00:01:14.220Well, first of all, if anyone hasn't seen the old episode, can you give a brief background
00:01:18.580about who you are and what it is you do?
00:01:21.000I'm a psychologist and neuroscientist, and I was at Harvard studying
00:01:25.140gender dysphoria. But in the last episode, we didn't talk so much about that. We talked about
00:01:31.020hormones and brain development, sex differences in brain development, particularly during puberty
00:01:36.340and intersex conditions. So I did a lot of research before I got to studying the transgender0.57
00:01:42.580phenomenon, research on very rare intersex conditions, genetic anomalies, most of them
00:01:49.180endocrine disorders that result in hormone imbalances that result in personality differences,
00:01:55.640including in extreme cases, gender dysphoria, and in even more extreme rare cases, intersex,
00:02:02.460ambiguous phenotypes and genitalia, which definitely connects to the transgender debate.
00:02:07.540And that's how I became dragged into this research. And what I tried to talk about in our last podcast
00:02:13.720is on both of these extremes of the transgender abate on the transgender activist side you often
00:02:20.360hear these radical claims of sex is a social construct sex is a spectrum it's not binary
00:02:26.880and often if you inquire what they mean they'll say well look at all these intersex conditions
00:02:32.180and it's true they exist but we're talking about one in a hundred thousand people for any particular
00:02:37.340condition or fewer so those exist but it's not just that it's not like intersex is a third sex
00:02:44.800it's they are genetically male or female and they have these specific anomalies that lead to these
00:02:50.000specific intersex phenotypes and they can be much more likely to experience gender dysphoria
00:02:54.860so i made the case that historically transgender people very likely had some rare genetic condition
00:03:04.060that resulted in them feeling like they're in the wrong body. And I have a lot of sympathy for0.96
00:03:10.360those cases. But as we've seen in the last decade or two, there's been an explosion in gender
00:03:16.580dysphoria cases, especially in teenage girls. And the gender affirming care protocol, the hormonal
00:03:24.820and surgical intervention has been a disaster. I warned about that when we did this podcast two1.00
00:03:29.800years ago. And I managed to do my dissertation on what is driving this surge in gender dysphoria
00:03:37.400cases, particularly among teenage girls. Wow. How was that dissertation received?
00:03:44.920In different ways, better and worse than you would expect. So the better than you would expect is
00:03:50.780that as an institution, Harvard protected me and my advisor, Steven Pinker made it possible. So on
00:03:57.920one hand, if there was not an advisor who was willing to support me doing the research, I
00:04:02.540wouldn't have been able to period. And at Harvard, Pinker was the only person. So I'm very grateful
00:04:09.200that I had his support. It is concerning that everyone else was not willing to do it. And I
00:04:15.580ended up switching advisors to be able to pursue this topic. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah,
00:04:21.400because I was in the neuroscience lab studying hormones and sex differences. And in that lab,
00:04:26.800that's where i learned about mostly from animal research it was animal research where puberty0.58
00:04:31.680blockers were first administered and you see the tragic part is that that the things that sex
00:04:39.440hormones do to the brain during puberty people talk about adolescence as a sensitive window for
00:04:44.960higher order cortical development the types of prefrontal cortex regions that help mature
00:04:52.880emotion regulation capability so the theory for gender dysphoria is if you're prescribing
00:04:59.040puberty blockers because the secondary sex characteristics of puberty are distressing
00:05:03.840because you have this felt mismatch between your biological sex and your desired gender identity
00:05:09.920and that's going to exacerbate depression anxiety and in extreme cases suicidality
00:05:15.840the strong argument was always would you rather have a trans kid or a dead kid1.00
00:05:20.640And they point towards the high suicide rate among transgender people, which is true.1.00
00:05:25.000They do have among the highest suicide rate.
00:05:26.900But that's very different from a causal argument of if you don't give them puberty blockers or hormones or surgery, then they're going to be more likely to commit suicide.
00:05:37.020And the part that really disturbed me is that we know just from typical variation in hormone levels, especially across the menstrual cycle or on birth control, that hormones can massively impact your mood.
00:05:49.940And that's within normal, small scale fluctuation.
00:05:53.500So if you're talking about far outside the range of normal development, cross sex hormone
00:05:58.060and hormone administration, that is much more likely to destabilize your mood in a way that
00:06:03.420can paradoxically make the very suicide outcomes that were tried to prevent much worse.
00:12:31.800oh, you have this really complicated issue.
00:12:34.060here's the solution that we can provide you when it's much more nuanced than that even in terms of
00:12:39.900mental health which is like yeah you're very depressed but here's a pill that just fixes
00:12:43.300the imbalance and it's like clearly that hasn't been working because our mental health issues
00:12:49.880are skyrocketing and you've done a bunch of research actually you know what let's start
00:12:54.280with cato let's start with cato and then get into that you're at the cato institute now right
00:13:00.100can you describe what that is what that does cato institute is a libertarian think tank
00:13:06.240policy research organization and i'm on the human progress team there's a great website
00:13:11.620humanprogress.org you can see all these great statistics about increase in lifespan decrease
00:13:18.280in disease rates increase in literacy worldwide increase in economic productivity basically human
00:13:24.560progress more of everything good less of everything bad and we use global data publicly available
00:13:30.000everything you can check for yourself everything is replicable and open source so i'm doing mental
00:13:36.040health research because despite this robust evidence that by so many metrics we're living
00:13:41.340in the best time in human history you also look at psychiatric diagnoses and they're at all-time
00:13:46.960highs and worse than that it's in the wealthiest freest countries that have the highest depression
00:13:54.300and anxiety rates. So a lot of people look at that, and they think there's some fundamental
00:14:00.120problem of progress of modernity, there's evolutionary mismatch, we're experiencing a
00:14:05.560crisis of meaning, it's hard to get data and things like that. And I try to be a data driven
00:14:09.980skeptic. So when I hear crisis of meaning, driving an all time mental health crisis,
00:14:15.080I think, okay, that's one good hypothesis. On the other hand, maybe it's a sign of progress
00:14:22.180that we're seeing psychiatric diagnoses rise because there's less stigma. There's more mental
00:14:27.900health awareness. We have the resources to attend to mental health problems. I think all of that is
00:14:32.580part of progress and part of what's driving this. But I've also been writing a lot about Cato.
00:14:37.420Now, being a libertarian think tank, we're also extremely suspect about government overreach
00:14:45.580and the financial incentives that come into, in this case, a health care expansion.
00:14:52.280So when the very providers that diagnose the conditions are the ones that stand to benefit
00:14:58.800financially from seeing more psychiatric disorders, it's not surprising that there's an incentive
00:15:04.660to overdiagnose. And if you look at the DSM, the American Psychiatric Association's textbook
00:15:11.220manual that lists all of the mental health conditions and the criteria for diagnosing them
00:15:16.160it's gotten bigger with every successive revision the original one more than 60 years ago
00:15:21.280was about 130 pages and the new one is 1130 pages wow so it's expanded a lot and people will say
00:15:30.960well it's expanded because we have again greater mental health awareness better screening there's
00:15:35.360more nuance in how we define the disorders. That's all true. But also across every successive
00:15:41.720revision, the criteria for diagnosis have gotten broader. So what I've been writing a lot about
00:15:48.120recently is psychiatric overdiagnosis. And across virtually every condition, I think we're
00:15:54.160overdiagnosing. And as you mentioned, forget about relatively rare interventions like puberty
00:16:02.040blockers, as harmful as they've been, 30% of American college students of Gen Z are on psych
00:16:10.060meds, mostly SSRIs. And I know you've been doing a lot of research into it and personal experience.
00:16:15.680Yeah, like the stats I pulled, because they're kind of hard to pull, right, was 20%
00:16:21.540across the board. But I hadn't heard the 30% of Gen Z in universities.
00:16:26.800Yeah, my understanding is it's about 20% across the board, including for Gen Z. But there's also a large sex difference because it's mostly women who are diagnosed with depression and anxiety. So it's closer to 30% for females, closer to 10% for males, and also across the board, for whatever reason, 30% among college students. So the college student rate is much higher. That could be in part because college students are now majority female.
00:16:53.120yeah oh my gosh that's wild and we don't understand the long-term side effects1.00
00:16:59.660as you've been writing about that's for sure and it's looking it's seriously not looking good
00:17:06.220i read a study recently and it was people who'd taken i think they were specifically looking at
00:17:11.800ssris and it was people who'd been taking them for more than two years and 78 of them had some
00:17:17.720type of withdrawal and it was i think it was 30 out of the 100 of people couldn't get off them so
00:17:24.940the withdrawal you could say was bad enough that they couldn't stop taking them and apa doesn't
00:17:29.680even recognize ssri withdrawal they call it discontinuation syndrome yeah i don't even know
00:17:37.620how to explain that it's so frustrating i've been so frustrated by that do you know what have you
00:17:43.340seen any studies about what percentage of women who are on an ssri started with birth control
00:17:49.720because i'm wondering if that's a huge trigger for depression and anxiety in the first place
00:17:55.540but i haven't seen any research about it i have no idea but to your point our underlying biology
00:18:00.600is so complex and hormones and drugs interact in complex ways also all your experience with diet
00:18:07.720like again we have we have very little understanding although we're seeing emerging research
00:18:12.340that even like your gut microbiome can seriously impact your mood, let alone intervening with
00:18:19.040much more extreme pharmaceutical intervention. So I'm concerned about the long-term side effects
00:18:24.960of all of these, but I'm glad we're talking more openly about it. Yeah, I think we're headed in the
00:18:29.580right direction. And at least I think if people know, I know that the guidelines are being changed,
00:18:34.120which is the tapering guidelines, which is really important. And once the tapering guidelines change
00:18:39.540people understand oh if you're on a psych med you need hyperbolic tapering they'll understand that
00:18:44.800this isn't such a casual medication if you can't just suddenly stop taking it and revert back to
00:18:49.940normal if you need this lengthy taper to have your brain adjust back to being normal then you can
00:18:55.880infer oh this medication is actually quite quite intense it's not just like a serotonin vitamin
00:19:01.300that you pop. Yeah, I think, I think in RFK's recent initiative to create billing codes for
00:19:08.680not just prescribing, but de-prescribing medication, that was a step in the right
00:19:12.660direction. And on the subject of Medicaid and financial incentives, one of the strong arguments
00:19:19.340that you'll hear for this mental health crisis that supposedly young people in particular are
00:19:24.420living through is you see this hockey stick like phenomenon. So like slow increases in depression
00:19:29.960and anxiety. And then right around 2010, like sharp increase, especially in young people. So
00:19:35.240a lot of people, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, being one of the most prominent
00:19:39.920examples, attribute that right around 2010, this sharp increase to the advent of smartphones and
00:19:46.300social media. I've also been writing a lot about critiquing that underlying research. So it's true
00:19:51.580that there are correlations between social media use and depression, anxiety and loneliness. Kids
00:19:58.000who are most depressed and anxious and lonely are the most likely to use social media. You might
00:20:02.800also remember from our podcast, we talked about me being homeschooled and addicted to video games
00:20:07.920and spending like well over 10 hours a day on screens. So maybe there's a little bit of what
00:20:14.360Freud would call reaction formation, like a little bit of defensiveness and fighting against the
00:20:19.080thing that calls out your blind spots. But if you look at the actual data, there are lots of
00:20:24.800individual studies that show associations between social media use and these negative mental health
00:20:29.880outcomes, but they're mostly correlational. It's mostly self-selection that you have kids like me
00:20:36.380who are already overweight, lonely, depressed, homeschooled that are seeking out connection
00:20:42.500online. And as poor as my childhood was, I think that it would have been even worse if I didn't
00:20:49.640have video games and if I didn't have online social connection. And if you look at meta
00:20:54.760analyses, especially the ones that control for other personality traits that independently
00:21:00.560predict both negative mental health outcomes and increased screen usage, like introversion,
00:21:07.420then you see that the effects disappear. So the largest meta analyses show that these social
00:21:13.740media effects are mostly correlational and mostly null when you control for other confounds.
00:21:20.860And the alternative explanation to this hockey stick phenomenon, also in 2010, is when the
00:21:27.980Affordable Care Act introduced this mental health parity provision. So before 2010, it was
00:21:36.300not legally required for insurances to cover mental health services. They weren't considered
00:21:42.460an essential service. The Mental Health Parity Act introduced mental health care as an essential
00:21:48.780health service. So again, speaking in Cato language in terms of financial incentives,
00:21:53.740this opened the floodgates to what economists would call supplier-induced demand. Here's a
00:21:59.240thing that previously wasn't eligible for insurance coverage, and you need a diagnosis
00:22:05.260for insurance coverage. So after you open, you legislate a requirement to open the floodgates
00:22:12.020to insurance money, you create a strong incentive for diagnosis. And immediately after that in 2013
00:22:18.600is when we have the most recent and also the largest and most expansive and loosest diagnostic
00:22:25.780criteria edition of the DSM. So I look at that and I think it's a striking coincidence and it seems
00:22:32.080more causally likely to me than these social media correlations. I completely agree.
00:22:38.700that like that makes perfect sense i didn't realize that was exactly at the same time
00:22:44.460and that does make sense to me that if you're introverted you are going to spend more time
00:22:48.540online and i can tell from like so my eight-year-old you can just tell that giving kids
00:22:54.280screens all the time especially if this is a healthy kid isn't good for the kid but i would
00:23:00.680i would agree that it's likely um it's not causal it's likely correlation right the most robust
00:23:07.660effects aren't on mental health. The most robust effects of screen use are on attention span. And
00:23:13.760even when you look at attention span and education outcomes, the best studies on this are quasi
00:23:19.340randomized control trials looking at different schools within the same district. So they have
00:23:24.240similar demographics and you're more or less naturally controlling for those socioeconomic
00:23:30.340confounds. And you're looking at, okay, this school bans smartphones, this neighboring school
00:23:35.240doesn't. You don't see any significant differences on mental health outcomes or bullying. What you do
00:23:42.140see big effects is on standardized test scores. So kids do better with smartphone bans. Now,
00:23:50.440even there, I don't look at it and say social media or smartphones are so harmful to attention0.99
00:23:58.160span that kids are literally getting dumber. I look at it as a neuroscientist and thinking about
00:24:04.320the first principles of brain development, like it's the same brain matter, it's the same level
00:24:11.120of computational power, we can just specialize and redirect to different areas. So we talked about
00:24:17.440this last time, actually, in the context of sensitive windows for brain development, you have
00:24:22.460these heightened windows of plasticity. And the extreme examples are both in animal studies where
00:24:29.280you experimentally manipulate, say, blinding certain animals, what you'll see is that the
00:24:34.440visual cortex will atrophy, but then the other sensory cortices like the auditory cortex will
00:24:40.180grow in and start to fill that brain region. And you see the animal develop more acute sense of
00:24:48.220hearing or of smell. And we see the same thing in congenitally blind or deaf humans. So that's
00:24:55.000neuroplasticity at work. So starting from those same principles, let's say you have a developing
00:25:00.580brain that has a finite amount of smarts or computational power, and you can either specialize
00:25:06.980in slow traditional learning, like the types of critical thinking and reading long text passages
00:25:14.380that you do in standardized testing and traditional education, or you specialize in fast-paced
00:25:20.980multitasking the types that the types of intelligence that's optimized for with video
00:25:26.140games and social media and indeed that's what the research shows it's not that you're getting
00:25:31.340dumber it's that you're getting worse at a very specific type of long-term critical thinking task
00:25:37.680but you also get better at multitasking i'm not to say that objectively one is better or worse but0.98
00:25:43.620again thinking like an evolutionary psychologist and neuroscientist there are different trade-offs
00:25:48.340but you have the same level of brain power. That's cool. I don't know what to say to that.
00:25:55.420That's cool. I think that makes that makes sense to me. It's also hard to tell with the advent of
00:25:59.980AI and how the future is going to be exactly how humans need to adapt. Right? I've been writing
00:26:07.380about AI and mental health to actually the fun thing about this role is because psychology
00:26:11.640connects to basically everything policy related and technology related. So I get to opine on all
00:26:18.060these different areas. So like in the context of AI, people are talking about chatbots and AI
00:26:23.700therapy, or in these extreme cases, AI psychosis, AI driven suicide. So oftentimes people point
00:26:30.320towards some potential for harm. And that's kind of what we're talking about in all these examples
00:26:36.220here. There are real potential harms, say, of AI, of social media, of diet, of elective procedures.
00:26:45.340Then the question is, what do we do about it? And often people rush in for government solutions saying we need to regulate, we need to prevent this harm. But regulation creates harm to diagnosis creates harm, too. So also when people look at overdiagnosis, and when they say, well, the DSM has been getting broader, yes, but worst case, that just means we're generating some false positives, but we're expanding access to care. Wouldn't you rather do that than underdiagnose?
00:27:11.320But people forget that when you label someone, especially a child with a diagnosis, who's okay, get this. According to the CDC, there was a 70% increase in autism in the three years post COVID. Now, autism is a rare genetic neurological disorder that is characterized by social difficulties.
00:27:34.960gee i wonder why there is a 70 increase in social difficulties following a pandemic where we shut
00:27:42.600down the world and left kids outside of the normal social environment
00:27:48.020yep i was also going to say for jonathan height's work on social media
00:27:55.960what i do think is realistic is people are talking more about it so you get social contagion
00:28:02.960really easy on social media so perhaps around 2010 which isn't even i think when social media
00:28:08.480really took hold i think it was a bit later than that at least for me i was probably more involved
00:28:14.100in it in 2012 like quite a bit more than 2010 but you get support groups you get people saying
00:28:20.780these are my symptoms are these your symptoms and then you can find all your people so easily
00:28:24.920because of the algorithm and that i think would have more of a potential negative effect depending
00:28:31.080on what the contagion is than amount spent, than just social media as a whole. Like the ideas that
00:28:38.480are in social media. Does Jonathan Haidt talk about that? Is he talking about that causing
00:28:42.800mental health problems? Like what people are talking about on social media or literally just
00:28:46.700screen time? Yeah, it's homophily. And we certainly see that with the gender dysphoria epidemic and
00:28:52.720also with eating disorders like anorexia, with self-harm like cutting. In all those cases,
00:29:00.220I agree with you social media if it has any causal effect
00:29:04.280It's not directly on mental health, but it's on who you're talking to and what you're hearing
00:29:09.640So that's where that's where most of heights critique is and you know, he also pays a lot of attention to cyber bullying
00:29:16.020Again, there's there's a completely separate policy question that we need to be having because a lot of people
00:29:21.720I mean first the question is is this thing harmful and what I've been calling attention to is often the harms are on
00:29:29.640a less robust evidence foundation than people would have you believe.
00:29:36.680But even where the harms are real, okay, what do we do about it?
00:29:39.680Do we ban social media for kids under 16 like Australia has just done?
00:29:55.620So in many cases, the bans, if anything,
00:29:58.180It just gets them off the big platforms like Instagram that have the most robust safety checks, and they're exploring darker corners of the Internet that don't have the same regulations.0.98
00:30:09.660So that's, again, it's like the hormones for gender dysphoric youth.0.79
00:30:14.800It's well-intentioned, and yet it might make the underlying problem worse, not to mention that in order to mandate age to prevent children from being able to access harmful content online, it means that you have to have age checks for all users, including adults, and that introduces unconstitutional privacy risks.0.60
00:30:40.440So what do we do about it? Do we regulate or do we leave it like most forms of potential harm that children should be protected from and recognize it as a responsibility of the parents?
00:30:54.520So in a lot of these big lawsuits that we're seeing against social media companies right now, they're claiming that there's an underlying harmful association, which, again, I'm more skeptical about, but open to the possibility that it's there.
00:31:05.940Certainly in some minority cases, there are direct causal harmful effects. What we can't say is that at the level of systematic reviews and meta-analyses across the board, we can say something is harmful. But there are definitely individualized cases of harm.
00:31:23.360even in those cases is it the company that has been negligent or is it the parent that has been
00:31:28.540negligent because in any other case a kid gets access to a firearm or drugs then the parent will
00:31:36.040be charged with negligence you don't go after the company that's produced it yeah might be an
00:31:41.740unpopular opinion but i'm probably inclined to think it's the parent's fault now i don't have
00:31:46.660a teenager yet so maybe my view will change once i have a teenager but if you end up in a in a cycle
00:31:54.100of negative reddit threads probably not great for your for your mental health but then maybe there
00:32:00.580needs to be some oversight by parents being like are you in a chat room like where are you on the
00:32:05.500internet as opposed to just saying social media as a whole is bad because i also don't see how
00:32:11.380you're going to avoid, especially in five or 10 years, how we're going to avoid the internet with
00:32:18.280the advent of AI. It's going to be so ingrained in society, especially when there are robots
00:32:25.040walking around. Right, right. What I've written a lot for Human Progress about recently is the fact
00:32:31.740that we have this innate negativity bias. There is an evolutionary mismatch. Diet is the classic
00:32:39.860example in an ancestral environment where fat and sugar and high calorie foods were rare
00:32:45.840it's adaptive to develop a strong taste for it but in a modern environment of industrial food
00:32:51.780production over consumption is the greater risk so there's all sorts of evolutionary mismatch
00:32:57.620negativity bias being a great example you would rather mistake a stick for a snake than a snake
00:33:06.420for a stick evolution has selected for people to be a little bit neurotic a little bit overly
00:33:12.160threat sensitive and media hijacks that negativity bias not even because there's any perverse
00:33:18.760incentives it's just a natural incentive like you want to get human attention then anything negative
00:33:25.760is going to orient human attention again because in an ancestral environment and even in a modern
00:33:31.960day environment it's adaptive but it's also even more adaptive to be mindful of the fact that we
00:33:37.300have this negativity bias and be selective about what information you allow into your life so i
00:33:45.300think that this is a form of progress and the interesting thing if you've explored stoicism
00:33:49.980at all marcus aurelius former roman emperor he writes about in his meditations in his diary
00:33:56.060he basically has a whole bunch of first world problems he's an emperor
00:34:00.1202 000 years ago and he writes about i don't want to get out of bed i have all these servants that
00:34:06.140can do my job for me um i'm worried about gluttony because i have like literally all the
00:34:11.280best food in the world brought to me on a platter i don't want to go outside and exercise but i know1.00
00:34:15.960it's good for my body i don't really want to read because i can just have all these concubines0.99
00:34:19.920brought into my bed chambers and i don't have to do anything if i don't want to then like have sex1.00
00:34:24.080and have grapes fed to me by these beautiful women. And other people, power hungry people1.00
00:34:28.700would be glad to do my emperor job for me. I can outsource all of that. So he has extreme
00:34:33.200first world problems. And what we're seeing now, this crisis of meaning that we're talking about
00:34:38.460is basically emperor world problems at scale because we're wealthier than any other time
00:34:44.680in human history. We are having to contend with the same problems that the founder of stoicism
00:34:49.440contended with. The fact that we would rather have to avoid gluttony or avoid sleeping in and
00:34:56.520being lazy because we're wealthy enough and safe enough that we can afford to. So that's difficult.
00:35:04.180Responsibility and agency is difficult. I think this is why your dad was such an influence on
00:35:08.800especially on young men like myself growing up in this environment of extreme abundance but also
00:35:15.780extreme ease and being able to take the easy way out and be lazy but being able to instead you know
00:35:26.560rally for responsibility and create the own the meaning in your life as opposed to just having it
00:35:32.240handed to you in the daily struggle for survival it's difficult but it's worthwhile and it's
00:35:37.800amazing to me from a human progress angle that now those are the problems that we have to face
00:35:42.860instead of the default problems of starvation
00:36:05.560isn't that highly reliant on how conscientious you are?
00:36:08.920Isn't that a lot of that personality driven?
00:36:11.020and if so then what are those people going to do it is and i like that you're thinking like a
00:36:16.180personality psychologist i worry about the bell curve all the time and i don't just mean about
00:36:20.360intelligence but conscientiousness like you said neuroticism as well so there's always going to be
00:36:26.220some tale of a distribution of people that are going to have it easier and have it harder but
00:36:31.280they still fundamentally have to deal with the same challenges but i don't mean that in a pessimistic
00:36:36.280way like they have to deal with it i mean it like the solutions are going to be the same even if
00:36:41.000if they're harder yeah to implement as hard as it's going to be to adopt more responsibility if
00:36:46.840you're for biological reasons lower in conscientiousness and higher in neuroticism if
00:36:51.560anything all the more urgent it is for you to adopt that mindset yeah so do you think that can
00:36:59.020be taught do you have recommendations for people and i'm optimistic as an evolutionary psychologist
00:37:03.820that you know you said for people that don't have any motivation i don't believe such people exist
00:37:10.060because at the very least we have these inherited biological motives you know we want to avoid pain
00:37:17.460avoid starvation yeah avoid boredom even that's why that's why we talk about addiction and doom
00:37:23.400scrolling because people don't want to be bored i mean boredom is healthy for creativity to some
00:37:27.760degree but even you say like someone who supposedly has no motivation well they're doom scrolling
00:37:33.040because they're bored and that implies an intrinsic motivation to try to avoid boredom
00:37:38.400or they're overeating because again eating is just naturally pleasurable we evolved that way
00:37:43.720so what i'm trying to do in this broader mission as a psychologist of human progress is to better
00:37:51.520understand our evolutionary psychology and try to gamify it so we can optimize psychology it's like
00:37:57.540maslow's hierarchy of needs yeah i had this conversation with dad about five years ago
00:38:02.520because we were talking about what what do people do when they can't figure out what to do with
00:38:06.160their lives i was like well figure out where the problems are and then fix the problems like
00:38:10.760everybody has some issue that they could probably work at and and that's a place that's how i started
00:38:18.220where i was like okay this autoimmune disorder is a huge problem is ruining my entire life i guess
00:38:24.520that's what i'll do with my life is figure out how to not have an autoimmune disorder and i think
00:38:28.900that applies to every human it's like what part of your life is suffering and what can you do to
00:38:34.720fix it and there you have something to do right so it's like a fundamental is the glass half full
00:38:39.940or half empty I mean for every problem that's pointed out and like I mentioned one of the
00:38:44.200major critiques of the human progress narrative is well how can you say we're living in the best
00:38:48.500time in history when and then you know name all of these new problems that are unique to this time
00:38:53.860in history but for every problem I mean if we didn't have any problems your dad talks about
00:38:58.580this too. In Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, like you had nothing to do, but lay in bed and
00:39:05.480eat cake, you'd be bored, you'd be depressed, you'd be nihilistic. So and a lot of people are
00:39:10.160again, it's the it's the stoicism emperor world problems. That's cool. Okay, you talked about the
00:39:17.060meaning crisis. And before we started talking, you mentioned a book. Can you describe this
00:39:22.140upcoming book? This is the long term vision for psychology of human progress. So in the same way
00:39:28.400that there are many different disciplines within psychology, social, developmental, cognitive,
00:39:34.160evolutionary, clinical. We want progress psychology to be its own subfield. So if you've heard of this
00:39:40.520somewhat still niche world of progress studies, it's a lot of Silicon Valley, tech bro, libertarian
00:39:46.980types, not just, you know, startups, but this broader world of, you know, how do we optimize
00:39:53.800human existence you hear a lot of it with ai too so people are coming at it from different angles
00:39:59.020there's progress studies in terms of optimizing health so maybe i'd place you in there there's
00:40:04.160progress studies in terms of ai alignment there's progress studies in terms of our institutions
00:40:09.480how can we remove a lot of the corruption and perverse incentives including the incentives
00:40:16.900the perverse incentives in our health care system like for over diagnosis like we were just talking
00:40:21.640about. And more importantly, underlying all of this, all of these different problems and potential
00:40:30.680solutions are psychological problems and solutions. So that's not just what are the psychological
00:40:38.060traits that we should try to optimize for in terms of mental health and fulfillment and creativity
00:40:44.420and purpose but also what are the psychological traits that hinder progress tribalism zero-sum
00:40:52.300thinking negativity bias and how can we be more mindful of that and navigate around them
00:40:59.220that makes sense and you mentioned you're working with marian tupi sarah hill about a bit who's in
00:41:08.620the cato institute that people might know marion tupi runs human progress.org yeah my dad has been
00:41:14.840such a fan of his for like 10 years i remember before all all the like youtube infamy and
00:41:20.440everything uh he was kind of obsessed with the x account human progress because i was always
00:41:27.640tweeting out it was like well technically actually things are going in the right direction here are
00:41:31.720all the studies yeah and it's funny people don't like to hear it they get weirdly defensive like
00:41:37.180they're clinging on to the to the narrative that the world is so bad i don't know why but yeah you
00:41:42.920look at the data look at human progress.org and all of the data is open source from publicly
00:41:49.200available like oecd our world and data international data sets so we're not creating the
00:41:55.740data we're not spinning the narrative that things are better we're just illuminating where it is and
00:42:01.700again we're willing to contend with where the data says that things are worse and the main
00:42:06.740place that the data is worse is mental health outcomes. So I'm looking at that still with a
00:42:12.920healthy view of skepticism of, is it actually worse? Or could the data say it's worse because
00:42:19.740the diagnostic standards have shifted? And it's a combination of both. I think that there are
00:42:26.180real problems that are making people more nihilistic if they lack agency, but agency also
00:42:33.120seems to be the solution to this. And there are other real pressing problems grounded in this type
00:42:39.340of international data, like the fertility crisis. And I think that's fundamentally tied to this
00:42:44.680crisis of meaning. Having a child is the most long-term optimistic bet on the world that you
00:42:50.140can take. And a lot of young people aren't taking that bet. This is true. Interesting. I'm probably
00:42:58.100more inclined to think that there's something that something has made people sick recently
00:43:02.700you know that it's not just but I mean I come I come at this from more of a health perspective
00:43:08.220but I can't imagine for instance one of the arguments when I was diagnosed with juvenile
00:43:13.520rheumatoid arthritis it was unseen I think that was 1999 when I was diagnosed and it took five
00:43:18.840years to diagnose because doctors hadn't seen it and now it's skyrocket I don't I don't want to
00:43:24.980give the stat, but it went from something like 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100 or something. Those numbers
00:43:31.920aren't right. They'd have to be double-checked, but it's way more prevalent. And one of the
00:43:35.740arguments is, well, that's because we can catch it faster. But I didn't know anybody in my school
00:43:41.020that had joint pain. You know, it wasn't there. And so I'm more inclined to think that something
00:43:47.800recently has made people more sensitive physiologically to something that's causing
00:43:56.140depression rather than just a meaning crisis. But I think we're going to need a lot more data
00:44:02.580to figure out exactly what there is. There's theories, there's a vaccine theory, there's
00:44:07.660diet, the diet theory, of course, like more processed foods causing chronic illness.
00:44:12.280But I think that plays a huge role. I think you're right. That's certainly in terms of
00:44:17.580physical health and even mental obesity to even just a rising obesity rate right diet plays a
00:44:24.380whole a huge role lifestyle plays a huge role because people are just less active the fact that
00:44:29.320you don't really have to be physically active to survive or to put food on the table anymore in
00:44:35.680most industries of work in wealthy western democracies so again i look at that still as a
00:44:42.800sign of progress, like genuine problems we need to contend with. But let's say it's the case that
00:44:47.940because of food industrialization, there are all sorts of additives that turn out to have
00:44:53.360tiny, harmful, cumulative effects on physical and mental health that are impairing us from
00:45:00.380an optimal health standpoint. On the other hand, life expectancy is just about higher than ever.
00:45:06.900And if we think about the evolutionary and historical perspective, for most of human history, the median age was 40.
00:45:17.220Most of human history, deaths in infancy and in childbirth were crazy high, and now they're at all-time lows.
00:45:26.240So the human progress angle is, yes, we have real challenges to face. But on the other hand, we're able to acknowledge those because we have, you know, billions of people putting their minds together because we have these advancements in food production and technology and energy and so forth.
00:45:49.000So also on this point, you mentioned Marion Toopey. So he's he's leading this whole human progress initiative. You also mentioned Sarah Hill, who you had on your podcast on Peterson Academy, birth control expert. So she's writing a chapter for us in this book on the psychology of progress on the tradeoffs of birth control. Like it's great in terms of expanding agency and gender rights, women's rights.
00:46:14.700On the other hand, yeah, there are real meaningful challenges, whether that's the literal psychological side effects of disrupting hormones, or even institutional side effects. Like when we see such a change as now a majority of people earning degrees are women, we see changes in institutional culture that probably contribute to the rise in cancel culture that we saw in the last decade.
00:46:39.540Adam puts gently. Yeah. So that's not to say that we should regress, but it's to say that0.70
00:46:46.660everything is trade-offs, even, you know, smartphones and brain health. Everything
00:46:51.540is trade-offs. We're not atrophying our brains, but we're trading off a type of long-term delayed
00:46:58.560thinking into a type of multitasking and fast-paced information processing. Everything is trade-offs.
00:47:04.920So that's the central thesis of the book. I mentioned those two, and we're going to have
00:47:08.720chapters from various experts in different fields, including hopefully on diet, on physical health,
00:47:14.800again, not just thinking psychologically in terms of individuals and their personalities and mental
00:47:20.260health, but also psychologically in terms of tribalism and what types of people feed into
00:47:26.400what types of institutions and what type of institutional norms enable progress versus
00:47:32.420hinder progress now on one hand there is a strong bias the free market bias but the bias is not
00:47:40.040because we're libertarian we're libertarian because we see that this is what the data shows
00:47:46.500enables progress free markets genuinely enable innovation and material prosperity and anti
00:47:55.280free market societies especially communist regimes are the exact opposite hundreds of millions of
00:48:01.200deaths and unfortunately people especially on the left still have not gotten the picture but that's
00:48:07.720why we're continually fighting for freedom and trying to do it not so much in a polarized way
00:48:14.000but in a in a data-driven nuance just take a step back don't listen to us listen to the data
00:48:21.060i like that and i i can see that with abundance in food even though there were some
00:48:29.100malevolent I would say players creating the food pyramid and putting chemicals into our food you
00:48:35.840could see that if a society was to suddenly become abundant in food there's going to be this kind of
00:48:40.420blip where people figure out what to eat when they're exposed to everything and so maybe in
00:48:45.280the long-term games like well at least we have an abundant amount of food compared to before
00:48:50.440but we're in this intermediary period where we're not entirely sure what to eat because
00:48:56.320everything's been manufactured to taste so good. But in the long run, maybe a good thing.
00:49:02.260Yeah, I think more freedom is always good. And it gets trickier, especially from a philosophical
00:49:06.740perspective. What is the right amount of voluntary suffering? Not even the types of
00:49:13.540healthy sacrifice to develop yourself. But some people really like smoking. Some people really
00:49:21.680like junk food and they say you know i know this is going to shave years off my lifespan but i would
00:49:26.840rather live 60 years as a smoking mcdonald's eater oh yeah 80 years uh on a strict carnivore diet
00:49:33.840yeah go for it i i i have exactly that perspective is people should be able to do adults should be
00:49:41.760able to do basically whatever they want but they shouldn't be lied to in order to come to the
00:49:46.440conclusions they're at so like take psychiatric medications if you want to but know what happens
00:49:52.080if you're on them long term you should be told that and eat whatever you want but know what the
00:49:58.460like potentially chronic disease is the outcome like and it does get tricky from a philosophical
00:50:04.800perspective when you involve the government which i'm usually not interested in doing because i think
00:50:10.580usually that goes in the wrong direction but
00:50:13.580but then it's hard to say what to do with this society that's already addicted to all these
00:50:20.100things because they've been lied to for so long so we're not starting at zero for like medication
00:50:26.380foods we're not starting at zero and saying eat whatever you want here are all the ramifications
00:50:33.400if you decide to eat unhealthily here are all the ramifications if you decide to take medication
00:50:37.640long term. We're starting with a society that's already in the midst of it. So then do you need
00:50:43.440government input? Probably. I still don't know if it's useful or not, but it becomes a much harder
00:50:48.220question. One of the questions that keeps coming up in this progress psychology project is what do
00:50:55.100we do about institutional trust, which is at all time lows and really deservingly so given how
00:51:03.180much people have been lied to especially like covid really blew the roof off a lot of this
00:51:08.780not just because it was a strong example of government overreach and manipulating public
00:51:17.160information but also again the cumulative effects of years of lockdown and the psychological stress
00:51:24.000and handicapping an entire generation of young kids socially i think a lot of the political
00:51:31.000polarization and craziness we're seeing are downstream ripple effects of that. And we're
00:51:35.260going to probably see it for generations to come because, again, psychologists overuse the term
00:51:42.440intergenerational trauma. But in subtle ways, you're going to not just see that young kids
00:51:49.480who grew up during the pandemic are going to change and they're going to influence our
00:51:54.840institutions, but they're going to parent in different ways. And those children are going
00:51:59.560to grow up differently because that's sort of parenting. So I'm not trying to sound determinist
00:52:04.180or doomer. If anything, it's literally my job on human progress to be an optimist. And I am
00:52:09.580a data-driven optimist. But yeah, we need more transparency, more openness, more research,
00:52:17.300more data. And conversations like these are a step in that direction.
00:52:23.400Agreed. Does the Cato Institute run studies as well?
00:52:26.880We're running some studies on the human progress team.
00:52:54.080And what I love about it is there's true diversity of thought like you're supposed to have in academia. I mean, there is a self-selection bias to the extent that we're all libertarian or libertarian leaning, at least, and free market thinkers. But there's so much diversity.
00:53:11.000But you're right. So it's fine. And we're right. Yeah, I think we're right. And again, look at the data. Look at if you treat history as a set of quasi experiments. Well, it's not an accident that we're having this conversation in America. And you immigrated here because of the greater freedom, right? So you get these brain drain effects and your father as well. And it's like a rich get richer phenomenon.
00:53:38.760It's like this Matthew principle that seems to be a natural law. And that's why a lot of people critique free markets. But it's not the free market that's the problem. It's the underlying diversity of capability and value production. Like this is a far deeper evolutionary problem.
00:53:57.720agreed do you guys do any studies on like tribalism particularly i guess on social media
00:54:06.120i feel like just from what i've seen it's skyrocketed since covid uh
00:54:12.120and there's got to be some i was talking to dad about this the other day actually was there's
00:54:18.840got to be some personality traits that are associated with people who end up leading
00:54:23.160kind of these fringe conspiratorial tribes and he was assuming it has something to do with the dark
00:54:31.960triad and i'm just wondering if there have been any studies on that at all showing sociopaths i
00:54:40.880guess or psychopaths or whatever you want to call them people high and high in the dark triad
00:54:44.840on social media amassing large followings have you do you guys look into that at all
00:54:49.780At Cato, we're not looking into dark triad traits specifically. So the existing research literature certainly shows that, that the types of social media trolls are disproportionately high in dark triad traits. And especially when it's anonymous online interaction, you see the worst behavior brought out.
00:55:12.740And we are commissioning studies for this broader psychology of progress project on social media, polarization, misinformation. What do we do about it? Because again, we're not trying to say literally everything is getting better all the time. We're trying to say on average, if you could choose to be born in any time in human history, probably this is the time to be.
00:55:36.520And there are real challenges to face there. And the solution to those challenges or the first step to solutions is understanding what the problems really are. So yes, we're commissioning studies on that. And I'm relatively new here. I'm the only psychologist at Cato, which allows me to be much of a generalist.
00:55:54.720But as I mentioned, we're relying on outside expertise from others, topic experts, and I have a biostatistics background as well.
00:56:02.340So I feel that I'm particularly strong at evaluating study methods, which across any discipline, like the statistics are the statistics.0.76
00:56:11.920So I have a pretty good bullshit detector.
01:00:18.160Cato is individual donors, like people that believe in advancing individual liberty.
01:00:24.780and again lots of former academics or people that are just notable public figures like rob
01:00:32.080henderson is a good example ending up at manhattan institute my understanding is that think tanks
01:00:37.740have kind of two main streams of recruitment so there's like you're recruiting policy analysts
01:00:43.820and economists and people that are going to do research kind of behind the scenes and then
01:00:49.400you're recruiting people that are already notable public figures just because they
01:00:53.500align with your philosophy and it makes a lot of sense and it's advantageous to to have them on
01:00:59.640board and to put your branding on anything that they do so like anytime rob henderson goes on
01:01:04.940your podcast now like he's advertising manhattan institute so to some extent i get to do that for
01:01:10.100cato mine is kind of a unique case because i'm doing both because i'm relatively early on in
01:01:15.020my career like you know during grad school i was doing a lot of writing and public speaking about
01:01:20.020in this case the controversial gender dysphoria debate i think that if anything cato well cato
01:01:28.300definitely doesn't take a particular stance on it and this is a good example of the diversity of
01:01:33.280thoughts so i think everyone at cato and really like americans broadly are more supportive of
01:01:40.580what transgender adults want to do most of the concern is about children so on one hand you can
01:01:45.960make a strong libertarian argument that children can't consent therefore it's unethical on the0.99
01:01:54.620other hand you could make a strong libertarian argument saying that well when children can't
01:01:59.880consent it falls onto the parents and it's within the realm of the parents liberty to decide what
01:02:06.040they want for their child so most hopefully all libertarians would recognize that there's some
01:02:13.600level of extreme harm or neglect. And there's some level of inherent rights and value to a child
01:02:22.040that if a parent is severely abusing them, then they need to be protected. And it makes sense to
01:02:29.180look towards the government for that. But where do you draw the line? And particularly for
01:02:33.740experimental, potentially harmful medical procedures, where do you draw the line?
01:02:38.280So there are some people, some libertarians even, who look at that and say, well, even children, especially, you know, where's the cutoff for child, like a 16, 17 year old has more agency, and maybe they should have more say in what they do with their body, even with harmful elective procedures.
01:02:57.940At the very least, I think what we agree about is we need to have more openness about what the harms are and what the interventions are actually doing. And we certainly have not had that from the people promoting gender affirming care.
01:03:13.360So there's a lot of healthy diversity of thought there. And my case is unique, again, because I was speaking publicly about this issue. I think what they liked is that I was doing it in a hopefully unbiased, data-driven way. I was certainly trying to do that.
01:03:31.200And that it meant that I wasn't shy of talking about whatever the spotlight issues are. Like I didn't want to just remain in a narrow academic specialization where only me and my five colleagues would ever read each other's papers. Like I wanted to have more of an influence in public discourse.
01:03:50.120So I get to have this somewhat unique role being both the early career researcher, policy
01:03:58.460analyst type, but also getting to have more of this public intellectual role doing podcasts
01:04:13.840Perfect. Yeah, it's a great example, again, of, you know, just committing to trying to tell the truth and do good in the world and not be concerned about the long term consequences, not holding your tongue.
01:04:28.920I debated when you first invited me on your podcast two years ago whether to do it because I knew that I would get a lot of pushback, particularly from my peers at Harvard who were already saying mean things about me, but it was worth it.
01:04:42.920And one indirect path that I couldn't have predicted, and Marion Tupi, who's been on your show and who's taught for Peterson Academy, he saw it.
01:04:57.880So a lot of the people that are in Cato circles are also in ARC circles, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference that your dad puts on.
01:09:03.260Right. I'm concerned about that as well.
01:09:04.940So this is another good example of the perverse financial incentives that come in in the way our health care system currently operates.
01:09:13.080So most therapists and psychiatrists aren't deluded enough to believe that 30 to 50 percent of young people are mentally ill.
01:09:22.600They're navigating an insurance system and they're trying to provide care.
01:09:28.880And they're thinking, all right, if you've just gone through a breakup or the death of a loved one, you probably don't have major depressive disorder. You probably are in need of short term support. And yet you still have to if the patient is going to receive any sort of insurance reimbursement and they probably won't go to therapy if they can't.
01:09:54.580So there are adjustment disorders, which is often the shorthand that's used, which are temporary by definition. But again, depending on coverage and eligibility, a lot of times you'll see over diagnosis so that, you know, let's say adjustment disorder is the diagnostic tag.
01:10:14.580And it's an adjustment disorder. Is that something that's something in your environment like cancer or divorce or something like that? Is that what's an adjustment? It's basically the catch all term for this person is going through a hard time. And the unspoken awareness is this isn't really a clinical disorder, but we have to treat it like a medical disorder. Otherwise, there won't be coverage.
01:10:37.560So it's like the open secret within the therapeutic industry.
01:11:07.560sticking disorder in there that's manipulative again so we need to have a conversation about
01:11:13.160what types of mental health services and support can you receive if you don't have a medical
01:11:19.960disorder because the therapeutic industry has expanded to fill the void i think that historically
01:11:26.520you'd find in community yeah and from family all of that has fragmented so again everything is
01:11:32.440trade-offs i don't look at that and say it's an inherently bad thing i look at it and think it's
01:11:37.260predictable result that there's going to be a strong incentive to create or expand the closest
01:11:44.300existing support service and there's a there's a fine line between what is a medical problem
01:11:53.000and what is a mental health problem and what is an adjustment problem that you really just need
01:11:58.380some advice and some support and someone to listen to and you could get it from a friend but if you
01:12:02.800can't, then it makes sense to pay for a therapist. I think that's a good thing. The bad thing is that
01:12:09.900people internalize these diagnoses as though they have something wrong with them when really life
01:12:17.220is challenging and we need social support. Yeah. Dad said when he had clients, and I learned this
01:12:22.440from a young age, is before he said there seems to be a major depressive disorder or something
01:12:29.700going on here he'd be like do you have friends how's your work how's your love life like is
01:12:36.040anyone around you dying or hurt and go through all these elements of human life to make sure
01:12:41.560there wasn't something that was contributing to your stress levels that that was making you
01:12:47.360depressed and i don't know how many specifically psychiatrists do i don't know how many psychologists
01:12:51.920do that but i don't know how many psychiatrists actually do that rather than getting somebody to
01:12:56.120fill out a Beck questionnaire on depression and then just looking at that and saying well this
01:13:01.100looks like depression without delving into trauma or life situation like life circumstances so
01:13:08.220hopefully I guess hopefully with RFK kind of bringing awareness to psych meds that
01:13:13.900we'll get more clinicians doing that but I don't even know what psychiatrists are taught how they're
01:13:18.360taught to figure out how people are sick is it mostly based on questionnaires because that's how
01:13:25.440my experience went when i was a kid it was like yeah you have arthritis which is already reason
01:13:30.880enough to be depressed as a kid but i was just diagnosed from a back back questionnaire do you
01:13:37.280have any idea what the norm is like an adhd test i know that that's mostly questionnaires
01:13:41.960so i can speak as a psychology researcher and i rely on public health data at population scales
01:13:52.340And certainly for these prevalence estimates for all disorders that you hear from CDC and NIH, most of those use surveys because they're not able to do the types of in-depth psychiatric interviews that you would need for proper clinical assessment.
01:14:09.520So they use surveys that are typically correlated with depression, anxiety, autism, whatever it is, but they have major blind spots, especially the autism one, like we talked about, which is surveys, oftentimes parent reported surveys that ask items like my child struggles with eye contact, struggles making friends, prefers to be alone, things that are associated with autism, but are also associated with social anxiety or even ordinary shyness.
01:14:35.620So it's easy to get false positives on surveys, but these are just the prevalence data. So when you hear a suspect claim from NIH, 30 to 50 percent of young people have experienced mental illness. Part of it is survey bias. Now, if we're talking about actual diagnoses and over diagnosis, then that's driven by the clinician themselves.
01:14:59.820I'm not a clinician. I don't see patients. I'm not a psychiatrist. I can't prescribe medicine.
01:15:05.240So I can only look at the population level numbers and guess what they're doing. But again,
01:15:12.560when you look at the incentive structure, that they're paid more when they diagnose more,
01:15:17.200particularly psychiatrists, because you can do an hour-long therapy session, or you can do four
01:15:22.56015 minute prescription write-ups so psychiatrists have strong incentives to see more patients now
01:15:30.160this isn't to say they're greedy and they're prescribing when they should be doing therapy
01:15:34.800there's also a strong short supply of psychiatrists so most of the time you're seeing a master's level
01:15:42.440counselor for therapy and then if you need meds and if they're doing their job right like you and
01:15:47.740your dad mentioned if you've thoroughly evaluated all areas of your life that you can't find any
01:15:56.740obvious cause to your depression maybe it makes sense to start exploring medication but certainly
01:16:03.160if it's if it's viewed just as a crutch or viewed as the first solution that's very likely to best
01:16:10.240case serve as a crutch that avoids you getting to the root of your problems worst case leads to
01:16:16.920long-term side effects and dependency and things you were talking about earlier yeah and that's a
01:16:23.100huge problem okay adam my pregnancy brain is burning out that was a lot of information one
01:16:28.920last thing relating to your pregnancy so you were talking about basically the psychological concept
01:16:35.240would be how much agency you ascribe to yourself and how you navigate problems so you could take
01:16:41.520this victim mindset of how difficult things are going for you and how you pathologize it like
01:16:47.320something must be wrong with you or with the world or it sounds like you're recognizing you know my
01:16:53.420hormones are out of whack this is impacting my mood I'm gonna sort of take a step back kind of
01:16:58.900like the Alan Watts mindfulness perspective and recognize you know there's me at my optimal
01:17:04.520decision-making capacity and there's me in pregnancy brain so we've been talking about
01:17:10.080political libertarianism, but there's another interesting definition of libertarianism. So
01:17:15.520in the free will debate in philosophy, there's determinism. We hear a lot about that.
01:17:20.960The anti-determinist stance, the technical position is libertarianism. So this is related
01:17:28.360to philosophically the libertarian political movement that's all about individual freedom
01:17:33.540and agency but entirely separate philosophy literature on libertarianism so i would say
01:17:40.500determinism okay versus determinism so determinism would be this stripping you of your agency your
01:17:48.060deterministic system you're a byproduct whether it's genetic determinism like everything ultimately
01:17:54.060traces back to biochemistry you have no free will robert sapolsky is a great example of this
01:18:00.460neuroscientists who doesn't believe in free will, or even on the social constructivist
01:18:05.360determinism. So the interesting thing and the sad thing, a lot of developmental psychologists
01:18:10.460are implicitly or explicitly determinist. So the nature or nurture debate, and I host the nature
01:18:17.480and nurture podcast, so I'm quite familiar with the debate territory, but it overlooks the
01:18:25.220libertarianism free will debate it's if if you have free will and agency it doesn't much matter
01:18:33.240whether you're a byproduct of genes or environment genes or environment is inherently reductionist
01:18:41.240and determinist so what i like about the libertarian philosophy not the political philosophy
01:18:46.920but the free will philosophy is that it grants people agency or it acknowledges agency where it
01:18:54.260exists because your dad talks a lot about if you act like you don't have free will, then all that
01:19:01.080happens is you get bitter and resentful and you use your free will in unproductive ways. So what
01:19:06.400I really liked about you describing the challenges of pregnancy, you did it in a very libertarian way
01:19:12.080of acknowledging that this is a voluntary choice, presumably voluntary if you're mindful about win
01:19:18.920and win not to use protection and it's it's worthwhile and there are downsides but it's
01:19:25.380obviously i mean you can speak to this i don't have children yet but probably the world's greatest
01:19:30.100blessing so everything everything is trade-offs and i like this libertarian philosophy of rather
01:19:35.340than you know you're a victim of your hormones and it needs to be diagnosed as something's wrong with
01:19:41.320you like you're recognizing ahead of time this is a predictable result and i'm entering into this
01:19:47.760And I'm just going to try to navigate around it with my free will and with my agency.