00:22:30.000And you said that, so all of that is one in a thousand people, you think?
00:22:34.160I would say one in a thousand would be the umbrella stat for any one of these different
00:22:40.160disorders and even that is a massive overestimate because CAH for example even though it's classified
00:22:47.220as an intersex condition well for one thing in half of them it happens in males so you're going
00:22:53.920to experience the same medical issues with cortisol deficiency but no real issues of sex
00:23:01.500development. And then even of the females who have CAH, it's only ambiguous genitalia and gender0.98
00:23:09.500dysphoria in the most extreme cases. Maybe they'll turn out to be gay, but they can still1.00
00:23:13.900live perfectly healthy lives as women and they are genetically women. So that's wild. Okay. So0.96
00:23:22.300a few questions. One, why do you know so much about this? Like what was it about my whole PhD?
00:23:28.200Yeah, but what made you decide to study this? Was it like rampant talk about gender dysphoria that you grew up around? Or like, why did this interest you specifically? It's fascinating. You do a lecture on Peterson Academy, probably. That sounded like a science class. That was really good. Yeah, that was really good. But what made you decide to become interested in this?
00:23:49.880thank you Michaela well there's two separate answers there's the practical how did I actually
00:23:56.420get to researching hormones and brain development and end up with this as a research focus and then
00:24:01.780there's like you said what makes me interested in it because it sounds so niche right so this
00:24:07.640actually connects to I think some of the personal interests that we're going to get into like about
00:24:14.340my upbringing being homeschooled and growing up with a single mom and spending a lot of time
00:24:22.760online and having to learn social dynamics in a somewhat unorthodox way. But I'll start with
00:24:30.000the research that's more straightforward. So I came into college actually to study physics,
00:24:35.400but pretty quickly I switched into cognitive science. At first, stemming from the physics
00:24:40.220background. I was interested in artificial intelligence and thinking I was going to do
00:24:44.280something very computer programming. I was good at math. But I realized pretty early on in these
00:24:51.680classes that we know way less about human intelligence. How are we going to build artificial
00:24:58.380intelligence? I mean, we have succeeded in a way, but we also can't really debate on, you know,
00:25:04.380what is a woman? So to me, as you mentioned, some of this political stuff going on in the
00:25:10.920background, it made me think there were more foundational philosophical questions to be
00:25:15.220addressed through neuroscience. And then my first neuroscience lab, really just by happenstance,
00:25:22.520happened to be focusing on hormones and brain development. And I got to work with CAH populations.
00:25:29.040So this was pre-collected data, and we were looking at structural brain differences between children with and without CAH.
00:25:37.620So the other thing that's interesting about this natural experiment design, you can test two things simultaneously about the hormones.
00:25:44.280So if you see an effect that's present in both males and females with CAH, but not in typically developing children,
00:25:51.420then it's probably a result of either the cortisol deficiency prenatally or more likely the glucocorticoid supplementation.
00:25:59.040Because if you're taking chronic low levels of cortisol, you know, it's almost like chronic stress exposure, which we know impacts the brain, hippocampal volume in particular, which is the biggest effect that we found.
00:26:10.880But if you see an effect that's only present in CAH females relative to control females, then it's probably the prenatal androgen exposure.
00:26:23.320You see some effects that are probably glucocorticoid driven present in both sexes.
00:26:27.940and then you see some effects, including the behavioral and psychological ones that are only
00:26:33.060present in females. Interesting. Okay. Before we get into your background, what does, what does
00:26:39.640cortisol, what does, what do hyper stressful situations like long-term do to the brain?
00:26:44.560Oh, this isn't my area of expertise. Robert Sapolsky has a great book on this called
00:26:49.040why zebras don't get ulcers. And the basic idea, I guess there's two. The first is very low levels
00:26:55.760of cortisol, it has other physiological functions that are just necessary for survival. But I'm not
00:27:01.480a physician. I couldn't list those out. But then in terms of psychological stress response, this
00:27:06.540fight or flight response, we know that cortisol, a spike in the short term, is really adaptive.
00:27:13.020So why don't zebras get ulcers? Well, they'll experience a massive cortisol spike when they're
00:27:18.120running away from a lion. And then, you know, they chill out. Only humans, actually primates,
00:27:23.920Sapolsky's done great work on this. We'll experience chronic stress, even from social
00:27:28.120bullying, like anything, even if all of your physiological needs are met, we have social
00:27:33.840needs too as social mammals. And what does chronic stress do? Can you reverse it? I know, I know this
00:27:40.160isn't your area of expertise, but does it shrink your brain? It can shrink your hippocampus, which
00:27:45.420is necessary for forming memories. It can impair memory, especially if this happens during early
00:27:52.000development so there's this idea of sensitive or critical windows for brain development a critical
00:27:58.220is like fully lose it or use it use it or lose it and you'll see so a lot of these early studies
00:28:06.220they sound very mad scientisty and they kind of are so for whatever reason a lot of the early
00:28:12.220studies on visual development were done on kittens and you know when you say we're done
00:28:19.380in terms of a neuroscience experiment, often it ends with the animal being euthanized because
00:28:24.900you have to dissect its brain. So rodents are most commonly used for these invasive neuroscience
00:28:32.540studies, but cats, maybe because they were larger, maybe because they have a longer window of
00:28:39.500plasticity. So plasticity is the term for how malleable your brain is and during specific
00:28:44.820windows. So you'll see that there's sort of this parallel between evolution and ontogeny development
00:28:53.280within a particular lifespan. So the idea is the earlier a function is, like sensory motor brain
00:29:00.020regions mature the earliest, like within the first few months. So these scientists, what they would
00:29:05.680do, they would blindfold kittens for the first few months of their life. And if they did that,
00:29:11.400and they had no light exposure, then they would be permanently blind into adulthood. But if you
00:29:17.580took a kitten who was exposed to normal light and developed normal vision for the first few months,
00:29:23.900and then you blindfold them after the visual cortex matures, and then you blindfold them for
00:29:29.960years, they'll still be able to see when you take it off. So that's the strongest example I know of
00:29:35.800for critical period. And then psychologists have taken this for language. There's also a pretty
00:29:41.540strong critical period for language development in the first five or so years of life. And then
00:29:46.540in adolescence, in my main area of study, there's argument that it's a critical period for higher
00:29:55.520order cognitive development. So this is things like planning about the future, evaluating risks,
00:30:01.480social cognition emotion regulation high level stuff like that but then there's also this term
00:30:07.060critical versus sensitive so with vision in the first few months if you don't have light exposure
00:30:13.300no amount of light exposure later on will help for sensitive period it's more like it's a period
00:30:20.400of heightened plasticity but it's not all or nothing wow that's crazy okay you might not know
00:30:28.240anything about this but i'm going to ask you anyway so if you put people on something like
00:30:32.520and this this pertains to me because i was on i was on medication throughout my developmental years
00:30:36.920i've always wondered what that did to my brain and i'm not saying you know that because i don't
00:30:41.940know if anybody knows that but if you put somebody what's your guess here if you put a kid on
00:30:47.740something like an ssri because like my experience was it dampened down i like i took risks when i
00:30:54.840shouldn't have taken risks and that's part of my personality but i don't know how much that was
00:30:58.880influenced by the medication do you have any thoughts here if you become more of a risk prone
00:31:05.060personality type or even more disagreeable but it's because of early serotonin levels i don't
00:31:10.620know i wonder okay because i like i know i would put myself into risky situations without being
00:31:15.920scared and i'm sure that that that was blunted from the ssris so i've always just wondered
00:31:20.820throughout my developmental years if that made me more less risk averse than i should have been
00:31:25.360not that i'm like unhappy about it or anything but it was like maybe so there's there is a tie
00:31:31.140in there about other forms of medication that we give to kids so puberty blockers is the one
00:31:35.860on the forefront of my mind and that's been an active area of research for me recently not working
00:31:41.360with primary data but just reading animal studies giving them puberty blockers and looking at effects
00:31:46.780of brain development and whether or not it's generalizable to humans, looking at the limited
00:31:51.140number of human studies that have been published. But there is a meaningful connection there to
00:31:55.860SSRIs, which is that a lot of people criticize the animal models of puberty blockers or hormone
00:32:02.220replacement. They'll say it's not generalizable to transgender people or even just to humans
00:32:07.240because, well, it's an animal model. But most research, most things we know about the brain
00:32:13.460stems from animal research. And a lot of these things, especially subcortical structures,
00:32:19.580the more basic, the earlier evolved the brain region is, the more likely it is to be conserved
00:32:25.040across mammals. And mammalian brains are more similar than they are different. They operate
00:32:30.580on the same neurotransmitters, the same hormones, same sensitive periods during phases of life.
00:32:36.860And you'll have these behavioral markers that you'll use to test whether a drug works or not.
00:32:42.080So something like antidepressants, you're not just going to test it on a human right away.
00:32:46.860You want to have a rodent model for it first, but how are you going to measure whether a rodent is depressed or whether it's actually alleviating depression?
00:32:54.460And I don't know the specifics, but the basic idea is they have a whole array of standardized paradigms looking at things like appetite or play behavior or sex behavior.
00:33:05.260and researchers have coded how a typical animal responds and how a depressed-like animal responds
00:33:12.840or an anxious-like animal responds. And generally, you'll validate whether an antidepressant or an
00:33:17.760anti-anxiety med works by looking at the behavior. So the interesting thing is, in these puberty
00:33:23.060blocker studies, there's some preliminary evidence in rodents and in sheep that they may increase
00:33:30.920anxiety or depressive-like symptoms. Now, we don't know if that generalizes to humans,
00:33:36.900but based on the psychopharmacology of how antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds work,
00:33:42.080and just on this general theory that sex hormones are critical for brain development during puberty,
00:33:49.740I'm sure that there's some effect. And in fact, we do know there's some effect. We just really
00:33:54.580don't know what it's going to be. Like if you find a structural brain difference, with some,
00:34:00.040it's really straightforward your hippocampus is shrinking you're going to have impaired memory
00:34:04.760but for a lot of these especially for cortical networks where it there's enough plasticity
00:34:10.620that there can be trade-offs so like one one area shrinks another area grows to take its place
00:34:17.080like in the extreme examples of this you'll see that you know if a child loses one sensory system
00:34:23.280at an early enough age other sensory systems will grow and improve to make up for it that's
00:34:28.640neuroplasticity in action yeah that's really cool that's so that's what happens when somebody goes
00:34:33.220blind really little right does their hearing actually improve i don't know if the hearing
00:34:37.540itself improves i would think yes but at the very least we do know well depending on the type of
00:34:43.240brain damage if it's literally brain damage like the area is lesioned and there's tissue that just
00:34:49.100simply isn't there anymore then yeah auditory cortex will grow to fill in what used to be visual
00:34:54.860cortex and presumably that comes with improved function oh wow that's cool if you guys are not
00:35:02.540filtering your air it is the easiest thing it's the laziest thing you can do to improve your health
00:35:08.140i'm so gung-ho about this i literally travel with an air purifier for hotel rooms seriously i've
00:35:14.060been talking about air purifiers for years but i didn't realize how important they are until i
00:35:18.460stopped being able to think because of the very moldy house air oasis is top of the line the type
00:35:24.380of air filter you buy really matters and air oasis filters down to the right particle size
00:35:29.260which is why i'm suggesting them air oasis has a new iadapt air model that's what i'd get they
00:35:34.940have a medical grade h13 hepa filter that filters down to 0.003 microns which means they trap
00:35:41.580particles 10 times smaller than most other brands they have germicidal uv technology to sterilize
00:35:47.580the air purifier itself and the environment they also use a silver ion filter that penetrates the
00:35:53.260cell membrane of mold bacteria and viruses and reduces pathogens by up to 99 i own a number of
00:36:00.220them there's one in every room they're also quiet they come with free shipping a lifetime warranty
00:36:05.020and a 60 day money back guarantee you can get 10 off your purchase by using code mp at checkout by
00:36:11.820going to aeroasis.com slash products slash i adapt air dash large or select the size you want with
00:36:21.020code MP for 10% off. That is linked in the description and in the pinned comment. Enjoy
00:36:27.300the rest of this episode. Okay. Okay. Let's get into your background a little bit because
00:36:31.060from what you told me yesterday and from what I know about you, it's interesting. And I think my
00:36:35.540audience will find it interesting, but you grew up in LA, you had a single mom. What was your
00:36:41.400childhood like? I played a lot of video games and my mom is a part-time piano teacher, music
00:36:50.000director at her church we also wanted to talk about spirituality so that may tie in here but
00:36:55.780basically I didn't have a strong male role model in my life I didn't have friends I was shy I was
00:37:04.340homeschooled for two years in high school but that was only after being bullied a lot and I was
00:37:09.260bullied for my weight I gained a lot of weight I was 250 pounds when I was 15 years old and
00:37:16.080didn't have any friends didn't have any romantic interest I really only socialized and found joy
00:37:22.580on online video games and it's such a different world and I think this is in a way where the
00:37:28.660early obsession with sex differences comes in because online video games it's mostly males
00:37:34.520and the few girls that you'll see there they get tons of attention often it looks like harassment
00:37:41.320but on these video games and as a naive kid i was thinking you know there's this term on my favorite
00:37:48.000game runescape buying gf buying girlfriend so people would literally say that and you know
00:37:53.700sometimes you'd have someone trade them like they'd have this female character following them
00:37:58.400around like entourage they'd give them money or free stuff so i learned at a pretty early age i
00:38:03.380can do that i can play as a female character i'd even catfish and like pretend to be someone's
00:38:09.660girlfriend. This might have been as early as 10 years old. I don't think I even knew what it meant
00:38:14.420other than, hey, this person's going to give me free stuff. So I'd walk around as a female
00:38:19.240character. I'd also go on these online chat rooms like Omegle or Kick Friends. And this was really
00:38:25.800if I was lonely and trying to chat with people. So often what I'd find is I'll make a bio about
00:38:31.680myself. I'll post about my interests. I'll say I'm 15 years old. I want to chat. I'd get no messages.
00:38:36.920and then I make the exact same bio I say I'm a girl I get dozens of messages and a lot of them
00:38:45.380are probably other lonely boys like me and we have common interests in video games they're like
00:38:50.480it's so cool that you're into video games and you're a chick you're like the perfect bro you
00:38:55.160know we bond but they they'd fall in love with me often a friendship like that would end because
00:39:00.640they're like oh my gosh you're the perfect girl it's just like it's like you're a guy but you're
00:39:05.060not. And often, I'd find that I could get more attention if I just put a pretty picture. So I'd
00:39:10.620find random girls on the internet, and just post a random photo and pretend to be that person.
00:39:17.640That never backfired, hopefully. So I'd also get lots of dick pics. And for the most part,0.99
00:39:28.480I just block them. The unfortunate part of it all. Right. But, you know, this was in the early
00:39:34.680wild west of the internet at least for teenagers so this is back when you go in xbox live chat rooms
00:39:41.880and everyone is cursing up a storm and you're sending like the weirdest porn you can find0.94
00:39:48.460or isis beheading videos like all of my video game friends were really fucked up and so was i so0.97
00:39:55.180i think part of that had to do with whatever almost unconscious resentment for not having0.94
00:40:02.300friends or being popular in the real world. So it's like, you know, part of it stemmed into this
00:40:07.260early version of perfectionism. How can I get the highest level, get the best gear, you know,
00:40:13.840form a clan and get into a high rank, like social status within this virtual world?
00:40:19.680Eventually in my late teens, it snapped like I could just grind in real life, grind as if it's
00:40:26.160a video game, work on my fitness, obsessively calorie count. I did all that and succeeded
00:40:31.780after basically treating it like a video game. Yeah. Yeah. That was, that was wise. I think
00:40:39.660people have to realize that my dad has talked a lot about, you know, people who, this is mostly
00:40:44.880people who take drugs or something like that is you have to turn your life into the gamble, kind
00:40:49.560of make it into the game. You have to have like enough going on. So you ended up, I want to get
00:40:54.960into that you ended up losing a bunch of weight young which was very disciplined that's very
00:40:59.860difficult for people to do especially the way you did it because you just you calorie count I didn't
00:41:04.800do it smart though I calorie counted obsessively but I would eat the unhealthy food if it was lower
00:41:10.500health if it was lower calories I didn't have really any knowledge of whole foods or like
00:41:15.440what's healthy yeah still that's impressive though how old were you I was 16 when I started
00:41:23.180I lost 80 pounds in 14 months. So I said I used to be 70 pounds heavier, but I got really skinny
00:41:31.300first. I went all the way down to 165. And by then I was still shy and awkward, but I did have
00:41:40.060this fantasy of, okay, I don't want to just graduate the weird homeschooled kid and never
00:41:45.440experience graduation or prom or anything like that. So I wanted to get back into school. So
00:41:50.300senior year I re-enrolled into public school I still didn't make friends I was still really shy
00:41:55.600but I slowly started coming out of my shell more and that's when I was 165 pounds and then
00:42:01.280senior year I started working out for the first time so by college I was back up to like 180
00:42:08.180pounds and had some muscle less than I have now but like I looked normal and I only later learned0.99
00:42:14.620you know I graduated high school still without my first kiss but I later learned oh some girls
00:42:19.580actually had a crush on me then they just spoke to me and I was so awkward that they lost it but
00:42:24.640at the beginning it was like hey this is a new kid coming in he's not that bad looking he seems
00:42:29.580to be smart and then he's practically autistic so you lose the interest there and then I get to0.58
00:42:35.780college and dating apps are a big thing so I get on tinder and it was still the same thing like I0.99
00:42:42.120started getting a good amount of matches I still had all my friends the ones that lasted were these
00:42:47.980online friends that I'd never met in person from video games, a lot of them were still overweight
00:42:52.220and awkward and still never had any success with girls. So just the fact that I was now reasonably
00:42:57.540fit and going to USC, which has a very attractive student body and is a pretty social school.
00:43:05.220It also has a great research department and it's connected with Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.
00:43:10.180So I kind of just steered into the research direction after I failed to succeed at the
00:43:16.540extroverted party life. But online apps were different because, well, at first you begin
00:43:24.300texting and I was familiar with that, right? Not only that, but in some ways, I think I got more
00:43:31.540in touch with my anima. We can use the Jungian term, like my feminine characteristics, because
00:43:37.920I spent so long pretending to be a girl and, you know, not wanting to be completely unrealistic.
00:43:44.380I was telling Rob about this, Rob Henderson, and we use this term authentic catfish.
00:43:50.360He'd be like, that's a good title for an article.
00:43:52.980That's a good what's an oxymoron, right?
00:46:22.800So there's the main Human Connectome Project, which is brain development in adults ages 22 to 65.
00:46:30.120there's a separate cohort looking at brain aging 65 plus there's a infancy and toddler cohort and
00:46:38.800then there's the development one which we're working on which is 1300 kids ages 5 to 21 and
00:46:46.320you have different functional MRI measures structural brain activation connectivity and
00:46:53.180then what I'm working on specifically is we have saliva, hair, and maybe blood forthcoming
00:47:00.580hormones data and puberty measures and linking that to different brain and psychological outcomes
00:47:08.040of interest. Wow. That's really interesting. You said that you said yesterday you had an issue
00:47:13.240with functional MRIs and kids. So there are some issues that people have known about for a long
00:47:19.040time one is just that kids move in the scanner and you have to lie really still so you can get
00:47:25.300motion artifacts that just mess up your data but you know you can you can teach kids to stay still
00:47:31.200and even if you have to throw out half the data if you get enough kids you're gonna have enough
00:47:36.080usable data so that's more just a practical challenge but it can be overcome the other one
00:47:43.420is if you're averaging across dozens or hundreds of brains in a study, you can get a really precise
00:47:51.820estimate of, on average, what brain region is active during a particular task. So like I study
00:47:58.740reward sensitivity, so often you'll use a gambling game paradigm, and basically you're measuring brain
00:48:03.840activity during the whole game, and what you want to do ideally is filter out, say, wins versus
00:48:11.260losses because if you're just looking at straight win activity you're not getting just reward
00:48:16.840response in the brain you're also getting what is the visual cortex doing when you're looking at the
00:48:21.400screen you're getting how is the motor cortex preparing to press the button because you have
00:48:25.740to press the button for the gambling game but if you have win minus loss then in principle you
00:48:30.520filter out all of the stuff that's the same in the task across whatever condition and you're
00:48:36.560isolating, what is my brain doing uniquely when I win money compared to when I lose money?
00:48:42.360And there, very robustly, you'll see a response in the ventral striatum, which is known to be
00:48:48.260the brain region primarily responsible for reward processing. And especially in addiction models,
00:48:55.560you'll see this. It's part of the mesolimbic mesocortical dopamine system. It's dopaminergic.
00:49:01.660testosterone influences ventral striatal development and dopamine function. And all
00:49:08.040that's very well established. The part that's trickier, and this is the part that's troubling
00:49:13.200for my research, if you're looking at group averages, either in what part of the brain is
00:49:18.760responsive, or how does it change with age on average, you can get very good estimates of that.
00:49:23.700If you're trying to make individualized predictions, you can say, you know, on average,
00:49:28.900does more testosterone correspond to more ventral striatum activity? And the answer is yes. But if
00:49:35.340you want to make an individualized prediction, does more circulating hormone levels in your
00:49:40.480blood correspond to more brain blood flow in this one participant? So the thing that would actually
00:49:46.200be translational, the answer is no. And not only that, but sometimes that can be backwards. So
00:49:52.060think about what the hormone levels that we're measuring. First of all, it's a single time point,
00:49:57.740So it could be confounded, especially if you're measuring it through saliva, which most psychology research does because it's cheap and it's easy.
00:50:05.760You know, you don't have to stick a needle in their arm, but it's really noisy.
00:50:09.380It can be influenced by the last thing you've eaten, how much you slept, what your stress levels are, a whole host of confounds.
00:50:15.920So ideally, you'd want a whole bunch of samples, maybe day to day, week to week, month to month, especially for females, because then you can also get menstrual cycle fluctuations messing with hormone levels.
00:50:28.920So you want a lot of samples to be able to confidently assess the estimate.
00:50:35.180But then even if you can do that, circulating hormone levels doesn't tell you what the individual genetic response to that is going to be.
00:50:45.920So you could have someone with twice the testosterone as me, but functionally it's as if they have less because their androgen receptors aren't as sensitive or vice versa.
00:55:23.060And what I'm not sure of, the open question here, is the female level the baseline?
00:55:27.780and then what you do is you say males have more of this, therefore they're more likely to take
00:55:32.400risks. But you also see that beginning at puberty, women are more anxious and more depressed, or at
00:55:39.780least have a propensity for it. We don't know, is this because testosterone inhibits anxiety? And
00:55:46.680there's some animal research to suggest that, and even anecdotal experience for people who take
00:55:51.520testosterone replacement therapy. But it also could be that ovarian hormones, estrogen and
00:55:56.560progesterone, increase anxiety and depression. And there are all sorts of evolutionary theories
00:56:00.980for this. So it makes sense for males to be more reward sensitive and more willing to take risks
00:56:06.560because one man can in principle impregnate dozens of women. So if he can take some major risk for
00:56:13.460acquiring status or if he's more aggressive, as long as he can fertilize those eggs, even if he
00:56:19.120gets himself killed shortly after, even if 90% of people who try get themselves killed, it can be a
00:56:25.620stable reproductive strategy for men. And then it makes sense why women would try to be more0.98
00:56:31.280cautious, especially because women take care of children cross-culturally and have to be more
00:56:38.960threat sensitive and protective of these vulnerable infants. You also see interesting interactions
00:56:44.980with oxytocin here. They call it the mama bear effect. So oxytocin, it's known as the love
00:56:51.080hormone, the cuddle hormone, but it can increase aggression. And what it really does is it
00:56:57.480increases the strength of an overall in-group or out-group response. So it increases care towards
00:57:04.160the in-group, but it also through a chemical cousin of it called vasopressin increases aggression
00:57:11.260towards the out-group, this mama bear aggression. That's so interesting. I'm going to step away from
00:57:17.560that a little bit. I want to talk about how has university been like for you in the political
00:57:24.960landscape that we're in now? I know what it was like for me in 2012, and it was troublesome for
00:57:29.880me then, but you're at Harvard. So what's it like there politically? Is it as crazy as it looks in
00:57:38.200the news? Definitely not as crazy as in the news, but you do see some of those issues. So here's
00:57:44.680the interesting thing. I think institutionally, there's really not as much of a problem with free
00:57:50.840speech. Like you do see some examples of professors getting canceled, but even if they're canceled,
00:57:56.120what it often looks like is you're disinvited to speak at a conference or something like that.
00:58:01.280And that's terrible. That shouldn't happen. Like you should encourage disagreement and debate,
00:58:05.420but very rarely are people losing their jobs, at least at Harvard. It does happen at places.
00:58:11.280You know, even Carol Hoeven's story, which is the most extreme example that I know of at Harvard. She wasn't officially fired for going on Fox News and talking about the binary reality of sex and talking about her book on testosterone. But socially, people just made her life there such hell that she was essentially forced to leave.
00:58:33.020So that's what you see more of. It's almost like bullying or passive aggressive. It's like this sense of false common knowledge, like in the Emperor's New Clothes story, this idea that everyone is thinking that this thing you can't say, even if most people themselves are thinking it.
00:58:53.960And for whatever reason, maybe I'm more disagreeable. Maybe it's because I had a more atypical social upbringing. So I'm not as attuned or as willing to follow those sorts of social norms. Generally, I always speak my mind. And I've doubled down on this really ever since I started listening to your dad and exploring my faith more and believing in this foundational logos.
00:59:17.720so now I think whatever the price is for saying what I believe to be true I'd much rather pay
00:59:24.780that price than speak falsehood or hold my tongue so that has worked and it's it's very polarizing
00:59:33.380I'll say that it's made the people who admire and respect me I think admire me and grow close to me
00:59:42.140in that way a lot. And it's led to opportunities like this, like being on your podcast. But it's
00:59:48.360also made a bunch of other people think, OK, that's the controversial guy that's interested
00:59:54.300in evolutionary psychology and hormones and sex differences. And he's into Jordan Peterson and
01:00:00.240just stay away. He's this bad conservative guy. And, you know, I'm also a diversity fellow at
01:00:08.260Harvard. So this is on the DEI committee, which I applied for this role because I had this sense
01:00:15.080that those committees, despite diversity being in the name, were not very diverse. So I actually
01:00:22.040wrote my application basically saying this, like I have more conservative, unorthodox views. I
01:00:29.340actually called myself conservative Christian and I was raised around Christianity. My take is
01:00:34.660more abstract. We spoke about this a little bit. So I think it's very far from what that term
01:00:41.580probably rings a bell is like MAGA evangelical Republican. And I'm quite far from that. But
01:00:48.360my stance to DEI is even if I was that, there's no reason that shouldn't be welcome. That's
01:00:55.360genuine diversity. That was your essay? Not in those terms. I didn't say even if I was a MAGA
01:01:02.320republican i should be able to serve on this committee but you know that's that's the spirit
01:01:06.500that inspired me to apply and the interesting thing you know i have mixed feelings about this
01:01:11.680because on one hand i'm able to express my opinion and i'm never going to get in trouble for it
01:01:18.300because you know it is expressing diversity i'm not making personal attacks i'm literally just
01:01:24.520saying here's my opinion if you disagree i welcome that like tell me why you disagree like let's
01:01:30.940debate I find that stuff fun I think some people find it intimidating or they worry are there going
01:01:37.120to be social or career consequences to this and I think there are like I'm I'm playing a bit of a
01:01:42.420gamble here I think it's going to work out for me like I have faith that it'll work out for me
01:01:46.800but I don't know how it's going to be received crazy crazy okay okay this reminded me I thought
01:01:57.020this was interesting because like I feel like most of my audience is older than university so
01:02:00.720they don't know what's going on now. How has AI impacted people in university? Are they using it?
01:02:07.240Are professors allowing it? Can they test for it? I think it's left up to each professor. I don't
01:02:14.820think the university has an official stance on it. So some professors say it's completely banned,
01:02:21.200but then I guess that means they do have to test for it somehow. I don't know how the tests go for
01:02:27.100it. But I don't think most students are using it, at least not like it's going to write your essay
01:02:32.080for you because it's really bad. It's really bad. It'll make up citations. It'll just say things
01:02:37.080that are completely wrong. I found that it can be good for summarizing papers. But even if you do
01:02:43.720that, it's like it depends what you want. If you want literally a one paragraph high level summary
01:02:49.360and you don't need any nuance, then it's perfect for that. As soon as you need nuance, which you
01:02:55.180need a lot of in grad school and in research then it's useless yeah okay okay interesting so let's
01:03:01.540get back into into faith because you told me yesterday you've done an insane amount of research
01:03:06.920on religions around the world and different philosophers so like where are you what what do
01:03:13.280you believe right now so insane amount of research to me signifies like i'm doing a phd in it and my
01:03:19.340gut instinct is this is just like a side personal interest so I couldn't tell you much about the
01:03:25.400history of it but personally it stems from I think part growing up exposed to Christianity
01:03:35.020but then thinking there was no substance to it like learning about evolution and not having
01:03:43.400people I could go to and have critical discussions about it like people who say you know take it
01:03:48.520literally, or leave it. So I decided to leave it. And it turned into actually this anti-theistic
01:03:53.960phase in my teenage years. But in retrospect, I look at that like I was already depressed. I was
01:04:01.460overweight and resentful and spending all my time online with this bunch of sickos. And, you know,0.96
01:04:09.240it's not surprising to me that I had such a pessimistic attitude towards faith. It's like
01:04:14.480the Cain mindset, Cain and Abel. That resonated a lot. Your dad's Bible series resonated a lot
01:04:21.180with me in college. And it was for two reasons. The first was because he took a very secular
01:04:28.040approach to it. He's integrating it with evolutionary psychology rather than putting
01:04:32.580it at odds with it. And secondly, he really talks about the depths of those negative experiences,
01:04:39.400Like this resentful envy that one can experience. And I experienced this going to USC. You know, on one hand, I went on scholarship. So I applied through QuestBridge, the scholarship for low income students coming from a single mom. I wrote my essay about that.
01:04:58.220I wrote about how growing up in poverty with a single mom, and I spent most of my time online, that I had to do things like learn how to shave, learn how to tie a tie from YouTube tutorials, and that it taught me this level of independence.
01:05:16.120It gave me research skills and how I want to translate that into actual academic research.
01:05:23.160But then, you know, it's like a rich party school.
01:05:26.100the make fun of it nickname for it is university of spoiled children and there were a lot of those
01:05:32.900so i didn't fit in part of that was because of my own social difficulties but there's it's i would
01:05:39.580oscillate between this resentful victim attitude like look at all these people who are coming from
01:05:45.080wealthy two-parent households i don't fit in here they went to private school they're so much more
01:05:50.400articulate than me. I don't know what I'm doing. And then simultaneously thinking, like, I'm going
01:05:56.160to one of the best colleges for free. And other people across the world are starving or can't get
01:06:04.520an education whatsoever. Like, what right do I have to be a victim? And I would go spiral in those
01:06:10.800states. And I think it was just this inherent interest in science and philosophy. I couldn't
01:06:17.800tell you why i had that so that's a cool thing too it's like it's almost like it was a protective
01:06:22.800factor for me because i could have been out causing a bunch of trouble i did that online a
01:06:29.380little bit like the scamming people on video games luring was this thing you'd do in runescape so
01:06:35.300like there'd be pvp areas where players could fight each other and if you were a young kid like i was
01:06:41.100when i first started playing people could trick you into coming there they'd kill you and take
01:06:44.760their stuff. So then rather than learning not to do that, I learned to do it to other kids.
01:06:51.060And then I would even justify it as in like, well, if you're that naive, you deserve to have
01:06:56.060your stuff taken. And that's probably the same attitude that whatever older kid killed me0.83
01:07:00.640in my first couple of years playing the game did. So it's like I was morally grasping for something
01:07:08.280right and trying to justify my own existence and maybe being more anxious and guilt prone
01:07:13.920it wasn't just I'm going to get here and exploit as much as possible and then try to get a job
01:07:20.440and make the most money as possible I think part of that was engaging with these philosophical
01:07:28.100ideas pretty early on and it was through game theory that I started to really wrestle with
01:07:35.440objective morality. It was through that, as well as this famous Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
01:07:41.220And the basic idea there is that Gödel, famous mathematician, proved that any mathematical
01:07:49.180system, you can make it logically coherent with a given set of axioms, and you can prove anything
01:07:56.360within that structure, but you have to accept axioms. So that's almost like a leap of faith,
01:08:01.440Right. And I started reflecting more. It was really after listening to the Bible series that even though I called myself such a secular, rational empiricist, like where did my idea that truth is good come from?
01:08:17.100Where did my idea even that the universe has an organized structure come from?
01:08:22.040Like, I realized that I had, at the very least, a metaphysics of physics.
01:08:27.160Like, I believe there was this set of natural equations that could explain the world.
01:08:31.280And I just took it as a given that that was there.