its owners like with its horns
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  it was incredibly aggressive and then it did it again so that when i think about surprise like
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  that's literally the exact same dna right like they cloned this bull and yet they still couldn't
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  project what the behavior of this bull was going to be.
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  And it turned out very, very different
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  because the rearing environment, because of the epigenetics, because of all the individual
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  variability that goes into building behavior is, I think, fundamentally unpredictable when we're
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  talking about most of these kind of personality behavior things.
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  Yes, right.
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  And let's just park
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  for a moment because it'll come up in some people's minds.
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  Some of the diseases that are
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  literally just a one-to-one certain 100% based on your genes, Huntington's disease, things like
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  that, where if you've got the gene, you've got the disease, there's no ifs or buts and there's
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  nothing environmental that's going to happen about it, right?
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  So I don't think there's anything much
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  interesting to say about those, right?
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  Yeah.
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  I mean, those are the things that as soon as you
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  have like one gene that causes something, they take that out of psychology and it's medicine,
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  it's neurology.
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  Like psychology to some extent gets all of the stuff that we can't explain
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  with just one clear causal factor.
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  Yes, yes.
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  No, no, I'm just parking the physiological stuff
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  so that we can get to psychology
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  because it's so much messier.
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  I mean, what is also interesting,
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  the chance the bull example
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  is essentially just the same phenomenon
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  as identical twins anywhere in the world, right?
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  And all of the differences that you're going to see
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  between two identical twins
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  are going to be non-genetic differences.
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  They're either going to be epigenetic
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  or they're going to be environmental.
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  What's epigenetic?
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  so epigenetic is um epi is above so it's above the genome so you can think about your dna
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  you have that long dna molecule the familiar double helix but in your cells it's not just
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  hanging out all unwound like that it's bundled up together some some you might think of it as like
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  um like the way they wind yarn if you're a knitter right it's wound into this kind of really tight
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  ball.
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  And then there's a lot of mechanisms that make certain parts of the genome available to the
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  cell to be active in the cell, to be able to do anything.
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  And all of those mechanisms aren't
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  affecting the actual like DNA code, like that sequence of A, C, T's and G's that make up your
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  DNA, but they are affecting how the genome is being used by the body to make stuff.
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  You know,
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  like the molecule DNA is just sitting there.
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  It's a set of instructions.
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  It's a set of instructions
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  for the cell to make things, but how are those instructions read?
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  So those epigenetic mechanisms,
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  there's lots of them.
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  And they persist across cell division.
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  So, you know, you might have
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  something that happens to you when you're a child that changes your epigenome.
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  And that epigenetic
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  mark stays with you your whole life because it sticks with you across these like cell divisions.
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  So, you know, your brain cell isn't the same one by the time you're an adult, but the epigenetic
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  mark is still there.
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  And it's a mechanism for how environment gets under the skin.
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  You know,
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  like how do we go through life experiencing things?
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  How does that change our brain?
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  It changes our brain by changing in part how our DNA is used and read by the cells that it's in.
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  right and there are some interesting studies about this right like of children who were born
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  during famine or you know who were in utero during famine i think there was some scandinavian study
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  and then there was a 9-11 study of children who were in utero in new york are you familiar with
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  that during 9-11 to see whether or not that one there's something to do with whether or not the
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  cortisol levels and the stress levels in the women who were who were close to a major tragedy had an
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  impact on the well-being of children of babies who are in utero at the time that they were going
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  through the trauma.
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  And so they use 9-11 as an example.
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  I followed it up.
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  But anyway, interesting
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  ways in which you can notice that people can have long-term embedded consequences from things that
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  are neither in their genome nor that they personally experienced themselves.
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  Yeah, that they were in utero.
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  I think the most famous of these is the Dutch Hunger Winter.
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  Right, that's what I was thinking of.
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  Yeah, yeah, explain that.
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  part of the Netherlands.
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  And it's the babies who in particular were in like the second trimester,
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  which is a really critical period for brain development.
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  If their moms were starved during
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  that period, that that seemed to have affected their body weight and their mental health in ways
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  that might be epigenetic for the rest of their lives.
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  So one of the things that I loved about
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  your new book is that it begins with an acid trip, which is always an exciting way to start a
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  scientific tome uh you know i feel like they should just they there's all sorts of fancy
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  marketing materials which are like she talks about moral luck and she talks about punishment but
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  maybe that i should throw that all that and give them the first 10 pages it's great you're having
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  sex you're on acid it's like uh what's his what is this science book this isn't like the uh the
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  science books i got in uh in high school um what is what does acid why acid why does a psychic what
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  does a psychedelic trip have to tell us about the way we're constituted?
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  Well, so I began the book
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  with this experience that my now husband and I had on a psychedelic drug in the desert.
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  And you're
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  right, that's a very unusual way to start a book, especially as an academic.
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  But what psychedelic
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  drugs do is that they change our consciousness.
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  And in particularly, they change our experience
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  of having an I, an ego that's in charge, right?
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  So ordinarily we go through our lives and it's
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  like, I'm talking to you because I'm choosing to do this.
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  And it's very common when people are on
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  any sort of psychedelic drug, LSD or psilocybin, to have this feeling of ego dissolution.
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  So you're
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  still behaving, you still have memory, you still have sensory experience, but that sense of self
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  as kind of the director in your head that's like, and now I'm doing this, and now I'm doing this,
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  and now I'm making choices, is very lucid.
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  And I think that's an interesting way to start a book
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  about what it means to have a body and what it means to be responsible for the things that we do
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  in our bodies.
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  Because for me, at least, it gave me a new kind of level of insight,
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  not just a rational understanding, but like a really kind of phenomenological understanding
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  of what the heck people are talking about when they're like,
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  well, maybe free will is kind of an illusion.
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  Maybe we're not always these rational executive
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  actors that are that are choosing things all the time you know i'm an academic i really like being
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  in my head i really like thinking about ideas and this was an experience where i felt very much like
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  myself um but also where my my faith that i knew what the wellsprings of my actions were
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  was deeply shaken.
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  And I wanted readers to begin with that kind of disorienting
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  experience as we got into the more abstract ideas that take up much of the book.
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  And having grown up as an evangelical Christian, did the psychedelic experience give you an insight
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  at all into some version of spirituality that you couldn't find in religion?
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  Oh, that's such a good question.
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  In some ways, yes.
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  You know, I grew up evangelical, and my grandparents are Pentecostal, which is a variety of Christianity that takes seriously the idea that the Holy Spirit can indwell in people, and they believe in miracles, and they believe in speaking in tongues, and they believe in mystical things.
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  and healing.
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  I think we have the biggest Pentecostal church in the world here.
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  Really?
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  I didn't know that.
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  Our last prime minister was a Pentecostal.
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  Oh, that's fascinating.
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  I didn't know that.
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  And as a child and as a young person,
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  that variety of religious experience was very inaccessible to me.
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  I don't come by a sense of mysticism or magic or woo very easily.
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  um you know i'm a i i consider myself a pretty rational sober-minded person and yet i can take
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  a molecule that binds for a particularly long time to like one of my serotonin receptors
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  and then i'm like am i one with the moss like and will i become the moss one day is the moss
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  Breathing in Miami.
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  Right.
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  And it was just like, it was so, it was so out of ordinary,
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  that sense of connectedness with the universe that I think some people can access through their
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  religious and spiritual experience.
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  I had never really been able to access that kind of experience
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  before.
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  I mean, the reason I ask is because many people get from psychedelics a sense of,
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  wow, there must be something more than just a meat computer in my head.
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  Like this is,
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  I'm now in tune with something that is genuinely strange and that might be some cosmic consciousness or something like that, that I'm usually too caught up in my own id or ego to know what to do with or to even notice.
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  and yet you describe it a little bit almost the opposite or maybe it's a corollary of it which is
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  that you were you felt like i just take this molecule it goes into the molecules in my brain
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  and now i am just a meat i really am just a biological meat computer who is capable of
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  transforming my entire conception of the universe and the whole qualia of existence just via a
• 20:09
  lab synthesized uh compound yeah and i don't know if those are the same things or if they're if
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  they're flip sides of or if they're different things okay so i think you're saying something
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  really interesting here because the way you framed it i think situates i'm a biological being
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  I'm a meat computer as kind of on the opposite side of I am consciousness and my consciousness is part of something greater than me and that consciousness is maybe woven throughout the universe.
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  whereas I actually see those things I don't when I say like I'm a biological being I don't say that
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  to to denigrate my brain or my mind or to say to to reduce it to just a biological being
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  it's how freaking amazing that I have this brain where if I manipulate how the neurons are
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  communicating with one another i feel connected to a consciousness that's bigger than me and
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  broader than me in some ways i feel like it elevated my sense of the biological rather than
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  um estranging the biological from this sense of connectedness to something larger does that make
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  kind of does that make totally yeah yeah interesting so they're sort of flip sides of
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  the same of the same phenomenon and i mean i the reason it's interesting in the context of your
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  work is if we are if our whole experience of the world is so easily tweaked by the introduction of
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  this chemical into our brain what does that tell us about our autonomy in all of the other instances
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  where that particular chemical isn't present but nonetheless our whole conception of the universe
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  and ourselves is the product of a bunch of other chemicals that are also whirring around neurons in
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  the soft tissue between our ears so like our intuitive sense of being masters of our own
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  destiny of making choices is perhaps a fiction that's generated inside our heads in the same way
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  that the numinous kind of fiction of the lsd trip is yeah is that the i think is that the leap
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  yes i mean i would i guess i wouldn't say fiction necessarily because i don't think we
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  you know to say that something's fiction implies that there's something that's
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  non-fiction and that we can know what that non-fiction is whereas i think everything is
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  a construal you know we our brains are trapped inside the dark caves of our skulls and we are
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  using our senses to construct both a perception of the world and a perception of the self.
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  And
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  when we dream, or if we are hallucinating, or if we are on drugs, it's very clear that that's a
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  construal because it begins and it ends and it's different from our ordinary consciousness.
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  But our ordinary consciousness is every bit a construal.
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  That's every bit as biologically
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  undergirded and produced as a dream or a hallucination or a psychedelic trip.
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  So one book that I really loved is Ed Young's most recent book about animal sensation.
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  And he
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  basically is like, we have these windows on the world and other animals have totally different
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  windows on the world, right?
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  They're responding to electromagnetic radiation and we don't even
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  have access to that.
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  And that's a, you know, he's using the difference in animal consciousness and
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  I'm using the difference between, you know, sober versus on drugs consciousness.
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  But I think they're
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  both a way of weirding the normal to think about how constructed our day-to-day reality is.
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  Yep.
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  Fascinating.
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  And then the grooves that exist in our brain that lead us to respond to those
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  constructions in predictable ways as individuals are in part nature, are in part nurture, right?
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  There's a genetic basis to our psychological predispositions.
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  There's also the things that
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  happen to us in life.
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  And you toy in really interesting ways with the different attitudes
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  that we have towards holding people responsible for each of those.
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  We somehow sort of feel like
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  if someone has a genetic predisposition, say to addiction or violence,
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  then they're less able to overcome that or we hold them less culpable for it than if they just had a
• 25:03
  bad sequence of events happen to them that has led them to the same behavior but what do we
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  actually know about the ability of people in a in any moment to overcome their baser drives
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  yeah oh gosh there's so there's so much in there so to go back to your first part
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  sometimes we hold people less responsible or we think that they're at least less able to overcome
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  things if they if we think it has a genetic basis versus an environmental one so there's this idea
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  that if something's genetic it's it's less changeable or more stable than if it's environmental
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  um if we think about that for like five seconds that's not true right like you you just put your
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  eyeglasses on and I'm already wearing mine.
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  Right.
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  And it's like, I have, you know, a genetic
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  predisposition to poor eyesight.
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  I've worn glasses since I was a child.
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  And it's not like anyone was
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  like, you're genetic.
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  It sucks to be you.
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  Like, no, they give me, they give me something for it.
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  Right.
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  Whereas if I'd had a, you know, a really severe traumatic experience as a child, or if I
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  had been, you know, in my mom's uterus while she was starved by the Nazis, like that's an
• 26:21
  environmental insult that might be very hard to, you know, overcome or reprogram.
• 26:28
  So the relationship
• 26:30
  between genetic and environmental and changeable and not changeable, if we think about it or look
• 26:37
  at it scientifically, it's not like not nearly as clear cut as, you know, genetic equals, you can't
• 26:42
  change it.
• 26:43
  But that is such a common first impression that like, you know, if I'm genetically
• 26:50
  predisposed to alcoholism, that I'm like doomed or destined or fated.
• 26:55
  We use a lot of like words
• 26:57
  from Greek tragedy when we describe genetics.
• 27:01
  And what I, you know, invite the reader in the book
• 27:05
  to think about is how Christian that is, actually, as a way of thinking about the self.
• 27:13
  Even amongst
• 27:14
  people who are not raised Christian, who don't think of themselves as Christian, I think, you
• 27:18
  know, if you're in the English-speaking world, you are living in a cultural context that is the,
• 27:24
  you know, a cultural inheritance of Christianity and a particular type of Christianity.
• 27:31
  and this idea that like my body is the thing that is flawed and I can't overcome it on my own
• 27:39
  um is a is a very kind of Augustinian way of viewing the self right like this that the body
• 27:47
  is what's dragging me down and the will is what's pulling me forward um so anyway I mean we can get
• 27:53
  into that more but I I do think there is this this really strong intuition that genetic means
• 27:59
  not changeable um that on reflection we know isn't true but it's really hard to dislodge
• 28:07
  i mean it may just be because we feel like we know more about how unchangeable certain
• 28:12
  physical i don't want to say i mean it's easy to get yes so it's like you know if it's like
• 28:18
  like i don't have any i can't have any control over the fact that you know as i'm aging i started
• 28:24
  not being i started needing glasses to read right but if something bad happened to me and i
• 28:29
  responded to it by drinking a bottle of vodka every night and beating my spouse it is like are
• 28:38
  we wrong to have the instinct that there's something different i mean is it wrong to say
• 28:43
  like yeah something bad happened to you get the fuck over it the solution is not to beat your
• 28:48
  spouse and drink a bottle of vodka like that does seem to me to be a different category it doesn't
• 28:53
  It doesn't strike me that it's purely, you know, post-Christian moralizing for me to feel that there's more agency that the person could be bringing to the table there than I can with my eyeglasses.
• 29:05
  No, I don't think it's just post-Christian moralizing.
• 29:08
  I mean, I think that Christianity has shaped our attitudes towards the body in ways that shape our intuitions about what it means for something to be genetic.
• 29:17
  But I think more fundamentally, humans are a social species that evolved to be in cooperation with one another.
• 29:28
  And so, you know, this intuition that, like, how people treat each other matters, and it matters to me, and it matters in a moral way or an ethical way, is very difficult to the point of impossibility of demolishing, even if you are also holding in mind the ways in which that person's behavior might be shaped by factors beyond their control.
• 29:56
  Right.
• 29:58
  For me, it was really compelling to think about or to learn more about cooperation in non-human animals or even in like bacteria, you know, have collectives.
• 30:11
  And even they punish each other.
• 30:12
  Like if this bacteria is like soaking up too much of like a mineral that all the bacteria need in the environment, the other bacteria are like, no, dude, like you don't get to do that anymore.
• 30:24
  So I think that enforcement of rules around cooperation is baked very, very deeply into the sauce about what it is to be a living thing, much less a person.
• 30:41
  that's like you know we are a social species um and that our our sense of like i'm not just upset
• 30:50
  that that happened but i'm morally outraged or resentful or also or the reverse like i think of
• 30:59
  you as praiseworthy and exemplary is part of our human architecture because we were evolved to live
• 31:06
  in community with one another.
• 31:09
  Right, right.
• 31:10
  And I think now we have this tension,
• 31:12
  which I think in my book, I don't reconcile it.
• 31:15
  I might be irreconcilable
• 31:18
  between all of that evolved architecture
• 31:22
  of like, it matters to me how you act towards me.
• 31:27
  And not just like, it matters to me,
• 31:28
  like I'm upset that it's raining,
• 31:30
  but it matters to me in a way that we call moral
• 31:33
  or a way we call ethical.
• 31:35
  and also i can i can view you from a more objective perspective and see all the reasons
• 31:42
  why you might be acting like that and what do we do with that tension of we can't help but matter
• 31:48
  to each other in this particular way and also we know that we're all creatures that are subject to
• 31:56
  forces beyond our control what do we do with that combination i think is really one of the puzzles
• 32:03
  of our lives right now.
• 32:05
  And I mean, I suppose another thing that I get from your book is that on that first point
• 32:09
  of like, I judge you for your misbehavior, in contrast to the second point, which is,
• 32:14
  and I also understand it, the judging you from your behavior, you can also remove from
• 32:19
  the realm of morality and sin.
• 32:22
  Like you could, there could be a pragmatic sociological reason for the bacteria to punish
• 32:30
  other bacteria that misbehave.
• 32:33
  without casting moral aspersions on them.
• 32:35
  In the same way that we might try to protect
• 32:38
  swimmers at a Sydney beach from sharks without morally judging the sharks from wanting to eat
• 32:44
  people, you know, there might be sociological reasons and cultural reasons for punishing
• 32:51
  misbehavior, but removing that punishment from some kind of highly moralistic judgment about
• 32:57
  the evil of the person who did it, even if they committed an act that was, you know,
• 33:02
  beyond the pale and there are several philosophers who have explicitly argued for that position um
• 33:11
  or and also other scientists i mean i think this was robert sapolsky's recent book determined
• 33:16
  made this yes he's been on this show people should listen to it um where you know he's like
• 33:25
  it's wrong to hate someone or to morally resent someone to, he wouldn't even say wrong, I guess,
• 33:33
  he would say it's inappropriate to morally resent someone or hate someone for their actions.
• 33:39
  It's
• 33:39
  like hating the sky when it rains.
• 33:41
  It's like hating a tiger for preying on someone.
• 33:47
  And I think there's kind of, for me, I can break this conversation out into two spheres,
• 33:54
  which is our private personal relationships and also how we're going to treat justice
• 34:02
  on an institutional or state level.
• 34:05
  So I think, particularly in America, which is an incredibly
• 34:10
  retributive society, where we lock so many people up, moving towards a model where we say,
• 34:18
  we understand that your behavior is shaped by forces beyond your control,
• 34:25
  and also we need to protect people and show that there's consequences for negative action,
• 34:30
  and it's more dispassionate, I guess.
• 34:35
  I can see some real advantages of that,
• 34:39
  but I also find something, I guess, emotionally dissatisfying about the idea that we can reduce
• 34:47
  or eliminate that sense of what Peter Strassen called reactive attitudes
• 34:57
  from our relationships with each other, right?
• 35:00
  Like if your partner cheated on you and you found out about it
• 35:06
  and you were like, you betrayed our vows and our relationship
• 35:12
  and then someone came to you and said, you know,
• 35:16
  here's all the reasons why he did it and um it's just it's just kind of sad that you're mad at him
• 35:23
  because it's like being mad at the clouds for raining like yeah he hurt you right like i feel
• 35:29
  like it does something that kind of um i find a little bit like morally or a little bit um
• 35:36
  condescending in a way to be like oh that's so cute that you think he had control over it and
• 35:42
  that you're mad at him.
• 35:43
  Of course you're mad at him.
• 35:44
  You're in relationship with him.
• 35:46
  And part of
• 35:46
  being in relationship with people is that they're going to matter to you in a particular way,
• 35:50
  which we call moral.
• 35:52
  Yeah.
• 35:53
  Also, I mean, you just wouldn't be able to sustain any contracts with
• 35:57
  each other.
• 35:57
  I'm being crude by calling marriage a contract, but you know, anything like that,
• 36:04
  you wouldn't be able to sustain any ongoing commitments to each other if there wasn't the
• 36:08
  reliable prediction that people are going to get really pissed off when you break your word
• 36:12
  right it's almost like if i didn't if everyone was so enlightened that they just treated other
• 36:17
  people's misbehavior as the clouds raining then there would be less penalty for misbehavior and
• 36:23
  consequently more people would misbehave so like yeah i think so and also the the kind of
• 36:30
  anticipation of how your social group will be upset at you if you break rules we also internalize
• 36:38
  that very early in terms of guilt and shame.
• 36:42
  You know, we have moral emotions, which are
• 36:44
  internal reflections of our judgments about how our behavior will seem to other people that we
• 36:51
  care about.
• 36:53
  And, you know, there are people who have very little moral emotions about themselves
• 36:58
  who have very little guilt and shame.
• 37:00
  And we call those people psychopaths.
• 37:03
  there's something about the like the explicitly self-referential emotion that does have a moral
• 37:10
  component that i think is is an important part of human development yeah what do you make of
• 37:15
  the president just as an aside catherine just because i mean like there's you know there's a
• 37:20
  lot of there's a lot of monday morning quarterbacking and psychoanalyzing from you know from a distance
• 37:26
  But he's obviously, I can't, I don't quite yet have a good theory of mind here about whether he is genuinely impervious to the criticisms that he would get from other people or whether that's just a cover because he cares so deeply about what other people think of him.
• 37:47
  Like, what's your guess?
• 37:51
  So abstracting away from a particular individual.
• 37:56
  Speaking hypothetically about general people you know who may or may not be narcissists.
• 38:03
  The psychoanalytic conception of narcissism is one in which someone has to build a very inflated and grandiose external projection of themselves.
• 38:22
  Because in their squishy core, they feel worthless and they feel empty and they feel like nothing.
• 38:30
  And the hallmark of narcissism, pathological narcissism, is that because that deep core feels so insignificant, and because the carapace that they've built for themselves is so disconnected from that inner core,
• 38:53
  there is no amount of praise and no amount of power that will ever make them feel like enough
• 39:01
  it is a bottomless bucket and so you know the hallmark of talking to someone like i think a
• 39:09
  great you know in your life your listeners can take this if you want to know are you dealing
• 39:13
  with someone with a narcissistic personality is to start ramping up the compliments to the point
• 39:19
  where you think at any point now they're going to be like plays plays this is weird um and if
• 39:29
  someone has narcissism you're going to be able to ramp that up a lot more and if someone is truly
• 39:35
  like you know in a very extreme of pathological narcissism what you'll find is that there's no
• 39:40
  limit to um the amount of adoration and adulation and and external indicators of that that they
• 39:49
  desire and want and take totally seriously so if you made up a peace prize and you were like
• 39:55
  here's a peace prize like if someone with a with an adaptive personality would be like what is this
• 39:59
  thing you're giving me right what's a hallmark of narcissism would be like i got another medal
• 40:05
  and that again is because the inner self is is feel so devastatingly worthless i actually think
• 40:13
  it would be um you know i talk about this in the book that i think i don't really believe in hell
• 40:19
  I don't believe in an infernal place of torment in the afterlife.
• 40:23
  My conception of hell is being yourself.
• 40:27
  And I think people can construct hell for themselves on this earth.
• 40:33
  And I think to live as a pathological narcissist,
• 40:36
  I think it would be hell every moment to be alive.
• 40:41
  What does the whole feel like?
• 40:45
  What does the whole feel like for someone who is
• 40:49
  um i mean i don't think i have a narcissistic personality so i'm but i mean are there reports
• 40:58
  in the literature or anything about people describe people who have had their guard broken
• 41:02
  down enough to be able to describe it or like if you put one of them on the acid trip that you went
• 41:07
  on like and they got in touch with yeah if they got you know with that sense of the numinous would
• 41:15
  they like while they're weeping on the ground uh rocking back and forth in a fetal position
• 41:21
  uh on the plains of west texas or wherever it was what
• 41:29
  what would be the closest analog do you suspect to that feeling that of constantly having to fill
• 41:34
  something up is it like when you're really embarrassed about something or is it
• 41:39
  when you feel like nobody loves you and you're all alone
• 41:44
  I think it would be like, have you ever felt sort of worthless or humiliated?
• 41:52
  Like both rejected and small.
• 41:55
  I think that's, you know, I think of like those moments where you think,
• 42:04
  you know, we need some dose of self-esteem to make it through the day.
• 42:08
  and and we i think we've all had moments where you really are like yeah where someone has slighted you
• 42:15
  or someone has beat you and then they're really making you know that they beat you
• 42:20
  yeah with no grace maybe that's because that because that is what i don't want to keep talking
• 42:26
  about the individual person because i know that you live in a country where people can get punished
• 42:31
  for criticizing the chief executive of the nation which is absolutely bonkers but that is the
• 42:37
  impression that one gets from afar isn't it that there's a constant sense of grievance like the
• 42:40
  why is the whole world so ungrateful to me and so mean all the time to me and so uh it's like when
• 42:48
  someone cuts you off in traffic and then they just make the amber light and you get stuck behind the
• 42:55
  red light you're like i can't believe not only did they cut me off but they also got through before
• 42:59
  me life the universe isn't fair it's almost like every single moment of his life is that
• 43:04
  yeah i have this line in my book where i'm i'm borrowing from a philosopher
• 43:10
  um and you know sometimes when people some does do something to us we're like
• 43:17
  who do you think you are but i think in that moment we're actually asking like
• 43:21
  who do you think i am that you think you can treat me this way and get away with it
• 43:30
  and that anger is coming from a place of defending the status of the self right like i'm not so lowly
• 43:40
  that you are entitled to treat me like this and get away with it there's an anger there's an anger
• 43:46
  that can be a defense of one's own worth but if you're going into every interaction already feeling
• 43:55
  deeply subconsciously that you are worthless the corresponding reaction of aggression and
• 44:03
  grievance is going to be so much more right because because the latent question behind there
• 44:09
  is who do you think i am maybe i am really as worthless as i feel in my you know darkest nights
• 44:16
  of the soul and so psychologically what do we know again coming back to in fact before we leave free
• 44:23
  free will i just think it's it's worth noting that this whole question which i feel like has become
• 44:29
  a much more popular question over the past maybe five or ten years uh certainly in podcaster stand
• 44:35
  about free will and i think there's more of a consensus than there was when i was coming of
• 44:42
  age at university that free will doesn't exist uh today than perhaps there was um i don't know if
• 44:49
  that's true or if that's just my impression in the circles that I swim in.
• 44:52
  But it seems to sort of obviate or render redundant the question
• 44:58
  about nature versus nurture in a way because if you don't have,
• 45:05
  you know, if the sense that you are choosing in any given moment
• 45:09
  is an illusion, it's just an artifact of the whirring
• 45:13
  of what's going on inside your head and the universe at large,
• 45:17
  then it doesn't really matter whether or not you are the consequence of things that have happened
• 45:22
  to you or of your genome because either way any sense of choice would be illusory is that true
• 45:32
  yes i mean i think if if you're coming at this from the perspective of your uh you know a
• 45:38
  determinist non-compatibilist you know you think that having free will is incompatible with living
• 45:45
  in a determinist universe and therefore we do not have free will so therefore we don't have
• 45:52
  moral responsibility i wouldn't describe myself that way but that is a position that
• 45:57
  many philosophers and psychologists do have then yes from that perspective it doesn't matter
• 46:03
  whether the things that are determining your behavior are genetic or environmental or their
• 46:07
  interaction it's all part of the big causal chain that leads to your behavior which is why i find it
• 46:15
  interesting that this i think this is an example in which people's lay intuitions and academic
• 46:24
  discourse have really diverged yeah so a lot of academic philosophy will say well the nature
• 46:29
  nurture question is dead it's all nature by nurture interaction and none of that matters
• 46:34
  at all because we don't have free will anyways but if you ask people um to reason about okay
• 46:42
  well, this person committed a crime because they were abused as a child versus this person
• 46:49
  committed a crime because they are a natural born killer and they inherited genes that make
• 46:55
  them very antisocial.
• 46:57
  People do reason differently about the nature versus the nurture, which suggests
• 47:03
  that there's something other than an argument about free will or just free will that's going
• 47:11
  into their intuitions and this isn't necessarily like presumably certainly catherine uh reason
• 47:18
  differently about it if you say that the person just woke up one morning and decided to kill
• 47:21
  somebody yes yeah right then obviously people have an illusion obviously people do believe in
• 47:29
  free will because they do believe that there's something different about deciding to kill
• 47:32
  someone on a whim and being born with a propensity to to violence that is then encouraged by a you
• 47:39
  because you were recruited as a child soldier
• 47:41
  and had a brutalizing and were abused throughout your life.
• 47:45
  Yeah.
• 47:46
  I mean, so if you don't...
• 47:47
  Yeah, sorry.
• 47:48
  I was going to say, yes.
• 47:49
  I mean, as soon as there's a will involved,
• 47:51
  as soon as there's a human behaving involved,
• 47:55
  people's reasoning about it go sideways
• 48:00
  in all sorts of different ways.
• 48:02
  Their reasoning about it starts to become very varied
• 48:05
  and not always internally consistent
• 48:08
  and certainly suggests that we don't think about other people
• 48:11
  the way that we think about the unpredictability of the weather at all.
• 48:15
  Yeah, but why is it not consistent?
• 48:17
  I mean, if you're not a determinist,
• 48:18
  then there's nothing inconsistent about saying
• 48:20
  that it's worse to get up in the morning and decide to kill somebody
• 48:22
  than to be compelled to kill somebody by your environment.
• 48:26
  It's only inconsistent if you're a determinist, isn't it?
• 48:30
  Is it only inconsistent?
• 48:33
  No, I think it's just, it's not really about the inconsistency.
• 48:37
  I don't think most people are determinists.
• 48:38
  Like, I don't think if you ask Australians or Americans on the street, like, I think they believe in free will and they believe in and they're kind of unconvinced by academic arguments in favor of there not being free will.
• 48:51
  um i think what's it's not so much an inconsistency but a difference in so for instance if you
• 48:58
  um if you tell people that um uh that weight or sexual orientation is very influenced by genes
• 49:08
  um then that has a pretty predictable effect of people thinking that how much you weigh or
• 49:14
  whether or not you're gay or straight is not a moral issue to even be judged so there's something
• 49:20
  that like robs the behavior of people's tendency towards judgment by bringing up biology um whereas
• 49:30
  if you say um here's a criminal defendant and he murdered someone and his father was also in death
• 49:37
  row and he might have inherited a predisposition towards violence that does not at all make people
• 49:43
  be like well maybe it's not a moral issue or maybe he's less responsible for it if anything
• 49:49
  it actually makes people more punitive because the person is perceived as more dangerous or like
• 49:55
  more, you know, less likely to be rehabilitated, less likely to be changeable.
• 50:01
  Whereas if you say,
• 50:02
  okay, well, this person was abused as a child, then that tends to be mitigating in these capital
• 50:09
  cases.
• 50:10
  So you have this situation in which like bringing up genes or environment can either be
• 50:15
  mitigating or um or make people more punitive depending on whether it's genes or environment
• 50:22
  but also depending on the phenotype and it seems to be as soon as there's like a perception of harm
• 50:27
  or a victim involved then genes go from being like oh well this can't be moral this can't be
• 50:33
  a moral choice to actually making many people's attitudes harsher and i think that's an interesting
• 50:39
  pattern because it doesn't fit with any of academic philosophy's kind of arguments about
• 50:46
  how we should think about causes and responsibility and also it's really inconsistent like depending
• 50:53
  on what behavior you're talking about and depending on whether the factor involves is
• 50:58
  genes versus environment so that's kind of one of the puzzles that i'm trying to pull out in this
• 51:02
  book is what's going on there like what are what are the different models of what it means to be
• 51:08
  genetic that people are drawing on when they're trying to make sense of how this science should
• 51:15
  affect their judgments of people in their lives or judgments of them politically,
• 51:21
  you know, making sense of the behavior of the people around them.
• 51:25
  Yeah.
• 51:25
  I mean, you're also pointing a bit to the cultural and political controversies that
• 51:30
  you encountered during the Great Awokening, you know, five years or so ago for simply bravely
• 51:36
  doing your own research and while the you know a certain segment of the left was losing its mind
• 51:41
  about certain taboo issues one of which was the idea that there might be genetic predispositions
• 51:46
  to things in certain populations and what you just said about choice and sexuality is interesting
• 51:52
  because a very easy strategic cultural way to win an argument in favor of rights for a minority
• 52:01
  group is just to claim that they don't have any choice in the matter the whole born this way
• 52:06
  approach to gay rights, right?
• 52:08
  Gay people are just born gay.
• 52:10
  There's nothing they can do about it.
• 52:12
  Therefore, you can't judge them for it.
• 52:15
  I'm more on the side of Marsha Gessen, who, you know,
• 52:18
  the great New Yorker writer and Russian dissident, who's like, oh, I wasn't quite, I mean, I was
• 52:23
  obviously born this way, but I still have lots of ways that I could have chosen to live my life.
• 52:27
  And
• 52:28
  now she's transitioning and I think she's a guy now, so I'm probably misgendering her and I
• 52:32
  apologize if so but like who cares either way she's very loosey-goosey about it um i can imagine
• 52:40
  a universe in which i was married to a woman and it wouldn't have been terrible i've had relationships
• 52:44
  with women i prefer to be married to a guy we've got a great life this is awesome um so like you
• 52:51
  know we have protections for religion freedom of religion that's a choice you don't have to be you
• 52:56
  know i mean you are of course usually the religion of your parents but you don't have to be you can
• 53:01
  convert to anything and we don't think that that's a less legitimate reason for you to
• 53:05
  be given our consideration and not discriminated against it's like you know the the claim that i
• 53:13
  am powerless in some way is like the left's great trump card to be worthy of consideration in the
• 53:22
  public square and that may actually be a losing card because we may find out that actually we
• 53:29
  we're all powerless to the same degree and we're all powerful to the same degree what do you make
• 53:35
  of that i mean i think that you're you're you're pointing at something that a lot of scholars have
• 53:41
  written about which is that the idea of sexual orientation as being genetic biological immutable
• 53:52
  was extremely important rhetorically in the 80s and 90s
• 53:58
  as gays and lesbians were winning more civil rights.
• 54:03
  And then once they were won, or many of them were won,
• 54:08
  not to imply that that project's complete,
• 54:12
  then people started to question whether that narrative was even necessary
• 54:17
  and started to ask, well, like, what if my sexual orientation is a choice?
• 54:22
  Like, does that
• 54:25
  invalidate my claim to civil rights?
• 54:27
  Like, I'm still pursuing what I think is a good life in
• 54:31
  a pluralistic liberal society.
• 54:33
  I'm not harming anyone.
• 54:35
  So, like, what does it matter what the
• 54:38
  cause of it is?
• 54:40
  I think an interesting parallel to that story, and I don't mean to compare sexual
• 54:44
  orientation to autism spectrum disorders, but I think that the narrative around genetics has
• 54:52
  followed a similarly interesting arc, which is autism as being caused by bad mothers.
• 55:00
  And then, no, it's not the mom's fault.
• 55:03
  It's genetic.
• 55:03
  It's heritable.
• 55:05
  It's a psychiatric
• 55:06
  disease.
• 55:07
  And so the genetics was very important in reducing moral stigma around autism.
• 55:13
  And now
• 55:13
  many people are like well maybe it's genetic but like also like is it even a disease like maybe
• 55:20
  autism is part of my identity like maybe i don't want to be cured of my autism maybe this is like
• 55:26
  you know a human difference that like you're stigmatizing because it's inconvenient for you
• 55:31
  but like it's is another human difference just like sexual orientation so there seems to be
• 55:37
  something that's important about the biological narrative at the beginning of a social movement
• 55:44
  when you're trying to destigmatize it morally and then not be permanently necessary as the
• 55:51
  social situation evolves and so i wonder also if we're going to see a similar sort of thing
• 56:00
  with weight and weight stigma where right now we're in the throes of it's you know um
• 56:08
  being fat is not a choice your weight is not a choice your appetite isn't a choice look it's a
• 56:13
  biological phenomenon we can tinker it with it when you we give you a glp-1 agonist and i wonder
• 56:20
  if that reduces moral stigma around weight enough we will see in 15 years actually i just like eating
• 56:27
  a lot and like i like being weighed i'm like what does it matter like i'm not harming anyone you
• 56:31
  know um so i all of that to say i i think it goes back to this idea that there is not
• 56:40
  one narrative about the relationship between genes and blame it's something that depends on
• 56:45
  the phenotype um or the behavior that you're looking at but also i think depends on where
• 56:51
  in the arc of the moral conversation we are as a society and it can be leaned on more heavily and
• 56:58
  then kind of moved away from depending on other factors yeah i mean you can imagine that if people
• 57:05
  have a deeply held religious conviction that homosexuality is evil then it's going to be
• 57:11
  harder to sway them even if you say that it's not it's you know we're helpless in the face of the
• 57:17
  way that we're hardwired than if they're more tolerant so and they might even say look everyone
• 57:21
  inherits sin you're still on the hook for it exactly yes and i've spoken to people like that
• 57:25
  absolutely yeah who say like you know when i say you know i've had arguments where i you know
• 57:30
  people who object to you know surrogacy or something like that on the you know or to ivf
• 57:36
  and i'll say so you know why don't i get to have a family if my kids are well looked after and loved
• 57:42
  and uh they'll be like you can have a family you just can't do it with a man yeah you're you're
• 57:48
  able to have a family find a woman have a family like you buy like the the imposition against
• 57:55
  Josh Zep's not having a family isn't invented by culture or religion, they say.
• 57:59
  It's biology.
• 58:01
  Like, you know, you're choosing to be in a relationship that is non-reproductive.
• 58:04
  Well,
• 58:04
  that's fine.
• 58:05
  Then don't have kids.
• 58:06
  And I sort of understand the, I mean, I think it's obviously
• 58:09
  misguided and cruel and pointless, but I understand the logic there where, you know, from their
• 58:13
  perspective, they're just talking about blunt facts.
• 58:16
  They're not, you know, there doesn't have,
• 58:19
  there doesn't even have to be a moral component coming into it from their point of view.
• 58:23
  I mean, you're reminding me on the question of the phenotype and how much judgment we have about the particular behavior will influence how we feel comfortable talking about our choice around it.
• 58:34
  I was on a panel show in Australia and there was some conversation about, sorry to bring up a touchy subject, but pedophilia and pedophiles.
• 58:47
  and in the production meeting before the show i said rather provocatively i mean
• 58:55
  obviously what's wrong is the acts is the acts that they do but i don't not commit those acts
• 59:04
  because i'm a good person and i don't not feel those urges because i'm a good person
• 59:09
  I just don't feel attracted towards infants.
• 59:13
  And so in some ways, you know, almost like sexuality, I mean, and I said, you know, I mean, I didn't choose to be attracted to the people who I'm attracted to.
• 59:24
  It would be a kind of a prison to be attracted, to find myself attracted to prepubescent children or something.
• 59:31
  and that is no way to excuse people who act on those things.
• 59:35
  But it's just to understand that, you know,
• 59:38
  we should be a little bit hesitant about patting ourselves on the back
• 59:41
  too much for not doing something that we have no desire to do
• 59:43
  in the first place.
• 59:44
  And then when we got on the air, one of my co-hosts,
• 59:48
  with about seven seconds to go before an ad break, said,
• 59:52
  I mean, it's sort of like, you know, gay people,
• 59:53
  they don't get to choose like who they're attracted to either
• 59:56
  in the context of pedophilia.
• 59:57
  And then we had to throw to a break.
• 59:59
  And then for the next two weeks, she was just, she had to, you know, quit Twitter.
• 1:00:04
  Like it was, you know, you can imagine what, what.
• 1:00:06
  Yes.
• 1:00:06
  So, but I think, I mean, doesn't the point still sort of stand?
• 1:00:13
  Like you don't get to choose.
• 1:00:17
  You might get to choose what you, how you respond to what you want, but you don't get to choose what you want.
• 1:00:24
  Yeah.
• 1:00:24
  I mean, so there, I have so much, so much to say in response to that.
• 1:00:29
  And oh my gosh, that poor anchor or person online.
• 1:00:37
  For me, the pedophilia example is really helpful for defining how I think I think about the relationship between control and choice and responsibility differently than many of the other perspectives that I've encountered in the literature.
• 1:01:00
  so um you know we've already talked about the determinist perspective so the determinist
• 1:01:07
  perspective is you know everyone is we live in a determinist universe everyone's behavior is caused
• 1:01:12
  by forces that they don't have control over and so choice is an illusion and so we can't be morally
• 1:01:20
  responsible for anything that we do not really we can't really deserve um any any censure or blame
• 1:01:28
  or punishment because we didn't have any choice.
• 1:01:33
  And then there were people that call themselves
• 1:01:34
  compatibilists and they basically say like, we can still have choice and it's maybe not just
• 1:01:40
  like this disembodied choice, you know, but having free will, some freedom is compatible
• 1:01:47
  with living in a universe where we're caused by things.
• 1:01:51
  And that, and it's on the basis of that
• 1:01:53
  freedom, that we're morally responsible to each other.
• 1:01:57
  I think of it differently, which is that
• 1:01:59
  I don't know if we live in a determinist universe and I don't know if we have free will.
• 1:02:05
  I think
• 1:02:05
  those are metaphysical questions that are a little bit beyond my pay grade.
• 1:02:10
  But as a psychologist,
• 1:02:11
  I can see that all of us are shaped by the luck of being the sort of people that we are,
• 1:02:17
  of having the sort of upbringings we have and having the sort of brain that we have.
• 1:02:22
  and I think we're responsible for how we behave anyways.
• 1:02:26
  So it's not that I necessarily think that
• 1:02:28
  free will is compatible with the metaphysics of the universe.
• 1:02:31
  I don't know the answer to that
• 1:02:32
  question.
• 1:02:33
  But I think that being responsible for what we do is compatible with not having
• 1:02:40
  that much control over a lot of the wellsprings of our behavior.
• 1:02:45
  And that can feel like a really
• 1:02:48
  horrible conclusion.
• 1:02:49
  Like you're on the hook for things that you didn't even choose, right?
• 1:02:53
  But we do that already, right?
• 1:02:56
  We might say to someone, yes, from bad luck, I don't know what
• 1:03:02
  happened with your upbringing and your genetics and your brain development that made you attracted
• 1:03:09
  to prepubescent children, but you still don't get to do that.
• 1:03:12
  And if you do it, it's bad.
• 1:03:14
  And we're
• 1:03:14
  going to hold you morally responsible for it and i'm i'm you know i those moral intuitions feel
• 1:03:22
  okay to me so i think once we move responsibility from this like in some ways from this free will
• 1:03:30
  question of like what people deserve in terms of like heaven and hell like are they really good or
• 1:03:35
  bad or the judgment of their souls to how do we hold each other accountable in our society like
• 1:03:42
  how do we want to treat the person who might behave horribly and also be behaving horribly
• 1:03:50
  because they got terrible luck like how do we treat them in a way that respects both of those
• 1:03:56
  things and i think the example of someone who engages in childhood sexual abuse is like you
• 1:04:03
  know the most pointed example of both how difficult that is and also how important that is to recognize
• 1:04:10
  both their humanity and the grievousness
• 1:04:15
  of how they're harming other people.
• 1:04:17
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:18
  You're reminding me of a stand-up comic
• 1:04:21
  got up on stage and just looked at the crowd
• 1:04:24
  and said,
• 1:04:27
  celibate pedophiles are the best of us.
• 1:04:32
  And the audience just was like,
• 1:04:35
  and then it took about 10 or 15 seconds
• 1:04:37
  and the laugh started to build
• 1:04:39
  and it ended up being a huge roaring laugh because, yeah, yeah,
• 1:04:44
  celibate pedophiles are the best of us.
• 1:04:46
  How do you think about, I mean, that's all the very,
• 1:04:48
  what you just said about free will does sound a little bit to the philosopher
• 1:04:52
  like a dodge about determinism.
• 1:04:54
  Like how do you think, I mean, it sounds like you're basically
• 1:04:57
  just repackaging the argument about there are sociological reasons
• 1:05:01
  why we ought to pretend that people have choice even though they don't.
• 1:05:05
  How do you think inside your own head about your own decision choices?
• 1:05:09
  making if you're not a determinist like where is your free will coming from in the robert sapolsky
• 1:05:17
  universe yeah i mean i don't know that i have it i don't know i mean i i literally don't know
• 1:05:25
  i i wrote a whole book about this and if you'll notice my chapter on free will it's basically like
• 1:05:33
  there's lots of good reasons to think that all of our lives are structured and also it's really
• 1:05:40
  impossible for us to give up except when we're on drugs this sense of ourselves as freely choosing
• 1:05:48
  and it's something that we see emerge in children very young the sense of themselves as an agent
• 1:05:55
  um so i you know it's like well how do you build a life off of agnosticism how do you build a life
• 1:06:06
  out of a principle not knowing um and for me well i mean yeah it may just be moot
• 1:06:14
  right i mean i think that's where i am i think i'm just sort of at the point where like
• 1:06:17
  what what even hinges on this like we you know we obviously have a lot less
• 1:06:24
  control over the skin that we find ourselves in than a highly retributive society full of
• 1:06:30
  damnation and you know fire and brimstone we assume but at the same time it's obviously
• 1:06:37
  a fact of human psychology that we are convinced that we have free will and that we're making
• 1:06:44
  choices and that seems to be constructive sociologically and culturally in terms of
• 1:06:48
  holding ourselves to account so at the end of the day it's sort of who cares it's almost like the
• 1:06:52
  simulation argument for the universe like is the whole universe a simulation in a computer i mean
• 1:06:56
  maybe what hinges on what are we gonna do about it you know what are you gonna do about it yeah
• 1:07:00
  does it does it change anything about how one ought to behave or how one ought to think about
• 1:07:04
  the nature of things um yes i have a colleague here who's a philosopher and he has a um a great
• 1:07:12
  article brief article on free will and in it he says we've exhausted all the options
• 1:07:17
  philosophically we should get off the metaphysical carousel and take up psychology and i'm like yes
• 1:07:23
  as a psychologist i will yes exactly all right let's talk about the psychology of free will and
• 1:07:29
  human and the ways in which like our genes can uh affect our behavior there are some interesting
• 1:07:35
  examples like young men and violence what are the gene there are literally genes that you can find
• 1:07:41
  that will be predictive of a propensity for violence in young men?
• 1:07:46
  Yes.
• 1:07:47
  So there's kind of
• 1:07:49
  two types of genetic influence that we can think about.
• 1:07:54
  And one are very rare genetic variants.
• 1:08:00
  So
• 1:08:00
  these are things that occur in just a few families, just a few people.
• 1:08:05
  They're weeded out by evolution
• 1:08:06
  really quickly, but they can have, even these individual genes, very large effects.
• 1:08:10
  So I talk in my
• 1:08:11
  book about an example of a Dutch family where all the men in the family or half the men in the family
• 1:08:19
  had inherited this mutation on their X chromosome that changes how their neurons talk to each other.
• 1:08:28
  This is Brunner syndrome?
• 1:08:30
  This is Brunner syndrome.
• 1:08:31
  So women have two Xs.
• 1:08:33
  So even if you've mutated a copy on one X,
• 1:08:35
  you have another X chromosome that's normal, unmutated.
• 1:08:39
  And so the women in this family were
• 1:08:40
  totally unaffected.
• 1:08:42
  Whereas the men in this family, you know, they had a 50-50 shot of
• 1:08:47
  were they going to inherit the normal X or the mutated X?
• 1:08:50
  And the ones that inherited the mutated
• 1:08:51
  X had really persistent problems with impulsive aggression beginning in childhood and then really
• 1:08:59
  escalating in adolescence and young adulthood.
• 1:09:01
  So one raped his sister, one stabbed his boss with a
• 1:09:05
  pitchfork.
• 1:09:06
  Several had committed, you know, assault or murder, were in prison.
• 1:09:11
  And what's
• 1:09:12
  so interesting about this family is that from the perspective of the criminal justice system,
• 1:09:18
  they couldn't tell that there was anything different about them compared to other offenders,
• 1:09:22
  right?
• 1:09:24
  They weren't, from the legal system's perspective, not competent to stand trial or
• 1:09:31
  not guilty for a reason of insanity.
• 1:09:33
  And yet scientists were able to discover this genetic
• 1:09:36
  variant that had, you know, really profound effects on their ability to control their
• 1:09:44
  aggressive impulses.
• 1:09:46
  Now that's one family, a very rare gene of a very large effect.
• 1:09:54
  Most of what we're doing in my lab and in other people's lab is looking for many genes that each
• 1:10:00
  have like a tiny effect that together might increase your risk for aggression.
• 1:10:06
  But we can
• 1:10:07
  find those too, where children who are at the high end of this, what we would call apologetic risk,
• 1:10:13
  are more likely to pull a knife or gun on someone, more likely to be arrested,
• 1:10:18
  more likely to be convicted of a violent crime, more likely to be suspended from school.
• 1:10:24
  So we
• 1:10:25
  are seeing that you know our ability to regulate our aggressive impulses in interaction with other
• 1:10:34
  people is manufactured by our brain right and that's going to be affected by the genes that
• 1:10:40
  inherit and i mean so obviously this raises all kinds of questions about as we get better and
• 1:10:46
  better at predicting these polygenic uh arrays like these multiple gene interactions uh the
• 1:10:53
  other thing that you include uh in your book along with starting with an acid trip is minority report
• 1:10:58
  uh the tom cruise film where you know they can they've gotten to such a good i can't even remember
• 1:11:05
  how they're doing are they predicting the future are they predicting it on the basis of people's
• 1:11:08
  uh psychology in the future they have those like disembodied or the pod oh they have pre-cognitive
• 1:11:15
  yeah that's right anyway they can predict when crimes are about to happen with just a little
• 1:11:20
  bit of notice and then they can nip them in the bud and they can arrest people before they've
• 1:11:23
  committed the crime.
• 1:11:23
  I mean, you can imagine, suppose we get to a point at which people are
• 1:11:28
  able to be genetically tested when they're infants or even in utero.
• 1:11:34
  And then before they enter the
• 1:11:34
  school system, we know that there's a certain cohort of these kids who have a very high
• 1:11:40
  predisposition to violence.
• 1:11:44
  What does one do with that?
• 1:11:48
  I mean, I think there are good things that
• 1:11:51
  one can do with that and terrible things that one can do with that.
• 1:11:54
  I will say that, you know,
• 1:11:56
  with the exception of rare genetic mutations of large effect, I don't think that we're ever going
• 1:12:01
  to get to the precog predicting exactly who's going to commit a crime.
• 1:12:08
  And again, this goes
• 1:12:08
  back to chance and second chance.
• 1:12:10
  So even with perfect genetic information, there's still a
• 1:12:16
  fundamental and unpredictability of human behavior from human genotype.
• 1:12:22
  That being said, you could
• 1:12:23
  stratify risk.
• 1:12:24
  You could say, okay, well, this group has a 50% chance of becoming, you know,
• 1:12:28
  aggressive, and this group only has 10%.
• 1:12:31
  And I write about this in my first book about, well,
• 1:12:34
  what does it mean?
• 1:12:36
  You know, we can think of dystopian things that could happen in which
• 1:12:39
  people are deprived of civil liberties or, you know, basically genetic information is used to
• 1:12:45
  stigmatize, exclude, punish.
• 1:12:50
  And so what is the alternative to that?
• 1:12:53
  I think that,
• 1:12:54
  you know, in an ideal case, we're not using genetic discoveries to then
• 1:13:01
  genotype a bunch of children and try to prognosticate about their futures,
• 1:13:06
  is that we're trying to, we're using the genetic information to figure out, well,
• 1:13:10
  what are the mechanisms that would allow us to develop better treatments?
• 1:13:14
  I mean, similar to
• 1:13:15
  what we've seen for like Ozempic, where, you know, you could genotype a bunch of kids and be like,
• 1:13:21
  okay, well, you're genetically predicted to be overweight.
• 1:13:25
  So therefore, we're like,
• 1:13:26
  going to not allow you to have the chocolate milk.
• 1:13:28
  Like that would be not a good use of
• 1:13:30
  genetic information.
• 1:13:31
  But instead, it was, we understand genetic mechanisms.
• 1:13:35
  So now we can
• 1:13:35
  develop better treatments that then push on those mechanisms and that are really valuable treatments
• 1:13:41
  for people that you know want to be at a different weight or are struggling with um you know weight
• 1:13:48
  related medical consequences we don't have anything like that right now i mean i don't know
• 1:13:54
  if you're following this in the united states where rob reiner and his wife were stabbed um
• 1:14:01
  And their son was arrested for their murder.
• 1:14:06
  And we talk about every parent's worst nightmare.
• 1:14:09
  You've raised a child and now the child murders you?
• 1:14:13
  I mean, that is a horrible story.
• 1:14:17
  And all the reporting suggests that Nick Reiner not only struggled from substance use problems,
• 1:14:24
  but really struggled with impulsive aggression from the time he was a young man.
• 1:14:27
  He had violent outbursts beginning in childhood or puberty.
• 1:14:32
  This is a family that had a massive amount of resources and they still couldn't find effective treatments for him.
• 1:14:39
  And I think that speaks to a real gap in our understanding that like we don't understand what's going on developmentally well enough to be able to intervene effectively.
• 1:14:50
  And so for me, the genetics, the promise of it is not how can we predict the future for an individual person?
• 1:14:59
  it's how can we understand what's going on well enough to intervene better than we're intervening
• 1:15:06
  now which is not very well at all no no i mean i yeah i take that point i mean if you make the
• 1:15:14
  analogy to physical health it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if everybody had their
• 1:15:22
  genomes read so that people who had a high predisposition to colon cancer could know about
• 1:15:31
  it so that they could eat more fiber and get fecal occult tests at an earlier age you know to
• 1:15:39
  to catch it early it wouldn't be a bad thing and so i don't see what the difference is if you could
• 1:15:44
  catch people who are likely to develop schizophrenia or you know or who are likely to become
• 1:15:50
  alcoholics or something and provide them with the yeah you don't want to punish them prematurely but
• 1:15:55
  provide them with targeted um advice i've always just struggled a little bit with the claim that
• 1:16:05
  we're not looking we're not talking about individuals we're only talking about groups
• 1:16:08
  because groups are collections of individuals so like yeah i mean i always just felt like it's a
• 1:16:14
  bit of a dodge when we say like you know the very the most obvious controversial one is that we
• 1:16:19
  shouldn't look at any potential genetic differences in IQ between races, for example,
• 1:16:25
  because this is obviously going to raise all kinds of questions about white supremacy and
• 1:16:29
  eugenics and whatever.
• 1:16:31
  And people will say, you know, whatever generalizations you might make
• 1:16:35
  about the overall differences between races tells you nothing about any individual person.
• 1:16:42
  Statistically, that's not true.
• 1:16:43
  I mean, of course, there are outliers, you can't be sure,
• 1:16:46
  but you can make an assumption.
• 1:16:49
  If I know that all, I don't know,
• 1:16:52
  that redheaded people are likelier to have buck teeth
• 1:16:57
  and you tell me to pick who the buck-toothed person is,
• 1:17:00
  a non-redhead or a redhead,
• 1:17:02
  it does make sense for me to assume that the redhead
• 1:17:04
  is the one with buck teeth and not the other one.
• 1:17:07
  Like, do you know what I mean?
• 1:17:10
  Like, I...
• 1:17:13
  It's not a one-to-one.
• 1:17:14
  There's no one-to-one, but we are talking about the likelihood that human beings are going to behave in certain ways or develop certain characteristics.
• 1:17:24
  So, yes, groups are made up of individuals.
• 1:17:28
  And I think what you're describing in terms of humans think in terms of patterns and they think of generalities is a generalizable statement about humans and about averages.
• 1:17:42
  I think there is some I think there are some claims about some averages that exist within
• 1:17:50
  a social and political context in which the potential for harm is really really high and so
• 1:17:56
  I I think it's more like I'm I'm more comfortable speaking in generalities to the extent that that
• 1:18:04
  generality isn't attached to any political system that does harm individuals whereas I think some
• 1:18:11
  generalities are attached to political systems that do harm groups and individuals and that's
• 1:18:16
  where i feel like we just need to be more careful um i think the amount of specificity and precision
• 1:18:26
  that we need in our language around things should match the potential for harm again to individual
• 1:18:32
  people um that's been supported or justified with with regards to these beliefs does that make
• 1:18:41
  sense sure no it totally does i mean the counter the counter argument is is just that the way to
• 1:18:45
  rest the conversation away from the people who want to impose bad political systems that are
• 1:18:50
  injurious to individuals is to is for people who aren't bigots to talk about the science
• 1:18:58
  so it becomes a non-partisan question about where we're just trying to figure out what
• 1:19:02
  particular groups of people have what attributes and again it comes back to what's happening i mean
• 1:19:07
  i do think that's what's happening i mean i think there's a conversation and then there's like
• 1:19:13
  in the background you know there are just so many scientists who are so interested in these questions
• 1:19:20
  about individuals about groups about populations about all sorts of different behaviors and
• 1:19:23
  phenotypes and diseases that the like the knowledge that we have just keeps coming out
• 1:19:30
  So for instance, there was a preprint paper that just came out where they're looking at a sample of people from Mexico City who are very admixed, right?
• 1:19:41
  So people in Mexico City have genetic backgrounds from Africa, from indigenous America, from Europe.
• 1:19:49
  And so what this group of researchers were able to do is take advantage of the fact that even siblings can differ in how much ancestry they've inherited.
• 1:19:59
  So if my parents are a mix of indigenous American and European, I might just happen to inherit more indigenous American genomic ancestry than my sister does.
• 1:20:10
  and then they looked at that and they were like within family how are these ancestry differences
• 1:20:16
  related to educational attainment and type 2 diabetes and basically what they were able to
• 1:20:23
  show is that the ancestry difference in education was all environmental confound whereas the
• 1:20:31
  ancestry relationship with diabetes was really that there's more diabetes risk variance in
• 1:20:37
  indigenous american groups which you need to know medically right like if they're actually
• 1:20:41
  carrying this higher risk of diabetes so anyways i just thought it was an example in which like
• 1:20:46
  rather than being like we shouldn't study it they were just like we're just gonna look at
• 1:20:49
  differences between european and indigenous american groups and education and look it's
• 1:20:53
  not genetic and we've shown that more effectively with this one study than any amount of like kind
• 1:21:01
  of podcasting about it it was gonna lay it to rest so also i think it's gonna go that way
• 1:21:07
  Yeah, but I mean, just to come back, Catherine, to the question about like sexuality and choice and volition and, you know, why should it matter?
• 1:21:16
  Like, you know, suppose that we find, and for people who don't know your backstory, you know, there was a snafu.
• 1:21:23
  I mean, do you want to articulate what was the, I don't even quite remember the nature of the controversy, but I just remember hearing you doing the rounds for your last book.
• 1:21:31
  yeah in 2020 in 2020 and 2021 can you i could describe it but you describe it you'll describe
• 1:21:38
  it oh well so my my first book was about genetic influences on education and basically like what
• 1:21:43
  does it mean that some children are born with genetic variants that make it more likely for
• 1:21:49
  them to go further in school and then how can we think about that in a way that isn't gross
• 1:21:54
  you know like that isn't like and then we should you know sterilize pits who are bad at school
• 1:22:01
  and the controversy is that like some people just get really upset if you say that some children are
• 1:22:06
  more likely to go far in school than other children which I still struggle with because
• 1:22:10
  I'm like have you ever met children like have you ever been around kids before you know like
• 1:22:17
  I feel like if you've ever been in a classroom of kindergartners you can see that some of them
• 1:22:24
  are going to have an easier time with this whole process than others and that's not entirely social
• 1:22:31
  advantage that is also you know something about them um but that's for various reasons which you
• 1:22:38
  know we can go into or not that idea that people differ genetically in ways that affect their
• 1:22:44
  cognitive function is just such a like third rail in some parts of academic science i mean you were
• 1:22:51
  being accused by other academics of uh like you know this is the kind of topic that just like
• 1:22:56
  holocaust denial or you know climate science denial we shouldn't be there's no point in opening
• 1:23:01
  you know we don't need to be debating whether nazis were good we don't need to be debating
• 1:23:04
  whether or not some kids are just genetically stupid um was the attitude if i recall correctly
• 1:23:11
  yeah yeah i mean i still even after all these years um you know i'm still a little bit mystified
• 1:23:19
  by the response to it um but i also many of us are mystified about many responses during the 2018
• 1:23:27
  to 2023 period yeah you know i just i and going into this new book i'm like what are people gonna
• 1:23:34
  think um but i feel like i am trying to focus on i i really enjoy spending time thinking about
• 1:23:45
  these issues i think they matter to me i find them really interesting and i love thinking about
• 1:23:52
  how to explain them to other people the best way that i know how to and anything else is kind of
• 1:23:57
  none of my business right like if people willfully misread it that's kind of their bag that's not
• 1:24:03
  really yeah good i mean that's how science should be done and on the so just tease out the briefly
• 1:24:10
  the diabetes in First Nations communities, because it does remind me a bit of, like I
• 1:24:18
  was walking around this morning thinking about your book, and I live in a fairly Asian area,
• 1:24:24
  and I thought if you did a genetic study of this area, you could conclude that the people
• 1:24:33
  who have genomes that are, you know,
• 1:24:37
  characteristically Southeast Asian are the people
• 1:24:40
  who have a propensity to be able to use chopsticks
• 1:24:44
  because the ones who are using chopsticks are all,
• 1:24:46
  but that would not be true.
• 1:24:48
  That's cultural.
• 1:24:50
  So when you're looking at data in populations,
• 1:24:53
  how do you actually figure out whether or not there is,
• 1:24:56
  because you could link a bit of the genome
• 1:24:58
  and you could say, well, maybe this is the bit
• 1:25:00
  that is chopstick aptitude, right?
• 1:25:04
  That my kids don't have.
• 1:25:06
  Yeah.
• 1:25:06
  How do you know?
• 1:25:08
  What you're saying has literally been called
• 1:25:10
  the chopsticks problem in genetics,
• 1:25:12
  which is that if you have a genetically heterogeneous
• 1:25:17
  group of people,
• 1:25:18
  and then you compare their genes and their outcomes
• 1:25:23
  and correlate them,
• 1:25:25
  you might end up with a genetic correlation
• 1:25:28
  that's actually a proxy for something environmental.
• 1:25:31
  So it might look like this gene,
• 1:25:36
  as you say, causes you to use chopsticks versus a fork.
• 1:25:40
  But in fact, it's just this gene is more
• 1:25:42
  common in people of Southeast Asian descent compared to people of European descent.
• 1:25:47
  And
• 1:25:48
  what that gene is proxying is environment and culture.
• 1:25:52
  And the thought experiment there is,
• 1:25:54
  if you went in and you CRISPR'd a baby on the first day of its life to have this gene,
• 1:26:00
  it wouldn't grow up using chopsticks because it's not the gene that's actually causing it.
• 1:26:05
  CRISPR'd meaning if you genetically engineered it.
• 1:26:07
  If you genetically edited it.
• 1:26:08
  And you inserted that gene into the baby's genome.
• 1:26:11
  Yeah.
• 1:26:11
  Yeah.
• 1:26:11
  So when we think about what does it mean for a gene to be causal,
• 1:26:14
  the thought experiment is if you genetically edited a baby on the first day of its life
• 1:26:20
  to have that gene would it have a higher probability of developing that outcome
• 1:26:25
  and for the the what you were just talking about genes correlated with chopsticks use
• 1:26:31
  no because those genes are not causing anything they're just how do you know that
• 1:26:36
  clinically how do you know how do you tell without doing the test there's two way without without
• 1:26:42
  whispering babies which we can't exactly we don't do right that's the thought experiment at the
• 1:26:46
  actual term.
• 1:26:47
  So how do you tell the difference between this gene is actually causing something
• 1:26:51
  versus this gene is correlated with an environment that's causing something?
• 1:26:54
  The first is knowing something about the gene.
• 1:26:58
  So if you know, like, well, this gene, this variant
• 1:27:02
  is in this gene that causes for this protein.
• 1:27:04
  And when you change that protein in the cell,
• 1:27:07
  it does this.
• 1:27:07
  So if you have good knowledge of mechanism, then you can be more confident that
• 1:27:13
  the gene is actually causal.
• 1:27:16
  Oftentimes, though, we don't really have a good knowledge of mechanism
• 1:27:20
  or there's so many genes involved in something that it's hard to, you know, build a mechanistic
• 1:27:25
  picture of what they're doing.
• 1:27:27
  So the other alternative is take advantage of the fact that
• 1:27:32
  siblings are randomized to their genetics relative to the parental genotype.
• 1:27:39
  So if you have two kids,
• 1:27:41
  if they have the same biological parents.
• 1:27:44
  Each of them is a random draw from the same parental
• 1:27:47
  genotype.
• 1:27:48
  So they're sharing everything about your cultural environment where you live, the fact that
• 1:27:54
  you and your partner are this particular ethnicity, that they have this particular
• 1:27:57
  genetic ancestry.
• 1:27:59
  And the only thing that's varying is the genotype between them at the
• 1:28:04
  moment of conception.
• 1:28:06
  So the way that you're trying to, a big test for whether or not a
• 1:28:11
  genetic correlation is actually a genetic cause is if that association persists even when you're
• 1:28:17
  comparing siblings raised in the same home.
• 1:28:20
  And a lot of stuff goes away, right?
• 1:28:22
  Like a lot of stuff,
• 1:28:25
  there's, it's no longer associated with it.
• 1:28:27
  But if this, basically we can't CRISPR baby,
• 1:28:31
  But we can compare two siblings who had an equal probability of inheriting that gene.
• 1:28:36
  Right, right.
• 1:28:36
  And only one did.
• 1:28:37
  Do they differ in their subsequent outcomes?
• 1:28:39
  Got it.
• 1:28:39
  I love how you're saying yes, yes.
• 1:28:40
  I'm so glad that makes sense to you.
• 1:28:42
  Yeah, it does.
• 1:28:43
  You have a scientific mind, Josh.
• 1:28:45
  Yeah, I am a little bit of an amateur science, you know, nerd.
• 1:28:50
  A politics wonk and a science nerd.
• 1:28:52
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:28:53
  So, and presumably another way of doing it would just be to look at people who you know do have that genome who don't live in the environment in which you suspect could be responsible for the behavior.
• 1:29:09
  Like Asians who live in, I don't know, you know, an Asian child who was adopted by a Western family and lives in the United States or something like that.
• 1:29:17
  Do they use forks more than?
• 1:29:19
  Yes.
• 1:29:20
  So you can try to kind of break, both of those are versions of breaking what is usually the link between genotype and culture, right?
• 1:29:31
  So you're either saying with people within the same family who have an equal likelihood of inheriting it, what are their differences?
• 1:29:39
  or looking at, I mean, an adoption design is the other like great one, which is, you know,
• 1:29:46
  if you have this gene and you're in an adopted family and where you would ordinary, the, the
• 1:29:53
  legacy, the family legacy that that gene would ordinarily be tied to is not tied to you because
• 1:29:59
  you are an adopted kid.
• 1:30:01
  Does it still have the same association?
• 1:30:03
  So addiction, you mentioned
• 1:30:05
  a Zempik.
• 1:30:06
  Do you have anything more to say about a Zempik, by the way?
• 1:30:09
  What is it doing?
• 1:30:11
  Getting to learn about it.
• 1:30:14
  I mean, I think it's just at the very beginning.
• 1:30:17
  I'm completely
• 1:30:17
  fascinated by the new data showing that it might reduce alcohol cravings amongst people with
• 1:30:24
  substance use problems.
• 1:30:26
  So to what extent are these effects on appetite specific to appetite
• 1:30:30
  to food versus more general what are the long-term effects what are the effects of starting this you
• 1:30:36
  know early in life versus later i just think there's i think we're just at the beginning
• 1:30:41
  of what we're going to learn about this mechanism are you at all leery about it or
• 1:30:49
  i mean am i really about it um leery in what way i think i'm well i i'm i mean i will just confess
• 1:30:58
  that I, given the scale of the uptake, especially in the United States, I just feel like as someone
• 1:31:07
  who used to be a bit overweight and then during the pandemic sort of reached early middle age
• 1:31:13
  and was like, oh, I'm just going to be a fat person if I don't stop this.
• 1:31:16
  And then through
• 1:31:18
  presumably no choice of my own, because we don't have free will, decided to get fit and eat well
• 1:31:26
  and work out, I just felt like it's a, I mean, I'm obviously not talking about people who are
• 1:31:34
  clinically obese and who've tried everything else, but for people who could just lose a few pounds,
• 1:31:39
  it strikes me as there's a non-zero chance that it's a bit too good to be true and that without
• 1:31:47
  having had large populations take it for a very long time, we just don't know whether the trade-offs
• 1:31:52
  So worth it yet when there's a perfectly good non-pharmacological solution available to everybody.
• 1:31:59
  But this brings us back to the choice, you know, thing.
• 1:32:02
  And also the environment.
• 1:32:05
  I mean, I think it goes back to the environment, too.
• 1:32:07
  I mean, I think the biggest problems in America are we have a car culture.
• 1:32:15
  Like, walking is dangerous.
• 1:32:17
  We don't have public transportation.
• 1:32:19
  There are food deserts.
• 1:32:20
  like what is the affordability problem around healthy food particular families for children
• 1:32:25
  um so to this end i'm leery i'm leery about um you know a pharmacological agent that's most
• 1:32:34
  accessible to people with means and access to health care kind of papering over toxic
• 1:32:41
  structural environments that we're living in um and then also there's just the question of like
• 1:32:46
  we don't know.
• 1:32:46
  I mean, we're just at the beginning of this.
• 1:32:49
  I do wonder if, you know, there's a
• 1:32:53
  similar debate around antidepressants, right?
• 1:32:56
  Like, is this papering over something?
• 1:32:59
  Maybe
• 1:33:00
  people should be going to therapy instead of using antidepressants?
• 1:33:04
  Is this the easy way out?
• 1:33:05
  And then the data kind of settled on, well, the best combination is both, like both going to
• 1:33:11
  therapy and being on antidepressants.
• 1:33:13
  And that for some people, the antidepressants are the initial
• 1:33:17
  help they need to start better long-term patterns of like you know um kind of emotional hygiene and
• 1:33:26
  so i do wonder if we might see something if there's a potential for a virtuous cycle here
• 1:33:31
  in which this gives people an on a kind of an on ramp to the behavioral changes that are more
• 1:33:39
  sustainable in the long run hope so yes well i like that sunny interpretation yeah i mean
• 1:33:45
  Look, I mean, antidepressants, I think, are obviously incredibly useful in extremists.
• 1:33:50
  Like when people are in a deep hole or, you know, they're completely, the black dog has
• 1:33:56
  got them by the throat.
• 1:33:58
  Antidepressants are fabulous.
• 1:34:00
  And similarly, a Zempix, great.
• 1:34:02
  If you're 400 pounds and you can't do anything about it and you've tried everything else.
• 1:34:07
  The question is whether antidepressants should be used in perpetuity by people who are mildly
• 1:34:13
  blue and whether a Zympic should be used in perpetuity by people who are a little bit
• 1:34:18
  overweight.
• 1:34:19
  And I think this is something that attends all of our questions and our conversations
• 1:34:23
  in psychiatry and medicine, which is that there aren't real clear, bright lines.
• 1:34:30
  Everything is a
• 1:34:31
  continuum.
• 1:34:32
  You know, obesity is just a line that we put on a continuous distribution.
• 1:34:36
  And so we're,
• 1:34:38
  you know, at what point, and depression the same way, like you have five symptoms, you're depressed.
• 1:34:41
  So if you have four, you're not depressed.
• 1:34:44
  But like at what point when you move from the severe end of the spectrum to the middle,
• 1:34:49
  are you talking about something that's not just quantitatively, but it's qualitatively
• 1:34:53
  different in terms of its treatment approach?
• 1:34:57
  And I think that is like a question that attends so many of our conversations.
• 1:35:02
  Yeah.
• 1:35:02
  Yeah.
• 1:35:03
  I mean, the whole diagnostic, it is very funny, the diagnostic, the sort of rigidity and formality
• 1:35:09
  and formulaic nature of diagnosis.
• 1:35:12
  I mean, I understand that it has to be that way,
• 1:35:14
  but like I was recently diagnosed with ADHD
• 1:35:17
  and now all of a sudden I'm able to avail myself
• 1:35:20
  legally of speed.
• 1:35:22
  Of stimulus.
• 1:35:23
  Right?
• 1:35:24
  And like, there are a lot of other drugs
• 1:35:26
  that actually would help me more.
• 1:35:29
  I mean, I think mushrooms and acid,
• 1:35:32
  you know, once or twice a year,
• 1:35:34
  or like, you know, an ecstasy,
• 1:35:39
  experience a couple of times a year would probably be more constructive actually to my productivity
• 1:35:43
  than daily doses of speed but because we can't quite find the diagnostic rationale for those
• 1:35:50
  um yeah yeah it's trickier and my friend nico just had a paper and sell on on adhd meds and
• 1:35:59
  it was basically like they don't actually affect your attention systems they affect your reward
• 1:36:03
  systems like what they're doing is they're making things that you would other find otherwise find
• 1:36:07
  deadly boring rewarding um which is fascinating one way to say that i think you're right because
• 1:36:14
  there's other ways to recalibrate the reward you're getting from your everyday lives um
• 1:36:19
  uh then taking ritalin every day yeah yeah that's fascinating i mean that is that is
• 1:36:29
  in terms of the subjective experience of the drug that is consistent in the sense that it doesn't
• 1:36:35
  actually assist with multitasking or the sense of overwhelm that I have when I have multiple
• 1:36:41
  things to pay attention to at once.
• 1:36:43
  What it does is assist in focus on non uninteresting,
• 1:36:48
  especially repetitive, uh, tasks, uh, and stops me from getting distracted.
• 1:36:53
  Um,
• 1:36:54
  and, and in terms of other types of addictions, I mean, just because in your book, you mentioned,
• 1:36:59
  I can't remember what the, what is the gene that is associated with, is it CADM2 with opiates,
• 1:37:04
  cigarettes pot alcohol having sex at an early age dropping out of school
• 1:37:09
  sleeping during the day and adding salt to your food i like that list of of things
• 1:37:17
  so how should we think it's amazing how should we think about our own i mean anyone who has
• 1:37:21
  experience of struggling with an addiction whether that's overeating in the case of you
• 1:37:26
  know off the back of the osepic conversation or smoking or drinking too much or whatever
• 1:37:31
  is familiar with the kind of the pull and the tug and the, I don't want to, but I do want to,
• 1:37:37
  but I don't want to be the person who does that, but I am, you know, but it's going to feel so
• 1:37:41
  good to do it right now.
• 1:37:44
  What's going on there and how escapable is it?
• 1:37:47
  Oh gosh.
• 1:37:48
  So I don't think we
• 1:37:49
  know how that particular gene is associated with all these things.
• 1:37:53
  It was just, it really was one
• 1:37:55
  of those surprises where people were, one person would study this and one person would study this
• 1:37:59
  and one person would study this and then it just like kept popping up like the little mold that
• 1:38:03
  kept popping up every time you studied anything related to um doing a little bit too much of
• 1:38:11
  something that you know other people say isn't going to be good for you like that's what that
• 1:38:17
  list of behaviors has in common and one perspective on all of those behaviors is to think of them
• 1:38:25
  in some ways as a learning disorder.
• 1:38:28
  So we go through our lives and we're constantly learning
• 1:38:31
  from reward and punishment.
• 1:38:32
  This is what gets me things that feel good.
• 1:38:36
  And this is what, you know,
• 1:38:39
  results in negative consequences.
• 1:38:42
  And even if we look at non-human animals,
• 1:38:44
  there's differences in how well people learn from reward and punishment.
• 1:38:49
  There are studies of
• 1:38:50
  rodents where you treat, you know, train them to press a bar and get, they get alcohol every time
• 1:38:57
  they press the bar or sometimes they get drugs.
• 1:39:01
  And then at some point you switch up the task
• 1:39:02
  and instead of getting alcohol, they get a mild electrical shock.
• 1:39:07
  And most rodents,
• 1:39:09
  if you start shocking them, stop pressing the bar, right?
• 1:39:13
  And some rodents are like,
• 1:39:16
  maybe this time maybe this time will be the time right so what is that that is
• 1:39:21
  over learning from reward and under learning from punishment and i think that switch for me that
• 1:39:27
  like addiction is a learning disability and it's an inability to learn from the contingencies in
• 1:39:33
  your environment really shifted my perspective on it it's very clear that people do can and do
• 1:39:41
  overcome addictions and in terms of people who um you know are able to live in this uneasy space
• 1:39:49
  around free will i think many people who have struggled with addiction actually occupy that
• 1:39:55
  space so well i'm powerless before alcohol and i'm gonna make amends to people right like that
• 1:40:02
  is both a confession of powerlessness and an agency in the same 12-step program um
• 1:40:12
  uh however we also know that it is a chronic relapsing disorder and there's still more that
• 1:40:19
  could be done to help people who really do want to get clean and find it very very difficult to do
• 1:40:28
  i think especially now in america with the opiate um crisis you know one thing that opiate drugs do
• 1:40:35
  is they hijack your brain's ability to learn from your environment,
• 1:40:40
  such that the only thing that you can focus on is opiates.
• 1:40:44
  And what can we offer people who have not been served by our existing treatments?
• 1:40:53
  I think that's the real challenge now.
• 1:40:56
  And how much of that, Catherine, is that the opiate is getting its nasty,
• 1:41:01
  evil little fingers into your brain?
• 1:41:03
  and at least initially in the experience of becoming addicted,
• 1:41:07
  how much of it is what...
• 1:41:11
  I mean, I never hear people talk about this
• 1:41:13
  because I think it's taboo, but I think it might be true.
• 1:41:16
  It feels really fucking good.
• 1:41:19
  And people take it and it feels great.
• 1:41:22
  Like a lot of drugs,
• 1:41:24
  it's no surprise that heroin is a really good feeling in the moment.
• 1:41:29
  And so the idea of allowing doctors to prescribe
• 1:41:34
  a pharmacological version of heroin essentially was never going to end well because it you know
• 1:41:41
  it may end up many years hence that your whole life has fallen apart and that the drug has its
• 1:41:48
  nasty little claws in your head but initially when you say that it's a a learning problem
• 1:41:56
  isn't it a learning problem in the same way that when i when my daughter goes on a roller coaster
• 1:42:01
  she really loves she wants to go on the roller coaster again six times or all day i mean i think
• 1:42:07
  it's i think in that case you know there there are limits to just how strong the signal can be
• 1:42:18
  inside your brain when we're talking about a natural reinforcer right like that was a thrilling
• 1:42:25
  roller coaster ride like you get the dopamine going um but within i would say like evolutionarily
• 1:42:33
  expectable limits like maybe pushing it a little bit but you know there's lots of thrilling and oh
• 1:42:41
  this is a little bit scary experiences that are ancestral past um fentanyl or heroin i mean it's
• 1:42:49
  funny that you said the pharmaceutical version of heroin because heroin is the pharmaceutical name
• 1:42:55
  right it was manufactured as a pharmaceutical yes no but i mean just obviously that a drug
• 1:43:02
  company just repackaged it into into oxy content yeah and it's i mean it's so beyond anything our
• 1:43:08
  brains were evolved to handle it's such a mismatch between what the processes of reward and punishment
• 1:43:17
  were designed to do yeah i don't mean to downplay it i don't mean to downplay its power i just mean
• 1:43:21
  to try to help myself as someone who's never used the drug or used heroin maybe have more empathy
• 1:43:28
  like have you ever had surgery or like given yeah yes best feeling i've ever had in my life those
• 1:43:33
  three seconds before my colonoscopy it's like you know no don't like don't i don't want to i don't
• 1:43:37
  don't put me out i'd like this keep it like this davis adaris hasn't been on that about how like
• 1:43:44
  he wants to do his colonoscopy again because yeah just to get to give me as many as i can it's just
• 1:43:49
  I was only five seconds before the sedative kicks in,
• 1:43:52
  but it's the best feeling of my life.
• 1:43:53
  All I'm trying to articulate, all I'm trying to get into
• 1:43:55
  is that we talk about addictions in this very clinical, cold way,
• 1:44:00
  as if the drug is doing this thing to us,
• 1:44:03
  which I find quite disempowering.
• 1:44:06
  The phenomenology of the experience is that you take something
• 1:44:09
  which is the greatest rollercoaster that has ever existed
• 1:44:11
  in the history of the world, and of course you want more of that
• 1:44:14
  because it's an incredible experience.
• 1:44:16
  and then before you know it you know the when you're not on it it feels terrible and the highs
• 1:44:21
  aren't quite as high anymore and we all understand that cycle but initially i just feel like a lot of
• 1:44:26
  the conversation around our addiction as someone who so i quit drinking when i got fit i was
• 1:44:32
  drinking too much i never found 12 steps to be useful but i found i don't know if you know about
• 1:44:38
  the alan carr clinic have you heard about the it's a british clinic that um they started as an
• 1:44:43
  anti-smoking thing you'll occasionally be in an airport and you'll see a little book uh be like
• 1:44:48
  the easy way to quit smoking uh you know by alan carr who is now deceased but i found it really
• 1:44:55
  really helpful i just went to a seminar and it helped me not it helped me escape the constant
• 1:45:00
  self-recrimination loop of oh i wish i was i wish i was drinking but i also don't want to be drinking
• 1:45:07
  by simply saying, it's interesting what you said about it being a learning problem because
• 1:45:13
  they basically say there is no real problem.
• 1:45:19
  The problem, you're here because you don't want to drink.
• 1:45:22
  And the good thing is you've got hands and a wallet, which is something that the little
• 1:45:27
  part of your brain that thinks that it wants to drink, that's been tricked into thinking
• 1:45:30
  that it wants to drink, doesn't have.
• 1:45:33
  so treat it the same way you treat any stupid artifact of you know the bullshit that pops up
• 1:45:41
  in your head um it doesn't have any power you're not powerless you're you're the only you're the
• 1:45:49
  only entity that has any power in this entire situation like you're the one who has to go to
• 1:45:54
  the liquor store to buy the alcohol if you don't want to not there is absolutely zero problem like
• 1:46:01
  the part of your brain that what that you think wants the alcohol is a part of your brain that
• 1:46:04
  has been tricked into think into associating it with all of these good times because we drink
• 1:46:10
  when we're happy and we drink as to make us feel better when we're sad and once you actually pay
• 1:46:15
  attention to the experience of what it's like to have had a few drinks it's just slightly clammy
• 1:46:20
  and foggy like you do it in isolation of all of the all of all of the other good reinforcing stuff
• 1:46:27
  and notice pay really pay attention to what it feels like to be half drunk it's not so great
• 1:46:33
  that you want all of the other downsides it's not this fabulous thing it's and that for me was quite
• 1:46:40
  revealing but i don't think i could have gotten there had i not closely paid attention to the
• 1:46:46
  actual phenomenology of the experience of getting hooked onto the idea that this feeling is like
• 1:46:54
  um something that needs pursuing at all costs because it's just so good um yeah i don't know
• 1:47:01
  if that's going to be constructive i mean it reminds me of so much i mean so much of meditation
• 1:47:06
  is like you're not your thoughts you don't have to act on your thoughts you're observing your
• 1:47:12
  thoughts and letting them pass and no longer feeling that anything that pops into your head
• 1:47:19
  are into your heart like must be acted on um and also like cbt for anxiety right like so much of
• 1:47:26
  it is like um yes you want to run out of this elevator because you have claustrophobia but like
• 1:47:33
  that's just a that's just an urge like just observing it um and and sort of not trying to
• 1:47:42
  not trying to avoid it but deflating it in a little bit i think that's really yes yeah
• 1:47:47
  Well, congratulations.
• 1:47:48
  Good for you.
• 1:47:48
  It sounds like it was a good change for you.
• 1:47:51
  Yes.
• 1:47:52
  Oh, it was fabulous.
• 1:47:53
  It's so much better.
• 1:47:54
  I mean, God, so much.
• 1:47:55
  Life is just.
• 1:47:56
  That's why your skin is looking so good.
• 1:47:58
  It's like.
• 1:47:58
  That's just why I have a beautiful glow.
• 1:48:00
  I also have some anti-shine makeup on my forehead for the studio light.
• 1:48:05
  All right.
• 1:48:05
  I won't keep you any longer, Catherine.
• 1:48:07
  It's lovely to talk to you.
• 1:48:09
  Totally fascinating chat.
• 1:48:11
  Good luck with the book.
• 1:48:11
  Good luck with the book tour.
• 1:48:13
  Thank you.
• 1:48:13
  This was so much fun.
• 1:48:15
  Thank you for easing me into talking about the book.
• 1:48:17
  I was nervous about it.
• 1:48:19
  This was a delight.
• 1:48:20
  I really, really enjoyed it.