 Hello, Paige. Thanks so much for joining me. How are you doing today? Thanks for having me. I'm pretty good. Yeah, we are here to talk about your brand new book at the time of recording this. It's almost out, not out yet. It is the genetic lottery. So I want to talk about the book, some stuff that's been going on. And first off, I know you've been super busy with promotion and doing articles and stuff. But first thing I want to talk about is the prefeedback you've gotten for the book. How have you kept your sanity page? Because as somebody who writes, I've just been like, this poor, this poor, poor woman. So how's that been going? You know, it's been, it's actually been a really interesting learning experience about how Twitter is not real life. I think if, yeah, I think if you just look at, at Twitter, you see really kind of some of the most vociferous and loudest voices. But at the same time, I have been getting so many really lovely emails from people. And a lot of them are not from academics. They're from readers of the New Yorker or readers of The Guardian. And it's really been striking to me how many of them want to tell me their stories of their own life story or something about their kids. So, you know, in the middle of all of this kind of noise and blowback that I've been getting on some sort of social media, I've also just heard from so many people that are giving me feedback that talking about genetics helps make sense of their life story and their family story. And that makes dealing with the kind of social media chatter a lot easier because it makes me realize how, you know, how far reaching these, these findings can be and how many different audiences they can be. So, you know, no one likes to read bad things about themselves on the internet. That's definitely true. But I've also received so much support from people who really find reading about the science valuable and interesting. And that makes it worth it for me. Yeah, absolutely. And it's something I don't think a lot of people can relate to like a while back a couple years ago when my YouTube channel was blown up, it was hard to kind of filter that, right? There are so many people who are like, thank you and benefit against stuff like that. But then sometimes those negative voices are a little bit louder. But like, here's another question for you, like, like that New Yorker piece was like super in-depth. Sounds like they came out to visit you and like followed you around like all sorts of stuff. As an author, let me ask you this, because I'm a reader, I read so many books, just so many books. And as an author, does it, does it hurt your soul when people judge the book that hasn't come out yet? Yeah, I mean, it does in the sense that everyone wants to be evaluated for the best version of their arguments, right? And when you write a book, you have time and space to think about what is what is the best way I know how to express this idea. And when people are responding to a misapprehension about what you're arguing or just misunderstanding it, it does feel at times like you haven't even given me a chance on the flip side. You know, this book is not the first time I've been talking about this. You know, I give talks about this topic, I run a lab on this topic. And so, you know, the fact that the issues that I'm bringing up in the book are already a topic of conversation ultimately is a sign that I'm doing my job, right? Like what I was trying to do is to sort of push the conversation to talk about what what can we do with the science, how do we make sense of it? And even the negativity is part of, you know, being successful at drawing attention to this topic. My dad is an ex Navy pilot. He was a top gun for several years. And he always has this phrase, which is, you don't get flack unless you're over a high value target. And I just keep repeating that to myself that the reason why there's negativity is because I have the great privilege of talking about something important. And I just have to keep that in mind. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So as somebody who was fortunate enough to read your book, like I loved it. And I just I just feel for it. So I'm glad that I'm glad to be able to talk with you and hear that, you know, you're trucking along and moving forward. But like, yeah, like, so for those for those who are unaware, right? So we're talking about genetics. And and I can't wait to talk about some of these other topics on why I love the book so much. But in the beginning of the book, like, you make it very clear, like, you're like, Hey, when I'm sitting down to write this thing, I got some concerns, because this is a topic like you say, you're not you're not new to this. So for those who are kind of unaware of, you know, what you're talking about this in this book and stuff like that, like, why, why is this such a difficult topic to discuss and write about, you know, what you've been researching and stuff like that? Where do you think, you know, people's concerns are? Yeah. So I mean, just to back up a second, the book in general is about how do genetic differences between us make a difference for our lives and not just for our medical conditions, but for our personalities for how we do in school. And then because of these effects on education, that plays out into things like the labor market and income and wealth, which are, you know, typically studied under this umbrella of what people call social inequality. That is of course a really hard topic to talk about because two, two things are happening at the same time. One is we can look backwards in history and see the legacy of eugenics in this country, you know, there was a time in which people were, for instance, involuntarily sterilized because of their alleged genetic inferiority. So the history is looming large. At the same time, the science is zooming ahead. It's accelerating so quickly because of these technological advances and our ability to measure the genomes of millions and millions of people. And so we are in this moment of incredible technological change without having been able to make sense of that new technology and that new science in a way that doesn't seem like removing backwards in terms of, you know, using genetics for eugenic atrocities. So I think it's a subject that in another piece that I've written, I said, you know, genetics as a topic of fascination and fear. And it's a topic of fascination because we can see that it's important in our lives because the science really is exciting. And it's an object of fear because we can look back at this eugenic history in the 20th century. And whenever you have something that is fascination and fear, you're going to provoke a lot of reaction and conversation and consternation and backlash and also interest. And we do want to use the science for good and not for harm. How do we articulate how we're going to do that? Yeah. And that like, I don't know, sometimes I feel like I'm insane because I read the book and I got something completely different out of it, right? Like genetics is a huge portion. So I, you know, I read a ton of books on like social issues. I've had some authors on here. For example, I just had Robert Frank on here who wrote the book, Success and Luck, right? Yes. Yes. Love that. Which I love. And I really think of is, I think I might have mentioned this to you. I think of Robert Frank's book as sort of like a, like a twin to mine because he's talking about the luck that happens outside of you. And I'm talking about the luck that is embedded in your biology. But we come to very similar conclusions, Frank and I do, about what that means for our quality if we really acknowledge the role of luck in our lives. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what's the mind blown. So in a second, I'm going to have you fill in some gaps for me because the genetics thing is confused. That's the hell out of me. I'm more into like psychology stuff like that. But anyways, like, I took something completely different away like the second half of the book when you're talking about these outcomes and, you know, nature research and all these other things. But anyways, like, I was having a conversation the other day with someone and what you just mentioned, like the fascination and the fear, right? So when you're doing your research and with some of the pushback that you've gotten, like studying genetics and outcomes and all these things, how much of the fear do you think is that people are going to try to weaponize your work and your research, right? Like, like racists, right? Like neo-Nazis or, you know, certain political figures. Like, so how much do you think that that kind of fear is playing into it? And for you, knowing you as best as I can, what are the benefits to studying this and why should that outweigh that possible fear that people have? Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's such an insightful question because I feel like you're getting right at the heart of why people disagree, which is about this risk benefit calculus, right? So there's this idea that we're not quite sure how this research could be weaponized, but we can look to history and see how the idea of genetics was played into this eugenic legislation. Whereas for a lot of people, the benefits of doing this seem really in-co-it. Like, what is the good that's going to come out of it? Whereas, you know, I am a psychologist by training. I'm interested in studying the development of children and adolescents. And in particular, I'm interested in figuring out what are some of the ways that we could help children do better in school, help children be less likely to have ADHD or depression or contact problems. If we actually want to intervene to improve children's lives, what do we need to do? Unfortunately, a huge part of that research on which environments are the most impactful for children when we're talking about their school achievement, we're talking about their mental and behavioral health problems, has this flaw. And the flaw in the research is that they're correlating aspects of children's environments with the children's outcomes, without controlling for the fact that kids are also getting their genes from the same people that are creating their environments, right? So you have tons of studies that are, this is kind of a silly example, but it's silliness sort of plays out, I think, a real serious problem that a lot of psychology, sociology and education research has. So you'll see studies that are like, parents who have dinner with their kids have kids who do better in school. I literally just tweeted about this yesterday. And then you look at that and you think, well, or parents who are highly educated and have secure jobs can get home from work because they aren't doing shift work and are two-parent married families and their kids have inherited a whole suite of advantages. And it's probably not dinner that's making the kid do better at math. It could be, right? It could be a target of intervention, but it's really hard to tell just from the correlation. So we have, if you pick up any journal and psychology and just flip through it with that lens on, are they correlating an aspect of a child's environment with the child's outcome without controlling for genes? It's rapidly very, very appalling. And so then what people do is they say, oh, well, look, eating family dinner is correlated with doing better in math. So we should intervene to build a program, to teach parents about the importance of eating dinner together. And those are so expensive. And if you think about that as the process, we probably shouldn't be surprised that most things that we try in education and also in treating psychological therapies don't work. They don't make any difference whatsoever. And that is just a huge investment of time, of researcher expertise, of money. And so the risk, there's the risk of talking about genetics, but there's also what we can see the damage being done by not including it in our models. And that is that we are much less successful at designing successful interventions than we could be. And at the same time, it doesn't, you know, not talking about genetics, doesn't actually make genetics go away. Like everyone still thinks genes make a difference, right? If you ask laypeople, do you think that genes make a difference? They say yes, their answer is never zero. So you have this problem, which is the danger of this being conscripted for white supremacy or far right political extremism or eugenic legislation. The solution to that problem is often proposed to be, well, let's just not talk about genetics. The problem with that is that that solution doesn't work. It doesn't make genetics go away. And it hurts us for actually designing the environments that will be successful in helping children. So, you know, I don't think that doing more science makes racist less racist. I think it just hurts our science to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And Paige, let me tell you, if anybody attacks your book, I will be there to defend it because you're just you're just on and just like so much. Yes. Like, okay, if somebody came up to me and they're like, describe the genetic lottery in one sentence, I'd say genes matter, but so do a billion other environmental factors. Yeah. Yeah. That's how I would summarize your book, right? Yeah. Yeah. For example, like with the family dinner thing, right? Yeah. When I kind of work backwards, when I hear about different scientific research and something I've noticed just from reading so many books is that people really like pick and choose what they want to kind of strengthen their arguments. And yesterday, I was reading a book and it touched on the family dinner thing like houses that have family dinners. And I tweeted about them like, I absolutely hate when people say that because they're neglecting so many other things, right? Yeah. Like, you know, and one of the things I think about like my son, he's awesome. I know all parents say this, but my son really is awesome, right? He's 12 years old. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's a funny issue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. He's right in between. He's starting to get a little too cool for me, which is crazy because I'm the coolest that around, you know, but, but, but yeah, he just like got an invitation to the National Junior Honor Society. He's killing it. He's very self motivated and all these other things, right? And I look at these things like we have family dinner a lot. Like him and I like to cook together him and his mom or his mom and I split custody. But like if you look at the fact that he lives in a single parent household with split custody, we do have dinner a lot, but sometimes we don't because he's like, I'm going to eat in my room because I'm playing video games. I wonder like he's doing fine, right? But you know, when, when you were talking about, you know, genetic factors and child development, I'm a recovering drug addict and my mom was an alcoholic too. Mental illness runs in our family. You know, and you have a psychology background. I learned about adverse childhood experiences, like there's so many things that are separate from our genetics. And I feel that we need to, we need to talk about the science, especially if we're going to identify what's really going on with kids, you know, like you mentioned ADHD and all these other things. And, and it just feels like these, these people who get upset about the conversations kind of blocking us from that stuff. So, so I, I don't know, like, what do you think it's going to take to normalize and just be like, hey, calm down. Trust me. Trust me page. I'm pretty smart. I'm doing this for a while. Like, how do we get people to trust to let you move forward? Well, I think what's going to happen. And, you know, this is happening increasingly frequently is that I get emails and this is the other thing that makes it easier to ignore a lot of the social media chatter is I get emails from researchers and they say, you know, I've been doing these studies about social class and some aspects of child development, or I'm really interested in center based daycare versus, you know, not going to daycare before school or I'm really interested in private schools versus public schools. And I read this thing I read about your research and I don't even really know how to get started. Can you help me think about incorporating genetic analyses into my research. And that kind of thing makes all of this worthwhile for me, because I think as we move towards researchers having access to data that takes genotype seriously, but also is taking, you know, environments seriously, we're going to have more and more examples to point to that where we can say, look how this study was made stronger or better or look what we found out that we wouldn't have found out without this information. And then, and then that's going to become a more and more popular strategy. I mean, when we think about scientific, you know, evolution of scientific methods, the evolution of anything, there's always early adopters, and then hopefully some sort of virtuous cycle, some sort of feedback loop where their success gives us more examples that we can point to to say this is how this is helping look, look, look at the value of this. So that is what I'm hoping. If I can convince just a handful of researchers who are doing really good work on identifying targets for intervention or doing really good randomized control trials of something designed to help children to incorporate a genetic frame of analysis. I think that the success of those endeavors is going to ultimately speak for itself and more and more people will adopt it. Yeah, that's my hope anyways. Yeah, absolutely. And not to toot your horn or anything, but that's why I respect the work that you do and stuff like that because people who keep moving forward and stuff, it gets more people interested and we can start finding these things, you know, because I, you know, I'm still a believer that, you know, nurture plays this massive role, right? Of course. You know, and, and, you know, when we can look at both of those things or implement genetics into it, but even there was that book by what's his name, Adam Rutherford, like how to argue with a racist, right? Yeah, you know, and stuff like that. It's like, listen, listen, like, I just want to like tell everybody, chill out, trust us when we, when we break this stuff, when you don't freak out on us, we can help defend you a little bit. But here's a question, not to get super duper political, but here's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It almost seems like if, like, you're from, okay, here's a great example. You're from Texas, right? Texas. You are, you are right there. There's a lot of very religious people. You guys are dealing with that whole abortion issue right now and everything like that. When I think Christian conservative, I think anti-science, right? But if we look at your research, it feels like there's a lot of very anti-science liberals. And tell me if I'm wrong. And you, yeah, you can censor your response if you want, but that, that, I'm like, I'm left leaning in it and it hurts, it hurts my soul. We're supposed to be the science people in like climate change and, you know, life begins at this time, you know, and all this stuff. So, so what, what are your thoughts? I mean, the way I think about that is, you know, science doesn't exist in a vacuum. And it's one source of information that people have, but they also have their lived experiences. And they also have their moral commitments. And often, regardless of what our political ideology is, we are tempted to wage moral battles on empirical grounds, right? So you see this with the anti-abortion movement, in terms of them talking about, when is there a heartbeat? And then other people are saying, it's not a heartbeat. It's like a cell, it's a cell with a rhythm on it. You know, they're not really arguing about whether it's a heartbeat. They're arguing about, you know, a political issue for which science has become kind of like, has become a battleground for having that. So I, in my own thinking, I don't, I don't necessarily find it helpful to be talking about someone's pro-science or anti-science. I think it's helpful to be thinking about for which areas of science does it feel so personal that you're tempted to try to, try to wage your political values on empirical grounds. Because for me, when I do that personally, then I have to step back and I have to say, okay, what's the worst case scenario, worst case scenario for me scientifically, right? And then if I'm really committed to something as an idea, right? Like if I'm really committed to a multi-racial democracy, where we live in conditions of social equality, in what way can we build those commitments so that they're, that they, that they, we can maintain them sort of regardless of how the science turns out, right? Like because, you know, the, the thing about genetics is like, it has been so surprising for people, right? I mean, it's full of surprises. And I just, what's wonderful about it is that we are living in this time of incredible technological change and we get to be so curious about how things are going to end up. And I want to be able to preserve that scientific curiosity without thinking of any finding as a threat to my moral commitments. And articulating that can be really, really hard. And I think that's not, I don't think that's just the left or the right. I think that's true of people. We're all motivated reasoners at the end of the day. Yeah, no, for sure. And you know, if there's, if there's two things, if I had a magic wand and I could just, you know, give this to everybody, one would be to learn about, you know, our biases and like you said, like motivational reasoning and all that stuff. And I'm glad to hear a scientist sit back and say, Hey, I have to check in with myself. Like that's something like, fortunately, I just learned it through my sobriety and like mindfulness, why pause. I'm like, wait, if I'm feeling really strongly about something, I need to pause and figure out why that is. But the second thing, Paige, is why I think literally everybody needs therapy. Like there might be something deep down. I totally agree with that. I agree with that. I think that also I love, I have to say, I love hearing men talk about going to therapy and being open about that. I think that, you know, there's, there's this old ideal of masculinity, which is very dismissive of ever talking about vulnerability or needing help or having something to learn. And just in my personal experience, you know, I really think that therapy is like going to the dentist. Like we should all go to the dentist and we should all go to therapy at some point in the time. Because, you know, checking in with those biases and being curious about yourself and your own growth is, I think just a really important part of being a person right now. Yeah, absolutely. I was like, when, when I talk about my son and the national junior honor society, like his mom takes care of a lot of like the educational stuff and make sure he's on his homework. I'm more of like, I give him like the mental health homework, right? Because like, you know, that, you know, that's not something, you know, we learn to school. But yeah, like, you know, it helps, it helps us get down and understand why we're thinking these these ways and like even things like just cognitive behavioral therapy where you're challenging your own beliefs just so, so many things I just can't even, I can't even explain. But yeah, well, I think therapies are great. You know, there's, there's this point I come back to in my book that genes aren't destiny. And that part of what understanding biology does is help us design environmental interventions. And I think some forms of cognitive behavioral therapy are a perfect example of that. Like we know that people are not equally likely to develop depression and anxiety. We also know that if you're prone to depression, you tend to perseverate on the negative things in your environment and not the positive things in your environment, you tend to remember negative things more than positive things. And then therapists go in and they say, okay, well, how can we target that by targeting your thoughts and through conversation? They're not crispering your genes. They are, you know, so there's there's a pathway from biology to patterns of thinking. And then we're intervening on patterns of thinking. And that is really intuitive for people when we're talking about mental health. But somehow starts stops becoming as intuitive when we're talking about something like education. But I think the process is exactly the same, where we're trying to think about from biological difference to learning style or biological difference to how you interact with your teachers. And then that's what you're intervening on environmentally. Yeah. And, you know, that brings up something else. Like, and let me know if I'm wrong. This is something else I took away from your book. And I think you just mentioned it like genes aren't your destiny, right? Like, we do know that, you know, things like, you know, depression, anxiety, there's even been research, I don't know, you know, how peer-reviewed it is that trauma can even be passed down through genes, right? And, you know, there's a lot of people who who think when they think genes, I think set in stone, right? So for example, depression runs through my family, mood disorders run through my family and stuff like that. But based on your research, like, even if we do have these types of genes, or if I have the addiction gene, like, based on your research, it's there are things we could do to kind of counteract it or even, even like intelligence. Am I am I getting that right from what you've kind of figured out? Yeah. So I mean, we see evidence of this. I mean, if you just look for instance, like, that, you know, one tool that I talk about a lot in the book is this thing called a polygenic score, which is, you know, adding up information about a lot of different genetic variants. But what we see is that for any value of a polygenic score, we can see people that have gone really far in school and people who have dropped out of school and everything in between. Even when we're not looking at measured DNA research, so there's a couple of great studies that are taking advantage of very large population registry. So like all of Sweden, for instance, and you can see, okay, well, there's one sibling that was adopted away when they were very young. And then another sibling that came later that was raised by their biological mom. And you can see that, you know, these two siblings are coming from the same family, but the one that had more affluence and more advantages earlier in life have higher IQ scores and more likely to graduate from college, that sort of thing. So, you know, if we just look at the history of the United States, there's been these extraordinary gains in education in the last 50 years. And that has nothing to do with our genes, right? Like our genes did not appreciably change in the last 50 years. What changed is access to education, access to early, you know, childhood experiences that are good for growth and development. And there's no reason to suspect that we can't still be doing that work to bring more of those advantages to as many children as possible. Yeah, so speaking of siblings, this is a place where I was like, okay, thank goodness, Paige is coming on because I have been learning about twin studies forever, right? And I, so I don't know if there's just like debate or controversy around like, like the findings, but help me understand because in some, or maybe it's depending on the study. So here's what I've gathered. All right, so education page. In some instances, I find it's just like, okay, yeah, two identical twins separated, right? Because they've even talked about this like political affiliations, like becoming more conservative and things like that. And they talk about the households and sometimes they find, you know, one book I read, I'll be like, oh, they both turn out the same way. And the other book I read, they're like, oh, they turn out different ways, things like that. So can you break down for me real quick? The importance of these twin studies and are there like debates within your community about what the findings suggest? Because I'm confused as all hell. Yeah. So the sort of twin studies that people like love to put on the news stories or or you might have seen the movie three identical strangers are where you have, which was the story of identical triplets who are all assigned to different households at birth and adopted away, are twins separated at birth. Most twin studies are not that because most adoption agencies don't place twins in separate houses. That's really, really rare. Most twin studies are twins reared together. So it's two twins raised in the same house, usually by their own biological parents. And what you're comparing are identical twins reared together. So identical twins start off as, you know, one zygote, one sperm, one egg. And then there's an early sort of error in cell division. And now you've got two people instead of one. Whereas fraternal twins are twins that are two eggs, two sperm, they have the same genetic relationship as regular siblings. They just happen to be in the same pregnancy. So what you have there are, regardless of the type of twin identical or fraternal, they're being raised in the same household in the same neighborhood by the same parents. But the fraternal twins have this genetic difference between them. And so most twin studies are basically saying, if your genes are more different from one another, do your lives turn out more differently than each other? So there have been literally millions of twins studied. There was a review in 2015 in the Journal Nature Genetics. That was a summary of basically every twin study that's ever been done. And the general answer from the twin study is that, yes, if you have more different genes, then your life turns out more differently. And that is true for schizophrenia, that's true for depression, that's true for education. So the criticism of twin studies is that you're not actually measuring anything about genes, you're just comparing relatives that you know differently, that you're not measuring something about the DNA. And there's always this question, are you attributing to genes something that should be attributed to the environment? So maybe identical twins are treated more similarly than fraternal twins. And that's why their lives turn out more similarly. So there's this kind of constant back and forth around, are we overestimating the influence of genes on life outcomes from twins studies? Are we underestimating it? You know, what's the right answer? Those questions are interesting scientifically, but I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that whatever the answer is, it's not zero. It's not that there's no effective genes on life outcomes. So I think the danger that people can, that kind of trap that people can fall into is using those scientific debates about the assumptions of twin studies is the right number of 30% or 12% or 45% using those debates to deflect from the moral and political considerations that I'm trying to draw attention to, which is given that it's not zero, what do we do with that? Okay, that helps. That thank you page. This whole interview is worth it. So, okay, so here's actually, I need one more thing, because I was working on an addiction treatment center. I've done classes. I like to teach people about the science and stuff. So I need you to let me know if I know what I'm talking about when it comes to epigenetics, okay? So if I just dumb it down, simplify it as much as possible. Epigenetics, it's like a gene that's kind of dormant, but it can go active based on like, you know, like a traumatic event or something like that. Is that somewhere in the realm? Yeah, so that's, I mean, that's a really specific example. So epigenetics is pretty, you know, if you think about genetics, like we have these DNA molecules with the same DNA in every cell of our body, you know, absent some technical things that we don't need to get into, but not every gene is necessary at every time and every context. So a very simple form of epigenetics is the cells in your liver are different than the cells in your brain, even though they have the same DNA, because the genes that do liver type things are turned on in your liver and the genes that do neuron type things are turned on in your brain. So epigenetics is just, it really just means above the genome. And it's, you know, a whole class of things that regulate when, where and under which circumstances is a genetic sequence translated into proteins. And that can be, you know, what a lot of people have been interested in around trauma and stress. Does that change the pattern of gene expression? But even exercise changes the pattern of gene expression, you know, where you what stage of your life you're in new patterns of gene expression are different in childhood versus puberty versus adulthood. So in our lab, we study one thing related to epigenetics, which is called DNA methylation. So methylation are these methyl groups that can kind of one way to kind of crude way to describe it as like can kind of like glom on to the top of the genome and affect whether or not it's available to me. And we see, for instance, that children being raised in poverty in the Austin area show these epigenetic patterns that are associated with faster biological aging with heavier body weight with more information. So we definitely see evidence that the social environment is getting under the skin in a way to affect how our genome is being expressed, what effect it has on our lives. I again, I mean, as you can probably tell, I'm not an either or thinker, I'm a both and thinker. It's not genetics or epigenetics, it's genetics and epigenetics, right. Yeah, different layers of information that all matter for making sense of how children develop and change over time. So when we're when we're discussing like this, the social conversation, which is, you know, one of the one of the main focus of your book, right, because there's this idea of like meritocracy and work hard and we have equality of opportunity for everybody and da, da, da, da. So let me know if I'm off base or if the science is still out on this, right. But if a kid is raised in poverty in an abusive household, a stressful household where they don't know if they're going to be able to pay rent, put food on the table or whatever, that might have an effect on their bio, their biology, which I keep in the suburbs is not going to have to deal with. So yeah, I mean, I just think if we if we think about, if we think about the whole sweet, the whole constellation of environmental differences and genetic differences between kids in terms of how they play out by the time they're 18, right. Like, you know, by the time you begin adulthood, like are considered like responsible and culpable for your quote unquote choices, there's already been so so many ways that the debt could have been stacked in your favor or against you, right, in terms of, you know, your neighborhood, in terms of your parents, in terms of your school, in terms of your brain, in terms of your whether or not you live close to a highway or an industrial, you know, chemical plant that's polluting your environment in terms of your access to clean water. I mean, we see that, you know, lead is is one of the hugest influences in terms of the magnitude of this effect on things like IQ. So, and then we have this political discourse that so often is about how do we hold people quote unquote responsible for their bad choices, right. And I just think that so much of that discourse is profoundly out of step with the ways in which people's early lives are shaped by things over which they had no control whatsoever. So I come back to this idea in my book, and it's a very, you know, kind of classic idea from political philosophy from the philosopher John Rawls, which is if you didn't know who you were going to be, like if you took the you know, any all the possible combinations of genotypes and environments, and you didn't know who you were going to be, or I think often it's it's even more compelling to think about you didn't know which one of your kids were going to get. How would you design design society then, right. And I don't think it would be one in which we are like, well, the rich deserve their riches. And everyone else is struggling because of their their bad choices. And they haven't followed the quote unquote success sequence. Like, that is not what makes a structure or society good, in my view, right. What makes a structure or society good, in my view, is one in which the vagaries of chance do not govern your your access to the ingredients of a good life in the way that they do right now in the US. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like, Paige, don't don't don't even get me started on it. This is why I love your book. This is why I love Robert Frank's book. John Rawls has veil of ignorance. That's something I recently learned about. And, you know, when I'm, you know, talking with people about this and stuff, and I think my fingers here's just quick little background about me. I used to be like so pro meritocracy and hard work, because in 2012, I pulled up my bootstraps and I got sober, right. Like tens of thousands of people are dying each year. But look at me, look at the hard work I did. But then, like, you know, I started realizing all the luck, like I mentioned, my mom is an alcoholic. Well, she got sober seven years before I did. So that's kind of lucky that I had a mom there, right. And I've met so many people where they, you know, they want to get sober, but they, their families won't talk to them or anything like that. The only person who would talk to me was my mom and she helped me get into a sober living. And just so many things. So I'm like, okay, I did some hard work, but, you know, and, and I know that we're not going to be able to ever create this kind of perfect equality. But I think if you just do the veil of ignorance experiment, if, if anybody, if anybody on planet earth can say, no, that sounds terrible, like I wouldn't want to just randomly, you know, if the answer is no, then let's start working on some stuff. Right. And my, my girlfriend and I would like to play this fun game and we see a successful person who just kind of came out of nowhere. We'll start getting on Wikipedia and stuff like that. You see that their parents were like billionaires. You see how many kids, you know, how many actors their parents or producers or actors and stuff like that. And I'm like, you mean to tell me that that person had the exact same opportunity as this kid over here. Like it is mind blowing, but that's, you know, I'm so glad that you brought up sobriety there because I feel like, you know, this is not in the book. But I feel like that, that AA prayer around like the serenity stuff, the things I cannot change and like the, you know, what is it the strength to change the things I can and the way them to know the difference really could be a way to describe, you know, how we should think about genetics and environmental luck. Right. Which is, I'm not trying to say that people have no agency or responsibility in their lives or shouldn't feel proud of themselves if they've accomplished something like sobriety, which is a huge accomplishment. But they also have to have this like this, this responsibility in this space for agency that I had, is at the same time constrained by a bunch of things over which I have no control. Right. And like those are things in which we are, you know, we live embodied constrained lives and we're still trying to take responsibility for living the best lives that we can. And so that's very, you know, when I think about luck, genetic luck, environmental luck, you know, I think it's a very similar framework as that kind of AA prayer of saying, okay, well, this, you know, these are the ways in which people differ for reasons they have no control over. These are the things we can change as a society that can help them thrive and do better. We still have scope for agency and responsibility there. And it requires a lot of like wisdom and discernment, I think to talk about that in a way that doesn't go to extremes of, you know, people have no responsibility or people, you know, are totally pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or it's all genes or it's all environment. None of those all or nothing thoughts are really, that's one thing you probably learned in therapy is like be wary of all or nothing thoughts, right? Black and white thinking is almost ever true. Yeah, yeah, I've thought about it like I've, you know, self-published some of my own like mental health books, but I could do a whole one on like black and white thinking and, you know, you see it with like political polarization, just so many issues it's this all or nothing like, for example, you know, again, you're in Texas, there's this big, you know, issue with the abortion debate, but like, I think if you get two people together on both sides, you'll see that there's this big gray area, right? Like, when people are debating that there's not somebody, you know, even someone who's pro-choice, is it going to be like, yeah, eight months abortions, that's cool. Like, not many people are like, like nobody's going to say that, but, you know, other people from the other side, they might have a little wiggle room, but there's not enough conversation. And that's, that's this whole other thing like, when we're, when we're talking about this all or nothing thing, the conversation that always comes up, I think you touched on this in the book was Sam was a Sam Harris talking with Charles Murray about IQ. So that is one of the biggest debates when it comes to genetics. All right. So let me put it this way. I have this whole thing about just intelligence and IQ. I think IQ is just one aspect of it. Like, for example, Paige just me and you having this conversation completely different. I was, I was a drug addict till I was 27, you know, got sober. I sit and we talk about agency. I just read hundreds of books for the fun of it. I like to learn, you know what I mean? But I don't have a college degree. I can, you know, I can have conversations like this and sort of keep up, but there's this debate around like IQ. So two things, how much do genetics influence IQ in your opinion? Right. And do you, do you think IQ is the best way to calculate someone's quote unquote intelligence? Oh gosh, that's such a good question. So again, the answer for the first question is it depends, right? So for instance, my children's dad, my ex husband has done a meta analysis where they find evidence that genetics make a difference for IQ, but it makes more of a difference if you are raised in a higher social class family compared to a low income family. Because if you are being raised in conditions of a lot of material deprivation and exclusion from early childhood education, it kind of doesn't matter as much what your genetic differences are because they don't have this opportunity to be expressed in combination with kind of a high quality learning environment. So, you know, genes make a difference for the types of skills that are measured with IQ tests, but that's always in combination with the environment. You know, when people hear the word intelligence, they can use it. And it's one of those words that kind of gets psychologists in trouble, right? Because when I hear intelligence, I hear these are the, these are the forms of problem solving that are measured by IQ tests, right? But some people hear intelligence and they think this is human skill or human reasoning. And I think that the types of problem solving that are tested by standardized IQ tests is one type of human skill. It's one type of human reasoning, but it is not talent and it is not skill, sort of like, you know, full stop. So, I, you know, oftentimes when we're talking about IQ, people are, again, tempted to the extremes. So they're tempted to say like IQ tests only measure what is measured by IQ tests and like IQ isn't real or doesn't matter. And that we know is not true that the sorts of problem solving that are tested by IQ tests, they predict things we care about, like your likelihood of going through school, even how long you live. At the same time, there are certainly forms of human skill and human reasoning that are not tapped by that. And if, you know, a great way to think about this is, you know, imagine if our society was populated entirely by, you know, only the sorts of people who got PhDs in electrical engineering, right? Like that was the one type of skill and that was all we had, right? Like that would be a really boring world. That would be a really boring society. There's so much talent and ability to contribute that's not tapped by that kind of narrow slice of skill. And so I think we have to keep both of those things in mind at the same time. This is not nothing, but it's not everything either. Yeah. Yeah. I think the reason, yeah, I think like, you know, I come from more of the psychological thinking of it, like, if you get a brain surgeon, probably pretty smart, but can he like change his oil? No, we need somebody like typically we need somebody else, right? We're a society and we work together and some people are very smart in this area or not. But, you know, I use myself as an example with all the reading that I do, because I think, you know, we IQ, in your opinion, or your research, is it malleable? Like, I'm, you know, with all the reading that I do, I think I'm probably smarter than I was, you know, you know, yeah. I mean, we see that there's great, there's great studies on, you know, for instance, if you make students stay in school in extra year, or they start school, or they get accelerated to grade, or they started your early or we, or even just thinking about, you know, my lab right now is starting to think about how to measure learning loss over the course of COVID, right? Like how as being out of formal schooling affected children's cognitive development. So it's not, it's not innate or fixed. It's malleable, but still constrained in the sense that, you know, it's not that it's untethered from your biology, you know, it's not like you have some ability to do problem solving that's somehow like divorced from your brain, like that isn't what's happening. But at the same time, it's so dependent on input and experience and, you know, the quality of those inputs and experiences. And, you know, to kind of go back to your example about like, when you read hundreds of books, but you don't have a college degree, you know, someone could be able to be an electrical engineer, but not necessarily, you know, change their own oil. My jobs in life before I got into science, which was pretty young, was all as a waitress, right? Because what do you do if you're, you know, a teenager or a college student and you have no, you have no work background, you're a waitress. And I was a terrible waitress, deeply terrible waitress, because it requires a level of emotional attunement and extraversion and multitasking and switching and calmness under pressure that I find really, really hard. And then I got a job in a lab and I was like, I get to sit down and think about one thing and I don't have people yelling at me that they're like, fried chicken isn't done. And like, this is so much easier. So like, what's a hard job versus an easy job? Like what's a skilled job versus an unskilled job? I think all of our narratives around skilled and unskilled labor in America are completely like sometimes they just seem to completely divorced from reality. Like if you've ever seen a farm worker, like a video of a farm worker, that is an enormously skilled job that we just devalue the skill of it and the contribution of it to our society. Yeah, I think you nailed it right there. That's why I just get annoyed when they're like, oh, you know, IQ and genes and this and this, and it's like, who cares? We all need to work together. We all need different skill sets. Or this whole thing falls apart. Like when you give that example of like, if like, if everybody was like an engineer, I'm just like, oh, well, we just wouldn't survive. Like, I don't think, you know, a computer nerd is going to go out and hunt like if like tomorrow the world we had just apocalypse, you know, like, so, so a couple last final questions for you. One of them, I didn't even have on my list, but earlier in the conversation, we were talking about, you know, how we have like large sample sizes for genetics and stuff. And I was thinking about this because I've heard people be afraid of it. I'm not too concerned. But like 23 and me and maybe you're part of some government conspiracy where you can't even tell me like, should, should, should, should people be afraid of this? Like they're connect collecting like genetic samples and they're like, oh, they're having you send it in. So people like Paige can figure out how to mutate us and stuff like that. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, I think people should, should pay attention to, you know, the privacy agreements when it comes to 23 and me, they do, for instance, give data to researchers. It's anonymized, but I've worked with 23 me and genetic data. They do. They had a very big deal with a pharmaceutical company around that to look at genetic differences in relation to drug responses. I think this is part of a larger conversation that we're having not just about genetics and not just with 23 me but Facebook, Instagram cookies on your computer. Anything about how our interactions with private technology companies can be surveilled and used for profit. I think it's a huge conversation that goes beyond just genetics. This is why I'm super excited to see the U.S. finally investing in what other countries have already done, which are publicly funded studies of genetics, right? So I do a ton of stuff with UK Biobank, which is the UK government's kind of big genetic study of British older adults. And why is that in Britain? Why is that in Finland? Why is that in Estonia? We're moving towards what's called the all of us study in America, but I think it's a shame if American researchers have to rely on private for-profit companies in order to do research that's really intended to serve the public. Yeah, absolutely. I've been trying to learn more about the conversations around privacy and stuff like that, especially Facebook and Twitter and Google being called into Congress every five minutes. But yeah, so Paige, here's my last question for you. So genetic lottery, we talk about success and luck, right? And yeah, I love the book because you talk about so many different social issues. I don't even know who sat down with this question yet. But now you got the magic wand. Where do we start, right? Where do we start with solutions? Is it like public awareness? Is it so us, the people where we understand this and we start voting and realizing we need more policies for equality? Or do we need politicians to be educated on this? Like, where is a good starting point? Someone's listening to this podcast and they're like, oh crap, I'm going to buy her book, then I want to do something. Where do we start? Yeah, so I would say there's two things. And one is kind of like a macro policy level, which is I think if you start thinking about, again, this question of what would you want if you didn't know what the outcome of the genetic lottery was going to be for you and your kids. There's a couple things that other countries have that we don't have that you pick to really quickly, right? Which is around access to healthcare and kind of a minimum set of material well-being, regardless, right? So I don't think that your access to healthcare should be tied to your employment, particularly in a labor market where your employment is tied to how well you get informal education. That's just an outrageous thing that we do. So I think thinking about the role of lack and good social structures for me pushes me towards thinking about making things universal, right? Universal healthcare, kind of universal basic standards of living for people. What do we owe each other just by virtue of them being human and not because of something they've quote unquote achieved in their life? So that's a very kind of grand macro level. And then on the research side, I think if we are really serious about bringing the best tools that we can bring to bear to the study of improving education and psychology, we need to have a lot more of these combinations of randomized controlled trials of interventions with genetic data. And there's big studies that have both of those that do a lot of RCTs of education. And I said increasingly, with like the All of Us Study or Million Veterans program, like large scale genetic data collection in America. But how are those two things talking to each other? Like everyone knows it's not genes or the environment, it's genes and the environment, which means that we need scientific platforms that are not just genes or the environment, but that are both. And I think empowering researchers to be able to actually do the research that combines them is going to be how we push them off forward scientifically. So sorry for the follow up. But for the researchers, is that like, is that like funding or is that like the public not giving people like you so much crap? What does that look like? I think that's infrastructure. A lot of it is, you know, like if you think about, for instance, what people have done in neuroscience, they're saying, okay, well, here's our standards for, you know, reporting individual studies, but also how are we collectively investing in technology and platforms for conducting neuroscience studies. So I think a big part of that is infrastructure. A big part of that is researchers taking the risk to incorporate genetics into their studies, you know, which always requires like a new set of tools and ways of thinking about it. And then I think it takes more of us in the genetics community, not kind of shying away from controversy, but getting out there and being like, this is important, like we studied this for a reason, like this is important, we should be using it. I think, I think those are some of the steps, the action steps. Beautiful. I love it. I love a page. And, and, and yeah, like I appreciate you coming on so much. And, and I don't think I just, my personal opinion, I don't think it's possible to have listened to this whole episode and be like, yeah, Paige is doing this research to promote eugenics or something like, you care about like, you know, you see the net positives of researching this stuff. So I want everybody to go get the book and we didn't get to talk about your sick movie references throughout the day either. So people can be surprised by that. But, but yeah, so when's the book out? Where can they get it? And most importantly, where can they keep up? The book is officially out on Tuesday, but I'm seeing photographs all over the internet of people who've gotten their copies early. It is available on bookshop, on Amazon, support your local independent bookstore, please. My favorite is, it's called Book People. It's in Austin, Texas, if you want to, you know, send some love their way. And it is out in hardback, in audio book, and on Kendall. So choose your format. And I'm really looking forward to having the conversation about this, not just with other academics that always already swim in the space, but like with a more general public that's reading about these ideas for the first time. Yeah. And, and we're in your, you're constantly doing research as the best place to find you on Twitter, or does your lab have like a website? So you can find me on Twitter at kph3k, and then I have a website that's my name kpharden.com. Or you can just Google me page Hardin University of Texas, and you'll find my lab website that way. Beautiful. I love it. Well, thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for the work that you do. And yeah, we'll do this again when you write the next one. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.