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0:01:46 Hey, folks, we took a break for Memorial Day, but before the long weekend, we sat down with Rahm Emanuel for a conversation recorded last Thursday.
0:01:52 We got into the issues surrounding Biden, the Republican transfer of wealth to the rich and what Democrats need to focus on.
0:01:53 Here’s the episode.
0:01:54 Enjoy.
0:01:58 Welcome to Raging Moderates.
0:01:59 I’m Scott Galloway.
0:02:01 And I’m Jessica Tarlov.
0:02:12 Jess, joining us today is someone who’s worn a lot of hats in American politics, two-time mayor of Chicago, former White House chief of staff, and most recently U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel.
0:02:13 Rahm, welcome to the show.
0:02:14 Thanks, Scott.
0:02:15 Thanks, Jess.
0:02:17 We’re going to jump right into this.
0:02:23 The headlines this week have been dominated by the news that President Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
0:02:28 That comes on the heels of a week already full of questions about his health and a buzzy new book.
0:02:30 Quick question.
0:02:43 Did Biden’s narcissism and entering into consensual hallucination with the Democratic Party that he was the best candidate for a president, is that a big part of the reason that we reelected an insurrectionist?
0:02:47 Look, I mean, I have a couple answers on this.
0:02:50 You know, look, White Houses are insular.
0:02:51 Yeah.
0:02:53 And the Oval Office is seductive.
0:03:00 And while you talked about his medical condition and all this, my take on this is this is Shakespearean.
0:03:06 And the reason I say that is I’ve worked with former President Biden in three different functions.
0:03:16 One, I was assigned by President Clinton when I was senior advisor to work with him on passing the Violence Against Women Act and the assault weapon ban when he’s a senator.
0:03:18 And I was, as I said, senior advisor for the president.
0:03:24 Then our offices, when I’m chief of staff for President Obama, are adjacent to each other.
0:03:34 And then as ambassador that he appointed me and I’m 8,000 miles away, we worked through this historic agreement between Japan, Korea and the United States.
0:03:36 So I’ve seen him at different stages from different locations.
0:03:38 And I’ve seen him, and I’ve seen him change.
0:03:50 And what saddens me, and I’m just saying this as a friend, genuine friend to him, he’s a good man who did good work, who wanted one thing in life, which was to be known as somebody that was significant.
0:03:56 And the tragedy here will be that his last act is going to become a defining act.
0:04:12 And it is going to actually undo the one thing he wanted out of his life, which is it’s going to, I won’t say obliterate, that’s a little dramatic, but it’s definitely going to color in a very significant way the one thing he wanted.
0:04:21 And had he stayed true to his commitment in 2020 and said, I’m going to be a transitional, I do believe this was, you know, this gets back to a question.
0:04:24 Could you have won, could the Democrat have won this race?
0:04:27 I’ve always thought a Democrat could have beaten Donald Trump.
0:04:27 Yeah.
0:04:41 He didn’t get 50 plus percent, and I feel empathy for him because he wanted one thing in life beyond doing good work, you know, some sense to be seen as a significant player, et cetera.
0:04:57 And the vanity, the power of the office, the lack of people around him that would tell him truth, and I add one thing, I mean, President Obama and President Clinton can tell you, your job at certain times of the presidency is to tell the president not what they want to know, but what they need to hear.
0:04:57 Right.
0:04:59 And that didn’t happen.
0:05:03 He or they or both got walled off from that.
0:05:10 And White Houses get very, very insular, and that office is incredibly seductive.
0:05:19 So I feel him not holding to his pledge had consequences, one, to him and two, to all of us, and we’re dealing with it today.
0:05:28 We’ll just follow up, and then just moving to solutions, we’ve decided that a 34-year-old does not have the cognitive ability or the judgment to run for the highest office.
0:05:30 Do you think we need age limits on the higher end?
0:05:34 Why wouldn’t we have age limits, say, of 75 to run for office?
0:05:36 Well, it’s not only cognitive.
0:05:40 You ever see a before and after picture of a president in the White House?
0:05:40 Sure.
0:05:41 The day they walk in and the day we walk out?
0:05:42 Yeah.
0:05:45 Every year is a dog year, okay?
0:05:53 You walk into that office, and it is a physical, mental, emotional, psychological beating by the hour.
0:05:54 Mm-hmm.
0:05:55 There should be a cap.
0:06:00 You saw it with Ronald Reagan’s, I mean, deterioration in his final years.
0:06:05 So you’re on board with an age limit at the high end, that someone who, say, above a certain age should not be able to run?
0:06:06 Yes.
0:06:07 That’s the short answer.
0:06:08 I will say one thing.
0:06:10 There’s an anecdote out of the Oval.
0:06:14 You know, obviously, I’m President Obama’s chief of staff for the first two years.
0:06:20 And one day, you know, we were going from health care to a, you know, 10-minute financial reform.
0:06:26 Then we were going into the oil well that had exploded, and it was just, you know, that was only by 1030.
0:06:35 And I told him, I said, look, man, when we get out of here, I want to get a T-shirt shack on a beach.
0:06:38 And I want to sell one color, white.
0:06:40 So if somebody said blue, I’d go, white.
0:06:42 And one size, medium.
0:06:45 Just so I don’t have to think, I don’t have to make a call.
0:06:49 And we used to have this, like we’d be in a meeting, and it was like mind-boggling.
0:06:51 I look at him, I go, white.
0:06:53 He’d look at me and go, medium.
0:07:03 Because we were going to open up a T-shirt shack on a Hawaiian beach, and all we were going to do all day is lean forward and just watch the waves so you didn’t have to think anymore.
0:07:08 And the immense pressure, as my grandfather would say, it takes the neshama out of you.
0:07:09 Yeah.
0:07:12 I like knowing that white and medium are your safe words.
0:07:14 So now I know that.
0:07:27 Before we get to the reconciliation package, I just wanted to add on to what you were saying, Scott, about President Biden and, you know, the extension of what original sin is uncovered.
0:07:37 And there are already four books, right, that are coming out about the quote-unquote cover-up in the White House, is that we have this enormous trust deficit with the American people.
0:07:47 And they’re skeptical of politicians in general, but it has never been so bleak for Democrats in comparison to the Republican Party.
0:07:57 And I’m curious, as someone with great political instincts and having been successful in many arenas of politics, how you think Democrats can deal with that?
0:08:09 Because it feels very much to me and Scott that we are going about business as usual in extraordinary times and that we need an extraordinary solution to the challenges that we’re facing.
0:08:13 You know, just, I, this wasn’t a surprise to the American people.
0:08:15 They told us over and over he’s too old.
0:08:16 Yes.
0:08:27 I mean, if you go back and do kind of an autopsy of the presidency, there’s the confluence in that first August with both what happens in Afghanistan and the recurrence of COVID.
0:08:40 And also, which I think sometimes gets lost in the analysis, he doesn’t try to deal with Afghanistan by doing a Kennedy post Bay of Pigs and say, I own this.
0:08:40 This is on me.
0:08:41 I made the decision.
0:08:50 And his response sets off triggers because he was supposed to be hired to manage better than the chaos of Trump 1.0.
0:08:54 And that starts to build a resistance to him.
0:08:58 He never then gets back to positive real estate from a polling standpoint and trust.
0:09:10 And as inflation picks up and gets deeper and he tries to tell the American people the economy is better than you appreciate, the age issue comes over as a person who’s out of touch.
0:09:14 And it grows to like a 70 mile an hour headwind straight at him.
0:09:20 And the American people could not see past that block.
0:09:24 And it grew in intensity every day that went by.
0:09:26 So it was the most discussed subject.
0:09:29 If it was a secret, the American people were in on it.
0:09:30 Right.
0:09:31 It wasn’t a secret.
0:09:34 They were in on it and they issued a judgment.
0:09:36 Now, there is a trust factor.
0:09:38 I think there’s a trust factor for politicians.
0:09:40 The truth is, there’s a trust factor.
0:09:44 The farther you get away from people’s home, the less trust there is.
0:09:46 Local politics versus national.
0:09:48 There’s not, you know, people go, oh, our democracy is that threat.
0:09:49 Not the local level.
0:09:49 Right.
0:09:50 National level.
0:09:57 I think the bigger challenge for Democrats is, and I don’t think we own universally the deficit on trust.
0:10:01 I think our challenge, Democrats are seen as weak and woke.
0:10:08 Republicans are seen as going to be in this reconciliation bill as people that stab you in the back and betray you.
0:10:11 That’s the two vulnerabilities of both parties.
0:10:17 And if we do certain things that I’ve been advocating, I can talk about it on the show.
0:10:22 I think we can make up for and address the weak and woke in a very kind of focused way.
0:10:27 I think people have clearly, because of weak and woke, disappointed in us.
0:10:30 And that has made them appropriately angry at us.
0:10:32 What do we do about that?
0:10:35 You know, we’ve heard it in every kind of denomination.
0:10:38 You know, they’re crazy, but we’re preachy.
0:10:40 They look down on us.
0:10:42 Why are you on the wrong side of a 70-30 issue?
0:10:44 Fix us, Rom.
0:10:50 Well, look, I’m sensitive to a child that’s trying to figure out what pronoun they want to use.
0:10:55 But nobody wants to be sensitive to the fact that the rest of the classroom can’t tell you what a pronoun is.
0:10:57 And to me, this is insane.
0:10:59 I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again.
0:11:07 We shut the front door of a school for two years during COVID, and then we blew open the bathroom door right afterwards.
0:11:14 And not only were we off on a tangent of a set of issues, we made them primary to us.
0:11:18 Yes, by our DNA as Democrats, we are an accepting party.
0:11:21 We became a party that advocated.
0:11:23 And that’s a mistake.
0:11:25 Go back to President Clinton.
0:11:27 That’s a formative experience for me.
0:11:32 In 1992, 40% of his advertising is on ending welfare as you know it.
0:11:37 He comes on the heels of Jimmy Carter’s loss, Walter Mondale’s loss, Michael Dukakis’ loss.
0:11:39 He ran openly as a New Democrat.
0:11:43 And that New Democrat wasn’t just the economy, stupid.
0:11:48 It was 100,000 community police officers not defunding the police.
0:11:55 It was ending welfare as we know it, not continuing kind of a failed system, even when it was self-evident that it was broken.
0:12:00 The economics and the cultural aspect were grounded in mainstream.
0:12:06 President Obama himself talked openly about it’s easy to father a child.
0:12:07 It’s different to be a dad.
0:12:09 And he got criticized for it.
0:12:10 And he stood up for that.
0:12:20 Rounding yourself in the mainstream culturally is really, really important for the whole agenda, not just tactically.
0:12:24 Democrats, and this is a thing that I would say about politics.
0:12:28 Sound is not always fury.
0:12:33 And you have to, if you’re good in politics, know the difference between sound and fury.
0:12:42 Just because a Washington group tells you to use the word Latinx doesn’t mean people use it.
0:12:46 And we have to be not cavalier attacking people.
0:12:56 We have to ground ourselves in the very conversation that families have about social media, about homeless encampments near their house, things that happen on their block.
0:13:05 And not look, we’re running off in some tangent because some Washington group with a 202 area code on their phone yelling at you.
0:13:14 And my other point to illustrate this, in the last State of the Union by President Biden, he said illegal immigrant.
0:13:20 The next morning, the Washington interest groups attack him and say, you have to use undocumented.
0:13:23 And rather than say, hey, look, they crossed the border illegally.
0:13:25 They’re immigrants.
0:13:26 I’m using illegal immigrants.
0:13:27 You want to use undocumented?
0:13:27 You use it.
0:13:28 I’m going to use what I’m going to use.
0:13:31 That would have been a sign of strength.
0:13:38 Grounding yourself in the mainstream and the strength to say when somebody who’s in the family is off sides.
0:13:39 That is essential.
0:13:41 More so for Democrats.
0:13:46 And we got caught in a cul-de-sac, driving around in a circle in the last three years.
0:13:53 So, Ron, House Republicans just passed a massive tax and spending cuts package.
0:13:59 A lot of think tanks have said this is going to be the greatest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.
0:14:05 I’m curious to get your thoughts on this bill and these tax cuts.
0:14:13 This is not an advocate for my web traffic on my piece, but I just had a piece go up on The Washington Post on this piece.
0:14:17 But I think this is a huge opportunity for Democrats.
0:14:25 You don’t have either the microphone of the Oval Office or the gavel of the congressional.
0:14:28 Both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue are owned by the Republicans.
0:14:32 There is an architecture built in to that midterm.
0:14:40 An energized opposition, two-to-one independence break from the incumbent party, and a depressed incumbent party.
0:14:44 That is already, you can see in the early polling, setting up for 2026.
0:14:48 You can see Democrats are energized in these special elections.
0:14:51 Independents have broke from the Republican Party.
0:14:56 The Republican Party is just not turning out the way they did when Donald Trump was on the ballot.
0:15:01 It’s early, but the outlines of that architecture exist today, Scott.
0:15:06 On this bill, make simplicity a virtue.
0:15:15 There is a division between the MAGA, realizing all of a sudden Medicaid affects the rural hospitals and their constituents,
0:15:21 and the fiscal, if there are such things in the Republican Party, conservatives, who like the pain of cutting Medicaid.
0:15:23 Enjoy it, actually.
0:15:31 To me, you should make the battle cry, raise taxes on the wealthy so that we can give health care to the many.
0:15:32 Very simple.
0:15:38 The Democrats should be offering one simple bill, raise taxes on people making above $2.5 million,
0:15:44 eliminate carried interest, put the corporate tax rate back up to 27%, restore all the health care cuts.
0:15:45 Don’t try to solve all the problems.
0:15:47 This is setting up 2026.
0:15:49 The one thing we can win is 2026.
0:15:50 That’s what this is about.
0:15:57 The independent voters, which are going to be key in swing states and swing districts, want reform,
0:16:03 but most importantly, they want a check on an untethered, unchecked Donald Trump.
0:16:07 And you’ve got to associate the Republicans as a rubber stamp Congress.
0:16:10 This is not about oligarchy.
0:16:11 This is not about fascism.
0:16:14 This is not about do-nothing Democrats and weakness.
0:16:17 These terms are a referendum on the party in power.
0:16:20 Make it a referendum on the party in power.
0:16:28 This is a rubber stamp Republican Congress that has decided to reinforce what I refer to as the three Cs,
0:16:30 corruption, chaos, and cruelty.
0:16:31 And repeat it.
0:16:36 Washington interest groups see corruption as the Qatar jet, the Bitcoin.
0:16:44 The public sees corruption as a well-heeled, well-connected, getting a tax cut, and we’re getting our health care cut.
0:16:46 That’s how they see, perceive corruption.
0:16:56 And we should go right at it, drive like a Mack truck right to that point, and don’t go off wandering onto other ancillary issues.
0:17:01 The wealthy are walking off with all the money, and you’re paying for it with your health care.
0:17:03 It also has the beauty of one thing.
0:17:03 It’s true.
0:17:06 I like that.
0:17:11 It’s easy and digestible, and we suffer from being too loquacious as a party.
0:17:16 No, we’re always meeting with our Ph.D. committee to explain our theory of the case, yeah.
0:17:22 Embarrassed to be a Ph.D. holder myself, but we’ll pretend that I’m not for the rest of this podcast.
0:17:25 Okay, let’s take a quick break.
0:17:25 Stay with us.
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0:19:51 This week on Unexplainable.
0:20:00 I want to tell you about this guy I came across who has tied little leashes to butterflies and moths,
0:20:06 like little leashes out of fishing line, and taken them for walks around his lab.
0:20:08 And by walks, I mean little tiny flights.
0:20:11 So, like, imagine a dude with, like, a real-life kite.
0:20:15 On the other end is a butterfly, and he’s, like, walking it around a room.
0:20:17 Um, okay.
0:20:34 You mentioned education, the classroom, and that’s why you ran to be the mayor of Chicago.
0:20:43 And I’ve been disturbed by how Democrats have lost their edge in handling all of the most important issues to Americans.
0:20:49 I think we’re only still up on climate change and abortion, and only just barely now at this point.
0:20:57 And one of the biggest losses, I think, is that parents in this country don’t trust us to handle their children’s education.
0:21:09 And I’m curious as to what you think are some good policies that we could stand behind that would reaffirm people’s trust in us on that particular issue,
0:21:19 And also what we can do about the awesome, and not in the necessarily positive way, but just in the huge way, the power of the teachers’ unions.
0:21:28 When, you know, an average person knows who Randy Weingarten is, that that’s a problem for the party, especially considering what went on during COVID.
0:21:31 So, you’re right, Jess.
0:21:38 Last 30 years, Democrats had anywhere, starting from Jimmy Carter’s creating the Department of Education and Reagan trying to, or advocating to shut it down,
0:21:43 we had anywhere, call it, from 20 to 30-point advantage on education.
0:21:46 President Obama did race to the top.
0:21:48 President Clinton did teachers of excellence.
0:21:52 But we basically kept coming at this, focused on the classroom.
0:21:54 Accelerate.
0:22:01 There’s no doubt, during COVID, we shut schools down much longer than they need to be, much longer than, quote-unquote,
0:22:04 the science told us to do, even though we kept saying we’re going to follow the science.
0:22:10 Second, we got in a bunch of ancillary discussions that had nothing to do with reading, writing, and math.
0:22:16 The name of the school, was it named after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or any other founding father?
0:22:20 Or, access to the bathroom and access to locker rooms.
0:22:24 We’ve gone into bathroom and locker rooms, and we avoided the classroom.
0:22:30 So, you have to go back, for political purposes, to the place where you build political support.
0:22:31 That’s one.
0:22:38 Now, we’re at a 30-year low on reading scores, and I think near a 30-year low on math scores.
0:22:47 Alabama, in fourth grade, is the only state that has made gains on math.
0:22:55 Mississippi, going back to 2010, but even through COVID in post, has made significant gains on reading.
0:22:58 There’s a couple common themes to that.
0:23:01 One, time on task.
0:23:04 They dedicate more time to early intervention.
0:23:08 Three, we’re needed, one-on-one instruction.
0:23:14 That should become an emergency meeting using the Oval Office, all the governors, etc.
0:23:23 How do we get, over the next 18 months, what Alabama and Mississippi’s done, what are the best practices, and how do we make them universal, and start getting back to basics of that.
0:23:28 We have an absentee rate in Chicago of double digits, and that’s true nationally.
0:23:30 We have normalized absenteeism.
0:23:37 Parents and kids have self-selected four-day school week, and we’ve made it a norm.
0:23:39 And I think we should set a national standard.
0:23:47 No child will go from fourth to fifth grade who has north of seven, I’m using for this discussion, seven percent, because we’re doing social promotion.
0:23:48 The data is quite clear.
0:23:50 Kids can’t learn if they’re not in the classroom.
0:23:53 So, if you’re not in the classroom, you’re not going to the next grade.
0:23:54 End it.
0:23:56 No more social promotion.
0:24:05 Lastly, and I think this is really important, we haven’t rethought the high school since introducing universal high school education.
0:24:06 It’s been 100 years.
0:24:12 I’m not saying we did everything right in Chicago, but we did a couple things, I think, that do matter in that reinvention.
0:24:21 We went from a mindset of a diploma machine, get you to graduation, get you a diploma, to high school was preparation for what’s next.
0:24:23 So, we did three things.
0:24:28 First, if you earn a B average, we made community college free.
0:24:31 You got free books, free tuition, free transportation.
0:24:37 And in a school district with 83% poverty, 20,000 kids have availed themselves of it.
0:24:39 Three-quarters of them are the first in the family to go to college.
0:24:41 We made it free, but you got to have a B average.
0:24:54 Two, you could not get your high school diploma without showing a letter of acceptance from a college, community college, a branch of the armed services, or a vocational school.
0:24:57 You will not get your high school diploma without that letter.
0:25:00 So, you have to help parents do that.
0:25:07 So, we hired a massive amount of college and career counselors and got them into high schools across the city.
0:25:09 We help kids starting their freshman year.
0:25:10 What do you want to do?
0:25:11 How do you want to do it?
0:25:11 Okay.
0:25:14 And every year, you met with that counselor.
0:25:16 So, you were, did you need more math?
0:25:17 Did you need more science?
0:25:19 Did, you know, where were you on this or that?
0:25:31 So, they were preparing if they wanted to go Marines, they wanted to go plumbing, or they wanted to go to Harold Washington Community College, to Northern or UIC, or wherever they want to apply.
0:25:38 And we had a 99.4% compliance.
0:25:44 We re, as best we could, rethought and reinvented the high school education.
0:25:48 So, you know, my motto always was, you earn what you learn.
0:25:51 You get a high school education, you’ll learn that.
0:25:53 You don’t get one, you’ll earn that too.
0:26:05 So, Ram, something we talk a lot about here is, along the lines of young people, is, you know, my view is that the group that’s fallen furthest fastest is the one that gets the least empathy, and that is young men.
0:26:05 Yep.
0:26:11 Four times more likely to kill themselves, three times more likely to be addicted, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated.
0:26:14 What is your view on the plight?
0:26:16 If, A, do you see it as an issue?
0:26:20 And if so, how do we address it from a social policy?
0:26:23 Can you point to any programs that you’re in favor of?
0:26:29 I know you’ve been an advocate for national service, but what do you think we do to help lift up our young men?
0:26:33 So, there’s two things I’ll get to, but I want to finish one thought I was going to say.
0:26:34 Sure.
0:26:37 Because it deals with at least that one data point you pulled out about incarceration.
0:26:48 An oversized amount of the folks in prison are black men between the ages of 18 and 35 without a high school degree.
0:26:49 Yep.
0:26:53 The only thing I can change in that is whether you have a high school degree or not.
0:26:57 Can’t change gender, can’t change race, can’t change age.
0:26:58 That changes on its own.
0:27:12 And so, to me, getting kids, one of the things that we drove, and I say we, meaning Dr. Janice Jackson and I, she was the chancellor of our schools, is if you said to our kids, what are you going to do in four years?
0:27:14 If they had to have a, they could tell you.
0:27:17 I have kids when I was mayor in Chicago, which is true today.
0:27:20 Four weeks was their horizon.
0:27:23 They didn’t know if they were going to be alive at 18.
0:27:28 You get a child that walks across that stage and gets a diploma, they have a tomorrow.
0:27:33 They don’t get to that stage, they’re not thinking about tomorrow.
0:27:35 Their horizon is different.
0:27:39 So, if you can get them thinking about tomorrow, they’re going to change the way they think about themselves.
0:27:52 Second, and this was the inspiration for President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper, University of Chicago comes to me, and they show me this program that had about 80 kids called Becoming a Man.
0:27:56 And it’s a circle group you sit in, you do about four hours a day.
0:27:57 That’s one part.
0:28:02 And then they do other things with the children for about four hours a day, five days a week.
0:28:05 I was smitten by it.
0:28:12 I got Jimmy Butler involved in it, the basketball player, I got other athletes, anybody that came, including President Obama.
0:28:16 I made him participate at Hyde Park High School, and that became his inspiration.
0:28:27 We blew it up from 100 kids over my tenure to 7,500 young men, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th grade.
0:28:31 Four hours a day, five days a week, nine months out of the year.
0:28:34 It was their mentor.
0:28:37 It was their coach.
0:28:40 And it was their role model.
0:28:49 And I’m not going to do social science, but there’s enough data about staying out of the criminal justice system, graduating high school, that it’s overwhelming.
0:28:52 And again, I’m dealing with a population in Chicago.
0:28:55 It doesn’t mean it applies across the board, but I think it does.
0:29:00 Just with a little mentoring, their lives were different.
0:29:13 You can see this hollowness in their eyes, and it’s changed when they’re involved in something that’s rewarding, which I also believe about why I think we should go to a universal national service.
0:29:18 Look, a kid’s life is 20% in the classroom and 80% out.
0:29:23 If you want the 20% to succeed, invest in the 80%.
0:29:30 Now, we blew up after-school programs and summer jobs, and we tripled the enrollment.
0:29:36 But giving kids something where they get their own sense of confidence back.
0:29:49 And I would say to you, Scott, one of the things that’s clear to me, our young men have internalized a self-loathing, a self-doubt beyond just what teenage years used to.
0:30:02 There’s something that has happened that they have – look, everybody has a level of insecurity and grows up with it, but they have internalized this anger that’s self-directed.
0:30:08 Sometimes it is outside, and there’s – you can just – they’re craving a direction.
0:30:14 And they’re craving, in my view, an adult who cares about them.
0:30:24 You know, my father used to say as a pediatrician, you know, he’s never saw a kid that was spoiled because they were told they were loved too many times.
0:30:27 So I do know what the government can do, and I know what the government can’t do.
0:30:30 A government can support parenting.
0:30:31 A government can support a child.
0:30:35 A government program can give a child certain kind of supports.
0:30:37 There’s things it can’t do.
0:30:45 And I think one of the things we have to realize is we’re not – I think you’ve talked – both of you have talked about this.
0:30:50 We’re not in a zero-sum game that somehow if you’re helping young men, it comes at the expense of young women.
0:31:03 But the crisis that is now a flashing red light, not a yellow light, is these young men, aimless, and – I mean, you can hear it in their voice.
0:31:15 And if we don’t in some way interject ourselves and start doing different things rather than the same thing, we’re going to pay a huge price, and they’re going to pay a huge price.
0:31:18 So I looked at this mentoring program.
0:31:27 I would look at summer jobs after school, and then I would – I’m a firm believer that it’s got to be across the board, universal national service for six months.
0:31:28 Everybody’s got to do it.
0:31:32 Nobody gets to cut out of it just because you’re going to go to college or med school.
0:31:33 Forget about it.
0:31:45 So you’re talking like somebody that has a plan or at least some plans that we should be thinking about for the future of the party, for the country, and all of us.
0:31:50 And you’ve joked that you’re in training for 2028, but you don’t know if you’ll make the Olympics.
0:31:54 What does that training look like for you?
0:31:56 Are you thinking about running for president?
0:32:01 Are you thinking about running for governor if Pritzker takes the plunge himself?
0:32:05 So, Jeff, here’s how I think about it.
0:32:13 There’s a lot of people, rightfully, on the other end of the pool whose entire existence is fighting Donald Trump.
0:32:17 And there’s a lot to fight, and I don’t belittle it.
0:32:22 If I’m right, this election in 2026 is a referendum.
0:32:26 2028 is a choice, not a referendum.
0:32:35 And I’m going to spend my time, as I have both writing pieces, et cetera, on education, on national service.
0:32:38 I’ve already done certain things on national security.
0:32:44 And ideas about how to make the American dream affordable.
0:32:50 I don’t think it’s an accident that the moment the American dream became out of reach is less affordable.
0:32:53 It’s exactly the time in which our politics became unstable.
0:32:54 They’re connected.
0:33:00 And so, if I think I have something to offer that others don’t, I’ll take that plunge.
0:33:10 But I am going to spend my time now thinking, writing about what I think are the big issues that we have to address.
0:33:13 That gets to the topic of lost men.
0:33:17 That gets to the topic of rethinking our educational system.
0:33:21 There’s nothing partisan about reinventing high school.
0:33:24 You know, I happen to be for free community college.
0:33:27 President Obama took our program advocating nationally.
0:33:29 But that’s not the only road to the same destination.
0:33:35 And if I think I got something that other people aren’t talking about and a way to talk about it, then I’ll dive into the deep end.
0:33:40 But I’m going to spend my time articulating that, thinking about that, talking to people.
0:33:48 And if I don’t think anybody else is going to do that, or I think if I’m present in that campaign, I can drive that, I’ll dive in the pool.
0:33:49 If I don’t, I won’t.
0:33:51 That’s how I’m thinking about it.
0:33:52 Great.
0:34:05 Open AI spent the last few years turning ChatGPT into one of the most important and popular products on the internet.
0:34:12 Johnny Ive spent the last several decades building products at Apple that became truly iconic, like the iPhone.
0:34:15 Now, those two are teaming up to work on something.
0:34:20 We don’t know much, but it’s going to be some kind of AI gadget, and they think it’s going to be a really big deal.
0:34:33 This week on The VergeCast, we talk about what Johnny Ive and OpenAI might be up to, plus everything that happened at Google I.O., the developer conference, and all of the other news in the AI and gadget world, because there is just so much of it.
0:34:36 All that on The VergeCast, wherever you get podcasts.
0:34:45 When comedian Chris Gethard was growing up, he went to a place called Action Park.
0:34:53 It was one of the first water parks in the country, and it was built by a man who had no experience building theme parks.
0:34:56 Some people called him a berserk Willy Wonka.
0:35:03 Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there.
0:35:07 Not only did we know that, it was a huge part of the appeal.
0:35:09 I’m Phoebe Judge.
0:35:15 Listen to our latest episode, Action Park, on Criminal, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:35:22 Welcome back.
0:35:25 So, just some recent news here.
0:35:32 Two Israeli embassy staffers were killed in a shooting outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in D.C.
0:35:34 Obviously tragic and heartbreaking.
0:35:43 What are your thoughts on this sort of light sleeper, which is anti-Semitism, what appears to be an increase in anti-Semitism in the U.S.?
0:35:48 Well, you know, so two things got the shooter.
0:35:50 I mean, the Chicago Police Department has it.
0:35:54 He’s been at our house a number of times for protests starting in 2017.
0:35:58 So, I have a slight connection with that.
0:36:04 Second is, I have a slight twist on what you said.
0:36:05 You said an increase.
0:36:08 Anti-Semitism has always existed.
0:36:10 More visible then.
0:36:11 Yes.
0:36:13 And the question is, why is it more visible?
0:36:15 Why these people?
0:36:16 Why now?
0:36:18 Straight up, why?
0:36:21 And to me, we’re going to have to have a hard conversation.
0:36:39 There has been a permission slip for what used to be behind closed doors said about Jews or said in a kind of snide remark, etc., to where it’s said now publicly, where anti-Semitism or anti-Semitic expressions are said openly.
0:36:52 Yes, October 7th ushered in one level, but anti-Semitism has existed, and what’s new is it’s got a green light.
0:37:00 And that green light, not only to expressing it, bubbles over into violence, not just stays rhetorical.
0:37:03 And I said this last week, and I’m going to say it again.
0:37:05 I said it at the 92nd Street Watch.
0:37:19 When you have people in 2017 marching around saying Jews will not replace us, blood and soil, and the next day doesn’t call for Lincoln’s malice towards none, we say there’s good people on both sides.
0:37:20 We got a problem.
0:37:37 And I want to be very clear, I’m not saying that this is on President Trump, but we have a permission slip for what was once repressed or said in hushed tones is now fully said, and there’s no boundary to where we’ll lead.
0:37:49 You know, look, my life, adult public life, when I was working for President Clinton, because of certain things said about Rahm Israel Emmanuel, we had a dog that would smell the car before we were allowed to turn it on.
0:38:03 When we were in Japan, somebody spray-painted the fence in front of our house with neo-Nazi signs, etc., and to this day, I don’t know who, a neighbor went and painted over it.
0:38:15 I got elected Rahm Israel Emmanuel in a congressional district that used to have, represented by Dan Rossinkowski, Frank Annunzio, Roman Paczynski, Rob Bogoyevich, Flanagan, quickly.
0:38:16 You know, what doesn’t fit there?
0:38:17 Rahm Israel Emmanuel.
0:38:23 But I had people in a district vote for a Jewish kid.
0:38:30 I was elected a mayor of a city of Chicago whose Jewish population is 3%, a working-class city.
0:38:36 So I have seen the best of folks, and I know firsthand the worst of folks.
0:38:54 I think anti-Semitism today is at a heightened level, and for a host of reasons not singular, there’s a green light to expressing it that didn’t exist in years past.
0:38:59 I just quickly want to say, you mentioned, you know, I’m not putting this on President Trump.
0:39:00 I’m not.
0:39:01 No, no, I get that.
0:39:09 But there are a lot of people who would argue that it’s actually our party that has allowed the green light to anti-Semitism more.
0:39:10 And he was chanting, Free Palestine.
0:39:15 He was part of a leftist organization and college protests.
0:39:16 No, I know.
0:39:17 It was personal for you.
0:39:18 That’s what he’s part of.
0:39:24 No, look, I don’t—anti-Semitism doesn’t have a political party or political identification or ideological.
0:39:27 And if you do that, then you’re actually not dealing with anti-Semitism.
0:39:32 You’re getting sidetracked into a political discussion that’s actually extremely unhelpful.
0:39:41 I have seen, as I said, by the anecdote I gave in Virginia in 2017, that wasn’t the left, quote-unquote.
0:39:53 And I don’t find trying to figure out which party is responsible—I really not only think it’s a sidetracked argument, it actually blinds us from dealing with some core issues.
0:39:58 And we’re going to have to deal with it as a country and ask some really hard questions.
0:40:13 And I think the notion that somehow Democrats bear more of it is not just unhelpful, it’s actually trying to wash your hands of coming to crux because anti-Semitism doesn’t have a party or ideological point of origin.
0:40:22 I personally don’t disagree with you, and I’ve just been disappointed, I guess, in how life has been handled since October 7th.
0:40:41 Look, it’s a fair point, except for I want to say, you know, this country, I not only represent—I mean, I don’t want to go through my titles, but I’m the son of an Israeli immigrant and the grandson of an immigrant from Moldova who came here fleeing the pogroms.
0:40:44 This country has been incredible to the Jewish community.
0:40:50 It’s based on the rule of law, self-determination, and a series of freedoms.
0:40:54 When those get degraded, that is not good.
0:40:57 I got 2,000 years of Jewish history, but it’s not good.
0:41:00 It doesn’t have a philosophical or ideological point.
0:41:12 And the reason you stand up for these values or these principles is because it has allowed us as a community to flourish and contribute in a way that we just haven’t anywhere else.
0:41:15 And I’m not disappointed in my party.
0:41:21 I would say there are people on both parties that want to confront and fight anti-Semitism.
0:41:26 Ram, I see you as—I don’t know you well, but I’ve been following your work more closely recently.
0:41:29 I think you’re a brilliant messenger, a great strategist.
0:41:31 Will you call my mom?
0:41:34 Well, she’s clearly done an impressive—a pretty impressive job.
0:41:36 I think you’re like the Case family.
0:41:39 It’s like, who’s more successful than the other in terms of kids?
0:41:40 Who’s more neurotic?
0:41:42 Your mom’s clearly done something.
0:41:44 She should definitely write a book on parenting.
0:41:51 So what about, again, repeat what you think the one kind of puncturing message should be from the Democratic side right now?
0:41:56 Between now and 2026, rubber-stamp Republicans.
0:41:57 That’s winnable.
0:42:02 And if you get the House back, it’s going to be essential to giving us a chance in 2028.
0:42:07 In 2028, and it’s not just by election.
0:42:13 I think the core principle for the Democratic Party, the American dream is unaffordable.
0:42:18 It’s inaccessible, and that is totally unacceptable to us.
0:42:26 The idea that you have people in our country with three, four, five, six homes, and a young family can’t get a starter home is crazy.
0:42:28 It’s the core crux of the American dream.
0:42:30 I grew up—my dad was a pediatrician.
0:42:31 My mother was a radiologist.
0:42:34 If you ask a second opinion, it was another health care professional.
0:42:39 Today, it’s an insurance bureaucrat sitting on the other line telling you you can’t get that procedure or we’re not going to cover it.
0:42:47 And to me, the American dream—and this gets back to how people think corrupt—I don’t know you, Jess.
0:42:48 I don’t really know you, Scott.
0:42:53 You guys kind of know me through—I mean, our kids are going to be fine.
0:42:59 We have given every other person’s child the shaft.
0:43:08 The system has screwed them, and we have allowed both parties over the years, as long as our kids were okay and it kind of didn’t really hit a crisis, it’s fine.
0:43:09 It’s not fine.
0:43:17 And the core premise—if you want to strengthen democracy, make the American dream more affordable and more accessible.
0:43:23 And if it’s got a restriction sign around it, you’re going to get a lot of people pissed off.
0:43:27 And I don’t know if we can solve it overnight, and I don’t think we can.
0:43:30 I think it’s going to take a long time because it’s going to take a long time to get here.
0:43:37 But you can’t have a situation where people are using their 401K, which is supposed to be for their retirement, to make up for their paycheck, not covering their costs.
0:43:42 Health care—they spend more time arguing with their bureaucrat than they do talking to the doctor.
0:43:47 And we have young couples sitting at their parents’ home down in the basement and can’t find a home.
0:43:54 And unless we fix that, the rest of it is going to come apart.
0:44:09 And second, on a very crass political level, if we put that at the core, A, it will shunt out this weak and woke and will look like we’re fighting exactly for the people and against exact interests that have been giving people the shaft for years.
0:44:11 So to me, that’s the core thing.
0:44:12 That’s where I’m actually spending my time.
0:44:14 And I think it’s going to take us a long time.
0:44:25 And the reason we disappointed people, and they got disappointed in the Democrats, not only for these tangential issues, but we lost connection with what they expect from us.
0:44:35 We were always the defender of what comes under inclusive economy, that more and more people would have a shot at just the basics.
0:44:41 Own a home, save for your retirement, save for your kids’ education, afford your health care, and take a three-week vacation.
0:44:46 And none of that is affordable unless you’re well off.
0:44:53 And you shouldn’t be comfortable, if you’re well off, that the rest of the country isn’t comfortable.
0:44:57 So that’s my core thing of what the party needs to do.
0:45:03 And we get all caught up in, you know, not only tangential issues, but overthinking.
0:45:10 You look and you just, you know, as I used to do when I was a mayor and I was doing this when I used to do Congress on your corner.
0:45:16 You go to down Target, you walk down the aisles, you go to Walmart, I used to call them Target Town Halls or Walmart walk-ins.
0:45:20 And people that would stop to, you know, other people say, oh, hi, Mr. Mayor, or whatever.
0:45:21 But people would stop and talk to you.
0:45:24 This is not complicated.
0:45:35 Solving it is, but understanding people want somebody there that will get in there in the morning, roll up their sleeves.
0:45:40 And the one thing they’re going to focus on like a laser is making sure they have a shot.
0:45:52 And what survived Bill Clinton and Barack Obama through the ups, every presidency has ups and downs, is that at the core, the public knew who they were working for and who they were working against.
0:45:55 And we’ve abandoned it.
0:45:56 And guess what?
0:45:58 They got us read right.
0:46:00 We’re dead to rights, man.
0:46:09 We got caught off on bathrooms and Latinx and making people, you couldn’t use that language, you’re doing that cultural approach.
0:46:13 And people couldn’t figure out how to get a down payment on the home.
0:46:17 They had to pick which child goes to college and which one doesn’t and postpones it.
0:46:22 They were taking money that they knew in their gut was supposed to be for retirement, but they couldn’t make the bills.
0:46:24 They were taking another 401k and paying penalties.
0:46:36 We’ve put people in untenable positions just to do the basics, just to, you know, if I had a medical problem, like obviously when my dad was, I could call my dad or whatever.
0:46:40 People spend hours arguing with an insurance executive.
0:46:47 Half a doctor’s time and the nurse’s time is talking to some jerk on a telephone about a procedure that’s fundamental.
0:46:51 And I will tell you why I loved being mayor.
0:47:10 And when I did these graduations, when kids were coming with a Chicago Star Scholarship to free, the relief in a parent’s eye that they didn’t have to either take a second job, a second mortgage, or pick between the two kids who goes to college and who doesn’t.
0:47:16 That, because your son or daughter earned a B and they’re going free, they earned it.
0:47:21 That relief, I used to tell Amy, I said, you got to come to one of these.
0:47:24 So she came, I mean, people were, parents are crying inside.
0:47:37 There was an emotional catharsis because they were in this crazy Solomon choice, second job, second mortgage, or second child.
0:47:40 This is insane, insane.
0:47:43 So that’s what, to me, is what matters.
0:47:50 Rahm Emanuel is a two-time mayor of Chicago, former White House chief of staff, and most recently U.S. ambassador of Japan.
0:47:53 Rahm, really appreciate your time and your message.
0:47:54 Thank you.
0:47:56 We’re glad you’re on our side, Rahm.
0:47:59 Thanks, guys.

0:00:05 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
0:00:14 I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
0:00:20 My guest today is Dr. Melissa Allardo, professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Utah.
0:00:25 Dr. Allardo is a world-renowned expert in human genetics and epigenetics.
0:00:31 She conducts pioneering studies on how our behavior and the environment can modify our gene expression.
0:00:40 Today marks the first time on the Huberman Lab Podcast that we really explore human genetics, epigenetics, and how behavior shapes gene expression across generations.
0:00:48 We talk about the inheritance of physical traits like eye color, and we dive deep into fascinating mechanisms such as the mammalian dive reflex,
0:00:56 a physiological reaction to breath-holding and cold water that, as Dr. Allardo explains, can dramatically alter the physiology of your spleen
0:01:01 to allow significant increases in red blood cell count and oxygen availability to your brain and body.
0:01:07 And by the way, the mammalian dive reflex can be activated outside of free diving, and you can even do it at home.
0:01:12 We also explore how mate preference and selection in humans relates to the immune system.
0:01:23 That is, if you were given a choice of many, many different mates, as most people are, the mate you would select is the mate who has the immune system composition that is most different from yours,
0:01:30 and you would know that on the basis of their smell and how attractive their smell is to you compared to the smell of other people.
0:01:37 We also talk about how differences in external traits signal important variations in organ function, hormone levels, and even brain physiology.
0:01:43 Toward the end of our conversation, we discuss the current state and ethical considerations of gene editing in humans,
0:01:46 something that’s apt to be an increasingly important topic in the years to come,
0:01:50 because gene editing in humans is now possible and is happening.
0:01:59 As you’ll soon learn, Dr. Olardo does incredible real-world experiments that reveal the remarkable interplay between genes and behavior,
0:02:05 and she’s an absolutely phenomenal teacher who makes complex genetic concepts accessible and practical.
0:02:10 The conversation is sure to change the way that you think about mate selection, your parents, their parents,
0:02:16 and what you can do to optimize your physiology and health through behavioral practices that influence gene expression.
0:02:21 Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
0:02:26 It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science
0:02:28 and science-related tools to the general public.
0:02:32 In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors.
0:02:35 And now for my discussion with Dr. Melissa Olardo.
0:02:38 Dr. Melissa Olardo, welcome.
0:02:39 Thank you.
0:02:41 Nature versus nurture.
0:02:45 Super big question that we all wonder about, you know,
0:02:52 how much of our capabilities and potential and just general themes of life,
0:02:55 everything from how we look to what we’re capable of doing or not doing in the moment
0:02:58 or where we might be able to improve or not improve,
0:03:02 we hear some of it’s nature, some of it’s nurture.
0:03:06 So if we take a step back and we just ask a big question about human genetics,
0:03:13 how much of our DNA is modifiable by our environment and what we do,
0:03:15 what we choose to do in particular?
0:03:18 Because that’s most of what we’re going to emphasize today.
0:03:21 I think that’s something we’re still understanding at this point.
0:03:25 I mean, I think every day we’re getting more and more information about the ways that we can
0:03:27 actually modify gene expression.
0:03:30 And these things that we thought were totally predetermined in the past.
0:03:38 And so I think we’re still learning with epigenetics and all of these new fields just how much we can actually change things.
0:03:41 There are, of course, things that are kind of written in our genes,
0:03:44 but I think we’re learning that there’s a lot more that we can change.
0:03:51 Most of us at some point in high school learned Mendelian genetics, right?
0:03:54 Mendel, the monk, and his peas in his garden.
0:03:58 Most people probably don’t remember the details of that.
0:04:00 But we also learned about eye color.
0:04:07 You know, it’s, you know, commonplace for people to understand that if both your parents have dark eyes,
0:04:12 with very rare exception, it’s unlikely that you’re going to get light eyes as a child.
0:04:13 But it’s possible.
0:04:18 But if you have one light eyed parent and one dark eyed parent, then you start to enter the probability game.
0:04:24 And then at some point, your parents dictate a lot of your appearance, your phenotype.
0:04:32 And yet that there are aspects of our parents that are not seen in us at all and vice versa.
0:04:36 And so I think for most people, when we think about genes, we think about heritability.
0:04:42 But your work focuses a lot on the aspects of genetic expression that are subject to change
0:04:47 based on what people choose to do or are forced to do in order to survive, something we call selection.
0:04:54 So could you tell us about selection in terms of how quickly a given behavior, for example,
0:04:56 can change our gene expression?
0:05:00 I’m not aware of any way to change one’s eye color without putting in like a colored contact lens.
0:05:05 Now there’s some esoteric things showing up online about people using these bizarre treatments
0:05:06 to change their eye color.
0:05:11 But for the most part, people accept that you’re not going to change your eye color by behaving differently.
0:05:17 But what are some examples where we can change our gene expression quickly, relatively quickly,
0:05:19 by doing something differently?
0:05:24 Yeah, just going back to eye color, because this is just one of my favorite genetics facts.
0:05:28 So everyone with blue eyes descends from the same person.
0:05:34 So at one point in human history, one person had a change in their eye color.
0:05:37 And it’s just like amazing to imagine this person who had blue eyes for the first time.
0:05:43 And then through many generations, probably because that was a very attractive and interesting feature
0:05:46 in that individual, you know, that spread throughout human populations as we know them.
0:05:49 So I always just find that to be fun about blue eyes.
0:05:51 So there was a blue eyed F1, as we say.
0:05:52 That’s right.
0:05:53 Yeah, the first.
0:05:59 Let’s stay on eye color for a moment, because before we get into how genes can be modified
0:06:00 by behavior.
0:06:07 I’ve been told that the green eye phenotype is one of the more rare eye colors.
0:06:07 Is that true?
0:06:08 I think that’s right.
0:06:10 Yeah, I think it’s the most rare.
0:06:15 And can we assume that there was an original F1 brown eyed person that gave rise to the
0:06:18 entire lineage of brown eyes subsequently?
0:06:22 Yeah, I think in the history of humans as a species, I think that was our original eye color.
0:06:28 And so then, yeah, having these other eye colors arise in the population created these events.
0:06:32 I think green eyes, if I’m not mistaken, there were multiple people, you know, that comes from
0:06:35 different genes from different individuals in the history of humans.
0:06:38 But yeah, blue eyes is just this one individual.
0:06:43 I realize I’m slightly remiss on the statement about eye color not being subject to behavior.
0:06:47 We know that as you get more sunlight exposure, in particular, ultraviolet light exposure, that
0:06:49 eyes will darken.
0:06:49 Is that right?
0:06:51 Regardless of where they start.
0:06:51 Interesting.
0:06:57 So like a blue eyed baby will have much bluer eyes at birth than it will at age 15, at age
0:06:58 80, for instance.
0:06:58 Yeah.
0:07:04 And we believe that’s due to changes in pigmentation because of UV exposure.
0:07:05 That’s really interesting.
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0:10:28 Thank you for that because I think that most everyone is interested in eyes and eye color.
0:10:35 What are the sort of examples that come to mind when you think of rapid changes in gene
0:10:40 expression in any organ, could be at the surface of the body or it could be internally, that
0:10:42 are governed by some change in behavior?
0:10:43 Yeah.
0:10:48 So, I mean, our genes are constantly changing how they’re expressing based on, you know,
0:10:50 what environmental stimulus is coming in.
0:10:55 So we have, you know, these changes that happen on the order of, you know, minutes or hours or
0:10:55 things like that.
0:10:59 Then there’s also changes that we’re finding out are happening kind of over generations.
0:11:03 So we now know that there can be epigenetic changes.
0:11:08 So these are changes, you know, little modifications to the genome that happen by things actually,
0:11:11 molecules actually attaching to the genome and changing how genes express.
0:11:14 That can be passed down.
0:11:18 So this is really interesting from the perspective of things like trauma.
0:11:22 You know, we know that, you know, refugee populations actually have some of these changes that they’ve
0:11:28 inherited from their parents, even if they weren’t, you know, victims of the event that caused
0:11:29 them to be refugees.
0:11:33 Excuse me for interrupting, but are those changes that are passed down, are they adaptive?
0:11:36 Are they making subsequent populations more resilient or less resilient?
0:11:38 Yeah, it’s a very good question.
0:11:42 You know, in the case of trauma and refugees, I’m not sure.
0:11:46 I do know in terms of starvation, that’s been something that’s been studied as well.
0:11:51 So there was a famine that affected Dutch people several hundred years ago, I think.
0:11:56 And that was actually also kind of recorded in these epigenetic changes.
0:12:02 And so presumably that’s a change that is helping that population to better survive that famine.
0:12:03 So in that way, it’s resilient.
0:12:10 But then, you know, you think about in a contemporary situation where, you know, food is abundant, maybe
0:12:13 that is no longer beneficial, even though at one point it was.
0:12:19 And so then we have this other kind of order of change, which is, you know, actual changes in
0:12:25 the genes themselves that either arise from mutations in, you know, these single base pairs or at many
0:12:30 different sites or things like variation that’s already present in the population at a certain
0:12:34 amount that then, you know, increases in frequency throughout the population.
0:12:36 And this is where a lot of my work has focused.
0:12:45 And these are changes that until recently we thought would take, you know, 5,000 years, 10,000 years at least.
0:12:49 And now we’re starting to understand that maybe that can happen in as short as 1,000 years, 2,000 years.
0:12:54 This might be slightly out of line with what we’re talking about right now,
0:12:58 but I’m really fascinated by this concept of hybrid vigor.
0:13:06 I was taught, I don’t know if the data still hold up, that if you give mice a choice of other mice to mate with,
0:13:14 to produce offspring with, that they will select a mouse whose major histocompatibility complex,
0:13:19 which is a reflection of diversity of immune genes, so to speak.
0:13:24 They’ll pick the mouse whose immune system is most different from theirs.
0:13:28 Presumably, the just-so story, because we’re making stuff up about why they do this, right?
0:13:29 Nobody really knows.
0:13:36 The just-so story is that they do this in order to produce offspring that have a much broader array of immune genes
0:13:39 to be able to combat a much broader array of potential pathogens.
0:13:42 Is that true in mice still?
0:13:44 And is it true in humans as well?
0:13:48 Do people elect to produce offspring, if given a choice,
0:13:51 produce offspring with people that are more different from them as opposed to similar to them?
0:13:59 So they did a very similar study in humans, and humans also are drawn to other humans that have these differences.
0:14:02 So it’s interesting, especially with the immune system.
0:14:09 There was a study where I think they had people smell sweaty T-shirts of members of the opposite sex,
0:14:16 if they were heterosexual, to see how attracted they felt to the person just based on the smell of their sweaty T-shirt.
0:14:22 And people were more drawn to people who had very different immune systems than their own.
0:14:26 So I think this is something, you know, we see it in mice, and it’s easy to say, oh, you know, it’s their animals.
0:14:27 Of course they do that.
0:14:29 But we do it as humans too.
0:14:34 And it’d be interesting to know to what extent that’s influencing our choice of mates and spouses.
0:14:35 Super interesting.
0:14:41 So they’re given a choice of sweaty clothing from the opposite sex, potential partner.
0:14:45 I guess they’re, I don’t know if they were, you know, sent out on dates after the experiment.
0:14:49 But they’re, and they’re smelling, let’s say, 10 different T-shirts that are sweaty.
0:14:51 And then they’re saying, and then they rank order them.
0:14:57 And the one they like the most, if you go and look at the genome of the person whose sweat was on that clothing.
0:15:03 And specifically the immune system that you’re talking about, you know, the, what is it, histocombatibility?
0:15:04 The major histocombatibility complex.
0:15:05 Yeah.
0:15:10 The more different they were in that, the more attracted they were to that smell.
0:15:11 It’s kind of amazing, right?
0:15:29 Like that smell, which we just think of as, I like this body odor, I don’t like this body odor, I love this body odor, is kind of a proxy for gene expression related to the immune system of the offspring that you haven’t even had yet with this smelly T-shirt owning a person.
0:15:30 It’s kind of wild.
0:15:38 So I think it speaks to smell, and these aren’t really pheromone effects, but it speaks to smell as a pretty powerful driver of mate selection.
0:15:39 Yeah.
0:15:41 I mean, I think it could be.
0:15:46 It’s also interesting, you know, we have, you know, when you’re talking about hybrid compatibility or hybrid.
0:15:50 I called it hybrid vigor based on no particular knowledge of the correct term.
0:15:53 I think that’s the term I use because it makes sense to me.
0:15:53 Yeah.
0:15:55 Something like that.
0:15:55 Something like that.
0:16:04 You know, we’re having with globalization, people meeting each other, you know, across cultures, across continents for the first time.
0:16:20 So we’re getting genetic combinations that have never been possible in the history of humans, and that’s creating some interesting both kind of resilience and then also disease because you have, you know, combinations of genetic variants that have never been in the same individual before that are now showing up together.
0:16:24 I find this super interesting for a couple of reasons.
0:16:34 First of all, I’ll turn 50 in September, and I remember a time not that long ago where it was very unusual, for instance, to see an interracial couple in a television show when I was growing up.
0:16:36 Now that’s changed, right?
0:16:38 And I think that’s reflective of a number of things.
0:16:42 I mean, there’s cause and effect directionality here that we could get into, but that’s a different podcast.
0:16:54 But that, yes, people are intermarrying and or producing children with people whose backgrounds, genetic backgrounds, are very different than their own.
0:17:04 And if we take the opposite extreme, it makes perfect sense as to why this hybrid vigor thing would exist.
0:17:07 And the opposite extreme is a very uncomfortable thing.
0:17:13 But if you think about incest, incest has been discouraged in populations for a very long time.
0:17:28 Without anyone understanding genetics, like the mechanisms of genetics per se, it’s been well understood that in small villages that people shouldn’t mate with their siblings, shouldn’t mate with their cousins, shouldn’t mate – and ideally not even with second cousins because of the potential for disease.
0:17:36 So I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that nature punishes reproducing with people that are too close to you.
0:17:46 And then, of course, there’s the moral and ethical and all that aspect, but Mother Nature actually punishes individuals that do this through mutation.
0:17:57 Yeah, when you have two individuals who are closely related, that dramatically increases the chance that they’re both carrying a variant that has a negative impact on the offspring.
0:18:10 So, you know, when you have people kind of mixing more outside their families, then it’s very likely that even if you’re carrying this deleterious variation, it’s going to be kind of watered down by outside genetic material.
0:18:17 But, yeah, as soon as you have people too closely related to each other, you know, those things are ending up together and creating disease.
0:18:18 Yeah.
0:18:21 So it’s definitely nature has a system built in that says don’t do that.
0:18:22 Yeah.
0:18:31 I find it amazing that these things are operating below the level of conscious decision-making to influence preference like this smell or that smell.
0:18:40 And we’ve established, you’ve told us that the smells that reflect the most distant immune system are the most attractive smells, which is really wild.
0:18:56 So is it fair to say that humans are continuing to evolve, given that people are traveling further, meeting people from further away, having children with people from origin populations that presumably have never mixed before in the course of human evolution?
0:18:57 Yeah, absolutely.
0:19:00 I think sometimes people kind of, you know, think we’re done.
0:19:04 We’ve reached this, you know, ultimate point of evolution.
0:19:06 You know, we’ve finished evolving.
0:19:12 But as long as there are things that are affecting our ability to reproduce, we’re going to continue to evolve.
0:19:16 And, you know, especially once you have this introduction of new genetic variation.
0:19:23 I mean, some of the greatest adaptations in the history of humans have come from the introduction of new genetic material.
0:19:33 So, like, the Tibetan high altitude adaptation is actually believed to have arisen from the crossing of humans with another early hominid group called Denisovans.
0:19:38 So we essentially stole the advantageous genes from this other group.
0:19:56 And so maybe you’ll start to see that happening again, you know, as you have a more globalized population where, you know, different groups of humans are creating these interesting phenotypes through the mixing of their genes that maybe will lead us to be more resilient as our planet is changing around us.
0:20:06 How long ago did this gene that affords better abilities at altitude or ability to survive at altitude enter the human population?
0:20:10 You know, I’m going to get myself in trouble because I don’t remember exactly how long ago it was.
0:20:11 More than 10,000 years ago?
0:20:12 More than 10,000 years ago.
0:20:19 But it only became advantageous when the ancestral population of Tibetans moved into these extremely high altitudes.
0:20:24 So they kind of, you know, was just sitting there waiting for a chance to be really advantageous.
0:20:29 And then as soon as they went to these high altitudes, people carrying that genetic variation were at a huge advantage.
0:20:35 And so they, you know, passed that along to their children and their children’s children and so on.
0:20:36 Okay.
0:20:46 So does that mean that at some point the species we know as Homo sapiens was able to reproduce with a species that was not Homo sapiens?
0:20:50 They gave, and that’s how the gene entered the Homo sapien population?
0:20:51 That’s exactly right.
0:20:52 So, yeah, it happened.
0:21:00 We see that happening with Neanderthals as well, but also this other population of, they call it archaic hominids, Denisovans.
0:21:07 So these are a population that were found in areas of Asia, and their genes were introgressed, we say.
0:21:10 So essentially, you know, inserted into the human genome.
0:21:16 So individuals from that region tend to have a higher ancestry coming from that hominid group.
0:21:21 So that meant that a Homo sapien mated with this other species of primate.
0:21:21 Yes.
0:21:25 And the offspring had this gene incorporated into it.
0:21:26 Right, exactly.
0:21:32 And then that offspring at some point mated with another Homo sapiens and so on and so forth.
0:21:32 Correct, yes.
0:21:32 Okay.
0:21:37 Yeah, I’m not trying to paint more color on it so that people, I’m not trying to be salacious here.
0:21:48 I think that sometimes we forget that in the primate lineage that there were other primates with whom Homo sapiens were capable of reproducing with.
0:21:49 That’s right, yeah.
0:21:57 And there’s actually some extraordinary work from Svante Pabo, who works a lot with ancient DNA, where they found an individual who was a first-generation mix.
0:22:00 I think it might have been with Neanderthal, I forget now at this point.
0:22:18 But so it was a first-generation, half-human, half-whatever archaic hominid it was, which shows you, I mean, if they found this, the chances that they would find this one, you know, mixed individual are so slim that it suggests that this was something that was actually happening a lot for them to happen to find it.
0:22:32 So in the diagram that everyone has seen of a quadruped animal, like walking on all fours and then gradually evolving into the upright form that we know as Homo sapiens, which is the primate right before it?
0:22:42 Which, by the way, being slightly hunched forward in a slightly C-shaped position looks a lot more like Homo sapiens nowadays who are on their phones all the time.
0:22:42 That’s right, that’s right.
0:22:43 That’s a separate point.
0:22:44 That’s an editorial point.
0:22:54 But was there a kind of final primate step before Homo sapiens, like one, or was it a collection of a bunch of different primate species and then we got Homo sapiens?
0:22:57 Yeah, I mean, it definitely, you know, we have an ancestor.
0:23:06 I don’t remember exactly the name off the top of my head, but I have an issue with this diagram because it’s, you know, it’s the classic depiction of evolution, right?
0:23:12 But it really suggests, kind of like I was saying before, this trajectory and we are the pinnacle of it.
0:23:13 You know, we’ve achieved this thing.
0:23:25 And I think it also fits with this, you know, concept of survival of the fittest, which I think is, you know, also a little bit misleading in that, you know, it’s not about the most fit, it’s about the best fit.
0:23:29 So evolution doesn’t care how fit you are in the way we think of fitness.
0:23:32 It only cares how you fit with your environment.
0:23:41 So, you know, the idea that evolution is driving any species, but especially ours, towards some optimum, I think is inherently flawed.
0:23:56 I had a colleague at Harvard, he’s still there, although I think he closed his lab, who once said, it takes a lot of generations of offspring to evolve a given trait, but it takes very few to devolve a trait.
0:23:57 That’s right.
0:24:09 Like, you can create immense problems in all sorts of things from, you know, pancreas function to mobility to vision with a deleterious mutation.
0:24:18 But it takes a very long time to create an advantage for a given species through the accumulation of new combinations of genes.
0:24:19 Is that true?
0:24:20 Yeah, yeah.
0:24:23 I mean, it’s, most mutations are deleterious.
0:24:24 Most mutations cause problems.
0:24:33 And so we actually don’t even see most mutations because they kill essentially the offspring before, you know, it even becomes a fetus.
0:24:37 So most mutations are happening in a way that we’re not even seeing them.
0:24:45 So to wait for something that comes up that’s actually beneficial can take forever because, you know, you have to have exactly the right thing.
0:24:46 The genome’s huge.
0:24:54 So when those changes are happening, for it to not only happen in the right place but to not cause problems takes a really long time.
0:25:02 So some of the faster examples that we know of evolution, especially in humans, come from when there’s variation that’s just already there.
0:25:12 And, you know, it’s not particularly advantageous, like I mentioned, with Tibetans until you move into a particular environment or until you start practicing a certain activity like breath hold diving.
0:25:16 And so, you know, we have, we call it standing variation.
0:25:19 Just there’s all these differences between all of us humans on Earth.
0:25:27 And so when you have variation that’s beneficial in the right environment, then evolution can happen a lot faster.
0:25:28 Got it.
0:25:29 Okay.
0:25:31 So I’m obsessed with the X-Men.
0:25:32 Yes.
0:25:33 I love that series.
0:25:35 I’ve probably watched it five different times.
0:25:47 I mean, for a biologist who’s interested in all animals but the human animal perhaps most, you know, it’s like the perfect form of entertainment for me, right?
0:25:57 Different individuals who have mutations that afford them specific gifts or abilities but it creates some, let’s just say, some social tension between those that have and those that don’t.
0:26:03 And it’s about learning to use these mutations for good versus evil and it gets into all sorts of interesting human psychology.
0:26:17 You work on the actual real-life version of what I think of X-Men and, as you’ll tell us today, women as well, which is, as you just told us, there’s variation in all of our genomes.
0:26:28 And occasionally, by virtue of the needs of a particular group or individual, those mutations afford them an incredible ability to do incredible things.
0:26:34 So if you would, could you tell us about these underwater free divers that you’ve studied?
0:26:47 This is a collection of studies, I realize, but maybe the first study because I find this to be one of the more incredible examples of behavior shaping what we think of are fixed properties of the human body.
0:26:50 And please just tell us about it.
0:26:51 It’s such a wonderful story.
0:26:52 Yeah, absolutely.
0:26:58 And I also love the X-Men, although if you ever want to ruin a perfectly good sci-fi movie, watch it with an evolutionary biologist.
0:26:59 Noted.
0:27:00 Noted.
0:27:09 Yeah, so there are these incredible people, well, really all around the world, but I started my work in Indonesia called the Bajo.
0:27:12 They are a group of what’s called sea nomads.
0:27:17 So sea nomads are, they’re these people who spend their whole lives essentially at sea, traditionally.
0:27:21 They live on houseboats and everything they need, they get from the sea.
0:27:27 And they do this through fishing, of course, and other things like that, but also through an incredible amount of breath hold diving.
0:27:30 So they’re extremely good at this.
0:27:33 They can hold their breath for many minutes at a time.
0:27:35 They dive to incredible depths.
0:27:40 A lot of them wear these jewelry made of black coral.
0:27:45 Black coral only starts growing at about 100 feet deep, so that tells you how deep they’re diving.
0:27:46 So those are trophies.
0:27:50 They’re actually meant to protect them from evil spirits and things like that.
0:27:54 How long are their breath holds on record?
0:27:55 I’ve heard you talk about this before.
0:28:00 It’s a little debatable, but the number I heard from you in a lecture, I went, whoa.
0:28:01 Yeah.
0:28:06 So I was told, and I always emphasize that, I was told I did not see this, I did not record it.
0:28:07 I was told 13 minutes.
0:28:11 And this was by the father of a diver who I worked with in Indonesia.
0:28:15 That’s got to be in the neighborhood of world record stuff.
0:28:16 It is, yeah.
0:28:18 I’m trying to remember what the current world record is.
0:28:23 But it’s also, I mean, you have to think about if you see them diving, like it’s incredibly active.
0:28:28 So a lot of the breath hold records that we think of are people floating in a pool.
0:28:29 They’re not moving.
0:28:31 They’re not expending any, you know, energy.
0:28:33 They’re not using up that oxygen as quickly.
0:28:39 And these sea nomads are, when they’re underwater, they look like hunters on land.
0:28:41 They go deep enough that they’re not floating anymore.
0:28:47 And so they’re walking on the surface, you know, the bottom of the ocean with their spear
0:28:47 guns.
0:28:49 And they look like hunters.
0:28:50 It’s incredible to see.
0:28:55 So even if it’s not 13 minutes, let’s say it’s half that, it’s still super impressive.
0:28:57 It’s very impressive, yeah.
0:28:58 So do they grow up doing this?
0:28:59 They do, yeah.
0:29:04 And they, in fact, they spend so much time traditionally on these houseboats and so little
0:29:08 time on land that a lot of the children actually learn to swim before they learn how to walk.
0:29:14 So one of the divers, when I was out there, one of my colleagues noticed that one of the
0:29:16 divers’ feet was very soft.
0:29:19 And we realized that it’s because he’s never really walking.
0:29:23 He’s just always in the water, so his feet don’t develop the same kind of calluses that
0:29:25 ours do, because he’s not using them like we do.
0:29:26 Amazing.
0:29:30 So how did you find this population, and what sorts of questions did you start to ask?
0:29:36 Yeah, so I was actually diving as part of a coral genomics project in Thailand, escaping
0:29:39 Danish winter, because that’s where I was doing my PhD.
0:29:42 And I heard about a population called the Mokin.
0:29:44 So that’s another group of these sea nomads.
0:29:47 And heard about, you know, their incredible underwater diving.
0:29:53 Started looking into it and saw a study that I think you’ve seen that showed that children,
0:29:58 Mokin children, could actually see underwater better than European children.
0:30:02 And started thinking about, you know, I mean, free diving is really dangerous.
0:30:07 And so I was thinking that this could actually be something that’s driving selection in this
0:30:09 population, that’s causing this population to evolve.
0:30:14 In other words, just to put this in everyday terms for people, if you don’t get good at this,
0:30:15 you die.
0:30:16 Yeah, exactly.
0:30:18 If you die young enough, you don’t reproduce.
0:30:19 Exactly.
0:30:23 If you get good enough at this, you can live long enough to reproduce.
0:30:31 And your children will presumably inherit whatever mutation or genetic variants afford this ability.
0:30:32 Exactly.
0:30:32 Yeah.
0:30:33 Yeah.
0:30:38 And, you know, I mean, we see with competitive breath hold divers, you know, I’ve never actually
0:30:40 been to one of these competitions, but I’ve read about them.
0:30:42 People pass out underwater all the time.
0:30:45 And they’re, you know, pulled to the surface and revived.
0:30:50 But if you’re a sea nomad diving in the middle of the ocean with no one nearby, nobody’s going
0:30:51 to pull you out of that water.
0:30:54 And so you’ve just removed yourself from the gene pool completely.
0:31:00 Whereas someone who maybe has a variation or has genetic variation that’s making them safer
0:31:02 at diving might survive that.
0:31:05 And in this case, the safety at diving comes from being able to stay under longer.
0:31:07 We can talk about that.
0:31:12 But as long as we’re on this point, and because some people will be tempted to go test their
0:31:15 breath holding time, which please don’t do it.
0:31:18 I’m just going to do it across the board.
0:31:18 Just don’t do it.
0:31:20 Learn from an expert.
0:31:23 If you’re going to learn to free dive, learn from somebody who’s truly expert under the right
0:31:23 conditions.
0:31:28 I’ll put a link to a couple of folks I know that I have no business relation to, Mark
0:31:30 Healy and some other people that teach this on land first.
0:31:31 Actually, you know what?
0:31:32 I’ll just tell you.
0:31:36 You know what they told me was the first step in one of these free diving classes?
0:31:39 I chose not to do it, is to do not do this.
0:31:41 But I was told, here’s the first step.
0:31:46 You’re going to hold your breath on land and force yourself to not breathe when the gas
0:31:47 reflex hits until you pass out.
0:31:48 Yes.
0:31:49 And I was like, you know what?
0:31:50 I’m not going to take this course.
0:31:50 Yeah.
0:31:54 So this is exactly what gets people in trouble because, yeah, like, you know, we don’t have
0:31:57 a reliable sensor for when our oxygen is low.
0:32:02 And so that happens to people underwater because that feeling that wanting to breathe is a buildup
0:32:03 of carbon dioxide.
0:32:08 And so, yeah, people teach themselves to overcome it like they’re suggesting you do
0:32:08 there.
0:32:11 And then, you know, you’re underwater and you pass out and that’s it.
0:32:15 I’ve been told that you go from feeling that gasp reflex.
0:32:21 You learn to ride that like a bump the same way you might stay in a cold plunge or something
0:32:23 a little bit longer than your impulse would have you stay in.
0:32:28 But in this case, you’re underwater and then it passes and then you’re swimming freely
0:32:30 about and you feel good.
0:32:31 You’re relaxed.
0:32:36 You’re doing slow exhales to let off that carbon dioxide, whatever carbon dioxide is left.
0:32:37 And then it just lights out.
0:32:38 Yeah.
0:32:40 That there’s no flickering.
0:32:42 It just goes to complete blackout.
0:32:43 Right.
0:32:44 Like curtains, as they call it.
0:32:44 Yeah.
0:32:45 And then you’re dead.
0:32:45 Yeah.
0:32:47 Unless somebody pulls you up to the surface.
0:32:47 Exactly.
0:32:48 Yeah.
0:32:48 Yeah.
0:32:51 So hopefully we sufficiently scared people into doing this.
0:32:52 Okay.
0:32:56 So this population presumably is not thinking about carbon dioxide thresholds for the gas
0:33:00 reflex areas of the brainstem that are measuring carbon dioxide.
0:33:04 They presumably learn through experience that if you do the right things, you live and reproduce.
0:33:05 Your family eats.
0:33:06 You do the wrong things.
0:33:07 You die.
0:33:08 Right.
0:33:08 Yeah.
0:33:13 There’s so much cultural knowledge that’s integrated into the practice and that’s passed
0:33:17 on from generation to generation because a lot of times they’re doing this in family units.
0:33:22 One of the divers that I worked with, his dad used to be the most famous diver in the village.
0:33:24 Now he’s the most famous diver in the village.
0:33:29 And so there’s a lot of that tradition and that traditional knowledge that’s passed on despite
0:33:31 it maybe not looking like what we would read in a textbook.
0:33:39 When you say one of the most revered or expert divers, I’m very curious as to how this weaves
0:33:41 back to an earlier part of our conversation.
0:33:45 Is prowess at diving based on how long someone can stay under?
0:33:50 And is prowess at diving because it correlates with the ability to secure resources?
0:33:55 Is that somehow correlated with desirable mate?
0:33:59 Do these people tend to have more offspring than people that are not as good at diving?
0:34:03 And of course, there are confounds here, like you can imagine differences in hormone levels
0:34:09 to begin with, eating more during puberty and growing, you know, stronger or whatever
0:34:12 it is, or smarter and not just smarter.
0:34:14 But do you see this?
0:34:19 Like are the people who are great divers in the village, do they tend to be the ones with
0:34:22 more children to be direct?
0:34:24 You know, it would be interesting to count that.
0:34:29 I think now, you know, things are changing for the Bajo, at least the community that I
0:34:33 worked with, where a lot of people are moving away from traditional diving and into other
0:34:34 kinds of fishing practices.
0:34:40 And so I think at this point, you know, this prowess, this respect for these, you know, these
0:34:45 divers is more respect for the fact that they’re keeping the tradition alive and they’re continuing
0:34:47 this tradition, even though it’s a very hard thing to do.
0:34:49 But yeah, it would be really interesting.
0:34:53 I know actually the one, the one diver came from a very big family.
0:34:58 And that was something that the Bajo actually asked me about was, why, why do the Bajo have
0:34:58 so many children?
0:35:02 And so it would be interesting to see if, yeah, diving success correlates with reproductive
0:35:03 success.
0:35:05 Because you can imagine that it would.
0:35:07 I mean, they’re diving for things that they’re eating.
0:35:10 So why wouldn’t that increase your success on that?
0:35:16 Just out of curiosity, and because I like seafood, what are they fishing for?
0:35:20 They dive for, it depends on where they are.
0:35:21 They’re spearing a lot of fish.
0:35:22 Everything is delicious.
0:35:24 They dive for shellfish.
0:35:27 They also harvest seaweed sometimes.
0:35:32 And they actually collect a lot of sea cucumbers, which they dry out in the sun and then eat
0:35:32 later.
0:35:34 It’s like pure protein.
0:35:34 Yeah.
0:35:34 Yeah.
0:35:35 Very interesting.
0:35:39 So what did you study in this group?
0:35:39 Yeah.
0:35:44 So we started thinking about, OK, for natural selection to act in this population, it needs
0:35:51 some kind of physical trait to act on, which got us looking at the dive reflex or the mammalian
0:35:51 dive reflex.
0:35:58 So this is, if anyone, and again, I hesitate to tell people to do this, but if you hold your
0:36:01 breath and put your face in a bowl full of cold water, your body responds as if you’re
0:36:02 diving.
0:36:09 And what that means is that your heart rate slows down, your blood vessels in your extremities
0:36:13 constrict because, you know, your fingers will be OK with a little bit less oxygen, but your
0:36:14 brain really needs that oxygen.
0:36:18 So it’s keeping the blood central where you need it the most.
0:36:20 And then your spleen contracts.
0:36:25 And so the spleen certainly wasn’t the first organ that I thought about when thinking about
0:36:25 diving.
0:36:27 But the spleen is a reservoir.
0:36:29 I mean, the spleen does many things.
0:36:33 But one of the things that it does is it’s a reservoir for red blood cells that are carrying
0:36:33 oxygen.
0:36:38 And so through that contraction, those oxygen-rich red blood cells are now pushed into circulation
0:36:40 and you get an oxygen boost.
0:36:43 How significant is that oxygen boost?
0:36:46 It’s about 10% in most of us.
0:36:47 That’s pretty impressive.
0:36:47 Exactly.
0:36:48 Yeah.
0:36:48 Yeah.
0:36:50 I mean, it’s enough to make a difference.
0:36:51 Yeah.
0:36:57 By comparison, you know, there are a lot of discussions online about, you know, if you
0:37:02 finish your exercise, resistance training or cardiovascular exercise with a brief sauna
0:37:07 session, so going slightly hyperthermic, right, you have to hydrate, et cetera.
0:37:11 But it actually works even better as long as we’re talking about dangerous practices.
0:37:13 It works even better if you’re slightly dehydrated.
0:37:16 You get an overproduction of red blood cells in the subsequent days.
0:37:20 And this is used for a performance-enhancing effect in elite athletes mainly.
0:37:23 You have to, again, avoid dehydration, death, et cetera.
0:37:30 But this is done – and there are – someone will correct me, but the shift in available
0:37:33 oxygen is in the low percentages, like 1% or 2%.
0:37:34 Okay.
0:37:37 So this is what people are fighting for using these kind of Baroque protocols.
0:37:42 You’re talking about a 10% increase in available oxygen through a contraction of the spleen.
0:37:44 I didn’t even know the spleen could contract.
0:37:45 Yeah, that’s right.
0:37:50 Just when you put your face into colder-than-ambient-temperature water?
0:37:56 Yeah, usually in, like, lab protocols, we do it at about 10 degrees Celsius or 50 degrees
0:37:58 Fahrenheit, so quite a bit colder.
0:37:58 For how long?
0:38:01 Well, it depends on how long you can hold your breath.
0:38:02 Oh, right.
0:38:08 Yeah, so, you know, the extent to which – like, how long the contraction actually takes,
0:38:10 I think we have room to learn more about that.
0:38:15 But one thing that’s slightly different from what you’re talking about is that after you
0:38:20 stop holding your breath, your spleen takes that oxygen back, essentially.
0:38:26 So it refills with red blood cells, and that oxygen is no – that extra boost is no longer
0:38:26 in circulation.
0:38:28 Ah, so it’s only during the breath hold.
0:38:29 That’s right.
0:38:31 Only when you need it the most.
0:38:31 Interesting.
0:38:34 What an incredible adaptation of the human body.
0:38:34 Yeah.
0:38:39 What are some other functions of the spleen just for – this is the first time the spleen
0:38:41 has ever been discussed on this podcast, I think.
0:38:41 Yeah.
0:38:44 We don’t think about spleens too often.
0:38:48 Well, you can live without one, so it seems like how important could it be?
0:38:48 Right.
0:38:52 Well, for this population, it sounds like it might be critical.
0:38:53 You’ll tell us.
0:38:54 Exactly.
0:38:54 Yeah.
0:38:55 What are some other things that it does?
0:38:58 It’s involved in the immune response to certain bacteria.
0:39:03 And actually, I’m trying to think of what else it does.
0:39:05 But that’s – the main role is immunological.
0:39:10 One thing I – in anticipation of this episode, I did a little reading about it, and it gets
0:39:13 very heavy neural innervation, which is interesting.
0:39:17 We don’t normally think about our peripheral organs besides our heart as getting a lot of
0:39:17 neural innervation.
0:39:20 Of course, the gut has neural innervation, et cetera.
0:39:25 But the spleen gets very heavy neural innervation, which makes me think that maybe there’s the
0:39:28 opportunity for more perhaps even conscious control of the spleen.
0:39:34 Does this population communicate about any sense that they can like switch this thing on?
0:39:39 Or is this just all kind of unconscious genius related to their behavior?
0:39:40 Yeah.
0:39:42 As far as I know, it’s all unconscious.
0:39:43 It’s not something that they talk about.
0:39:48 And most of them – when I was explaining what the spleen was, it wasn’t something that
0:39:52 they had ever thought about or experienced any kind of sensation in the area where the spleen
0:39:53 is found.
0:39:54 Yeah.
0:39:55 But who knows?
0:39:59 I mean, it’s encapsulated in smooth muscle, I think, the spleen.
0:40:00 And that’s what controls that contraction.
0:40:06 So yeah, maybe there could be some way to consciously contract your spleen.
0:40:10 We also – our spleens contract when we exercise to a lesser extent.
0:40:15 And this is why like horses and apparently greyhounds, someone wrote to me after the study
0:40:17 came out, have massive spleens.
0:40:21 As do seals who do a lot of deep diving, but that makes a little more sense.
0:40:21 Interesting.
0:40:25 Horses – I don’t think about horses being underwater very often.
0:40:25 Right, right.
0:40:26 Or greyhounds for that matter.
0:40:27 Yeah.
0:40:33 I wonder if they incorporate breath holds as a way to deploy red blood cells.
0:40:35 Yeah, it could be that.
0:40:41 Yeah, it’s something in the kind of breath holding aspect of extreme bouts of exercise
0:40:44 is also contributing to that contraction.
0:40:51 Like when one becomes a bit hypoxic because you just can’t keep up with whatever exertion,
0:40:55 like you just can’t breathe in enough oxygen, dump enough carbon dioxide to keep up with your
0:40:56 physical activity.
0:41:01 Is there any – is that one of the conditions under which it sort of mimics a breath hold?
0:41:06 Or do you need this cold – there seems to be something about the face being cold.
0:41:11 Yeah, there’s – it’s stimulation of the vagal nerve that is in part triggering this response,
0:41:15 which, you know, runs through your face since that’s why the, you know, the facial immersion
0:41:18 is crucial to triggering the response.
0:41:22 But there is, I think, a component of if you’re just holding your breath where that also kind
0:41:23 of triggers it.
0:41:27 So – but yeah, it’s really amazing to think that as mammals.
0:41:32 This evolved sometime so long ago that it’s in – it’s even in mice.
0:41:36 They’ve done a study where they actually trained mice to dive and they could measure the mammalian
0:41:37 dive reflex in mice.
0:41:38 Wild.
0:41:43 Yeah, so you sort of answered my next question, which was why do we have a dive reflex?
0:41:45 I mean, we’re not a harp seal.
0:41:46 Right.
0:41:47 And we’re not a diving bird.
0:41:50 Why do we – why do we have this?
0:41:52 Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question.
0:41:53 I don’t think we really know.
0:41:58 There’s a – some people talk about something called the aquatic ape hypothesis that says
0:41:59 that one of our ancestors –
0:42:01 Sorry, I’m trying not to interrupt.
0:42:04 I just – someone – I’ve heard of the stoned ape hypothesis.
0:42:05 Okay.
0:42:10 All the psychonauts love the stoned ape hypothesis, which is that psychedelics are what led to new
0:42:12 ideas and daytime dreams that led to our evolution.
0:42:14 And anyway –
0:42:14 That’s a new one for me.
0:42:15 Don’t forgive me for interrupting.
0:42:18 It was an interruption of the stoned ape.
0:42:18 Yes.
0:42:20 So –
0:42:23 Well, maybe the aquatic ape was right there alongside the stoned ape.
0:42:28 But I think that, you know, given the fact that it’s present throughout all mammals, I think
0:42:34 it’s much more likely that it was some very long ago ancestral, you know, proto-mammal that
0:42:36 was doing some kind of diving.
0:42:41 And because of that, this response is present to varying degrees in all modern mammals.
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0:46:04 I’m jumping around here, but I feel like these are the questions that are hopefully springing
0:46:05 to people’s minds here and there.
0:46:11 I’ve seen these videos of babies being born into a swimming pool and they can – and that
0:46:15 you get – on their belly, it looks like the Nirvana cover and, you know, they’re – they
0:46:19 seem perfectly happy to be underwater shortly after birth, which makes intuitive sense.
0:46:20 They were in the womb.
0:46:24 They were floating in the amniotic sac and they’re underwater, so to speak.
0:46:30 Do we come into this world knowing how to dive and be underwater because of our experience
0:46:31 during pregnancy?
0:46:33 I mean, it seems like it.
0:46:37 I mean, I’ve seen, you know, if you take babies and – I’m not recommending anyone
0:46:41 to do this, but like blow in their face, you know, they instinctively hold their breath
0:46:42 and can be put underwater.
0:46:46 And actually, Bajo, people told me, and I don’t know if this is something they actually
0:46:51 do, but that the test of a Bajo is as a baby, they pass the baby under the canoe.
0:46:55 And if the baby comes out the other side, then it’s a Bajo because it has held its breath
0:46:57 like it will for the rest of its life.
0:46:58 What’s the alternative?
0:46:58 Yeah.
0:47:02 That’s why I said I don’t know if they actually do this, but it was just something that they
0:47:03 told me.
0:47:10 But yeah, I think there is some innate response where we know, even as babies, to hold our breath.
0:47:11 That’s fascinating.
0:47:16 So what did you discover in this group of incredible divers?
0:47:18 So we discovered that they have larger spleens.
0:47:21 So, you know, I mentioned the spleen’s role in diving.
0:47:26 It’s increasing your – sometimes people call it a biological scuba tank.
0:47:28 You know, it’s increasing the amount of oxygen available to you.
0:47:33 So, you know, our hypothesis was that they would have larger spleens because a larger spleen
0:47:36 presumably means longer diving, safer diving.
0:47:41 And so we compared them to a nearby population living in a very similar environment but with
0:47:42 a history of farming.
0:47:46 So these are people who live right next to the ocean but aren’t really interacting with
0:47:46 it.
0:47:50 So, you know, Bajo children are in the water from the moment they’re born almost.
0:47:53 And then children in this other village didn’t know how to swim.
0:47:59 And so we found that compared to that village, the Bajo had significantly larger spleens.
0:48:02 So their spleens were about 50% larger on average.
0:48:05 And this was true for divers and non-divers.
0:48:10 So that showed us that it was very likely to be something genetic rather than, you know,
0:48:13 the fact that you’re diving increases the size of your spleen.
0:48:16 But does diving increase the size of the spleen?
0:48:21 This is a question that I think is still open because in both of the populations where I’ve
0:48:25 measured this, divers and non-divers have the same size spleen.
0:48:30 However, other people have shown that, you know, when you train, if you train people, if
0:48:34 you recruit people to a study and train them in breath hold diving, their spleens increase
0:48:35 in size.
0:48:39 So I don’t know if it’s just that the populations that I’ve worked with have some kind of genetic
0:48:42 factors that override that change.
0:48:44 But yeah, open question, I would say.
0:48:50 I know you’ve done some work parsing which genes are different in this population and developing
0:48:55 some animal models for that and that some of this converges on thyroid hormone.
0:49:00 Could you tell us the relationship between thyroid hormone levels that people are fascinated
0:49:01 by thyroid hormone, it seems?
0:49:05 Everyone either thinks they have a thyroid deficiency or an overproduction of thyroid.
0:49:07 or they want to increase their thyroid.
0:49:13 What is the relationship between thyroid hormone and spleen function as it relates to the production
0:49:15 of these additional red blood cells?
0:49:20 The gene that we found that was evolving in the population correlates with higher than average
0:49:22 thyroid hormone levels.
0:49:25 So not, you know, like clinically hyperthyroid, but higher than average.
0:49:30 And this is actually also true for Europeans who are carrying the same genetic variant.
0:49:35 You know, we showed in another group of individuals that if you have this gene variant, you have
0:49:37 higher thyroid hormone levels and you have a larger spleen.
0:49:41 So it’s not just something that’s true in the C-nomads.
0:49:46 And so what we think is going on potentially, and this relates to the work that we did with mice as
0:49:51 well, is that because of these higher, I hesitate to say elevated because that’s a clinical term,
0:49:57 higher than average thyroid hormone levels, people are, you know, the mice, the humans,
0:49:59 whoever it is, are producing more red blood cells.
0:50:04 And so now whether that’s kind of stretching the spleen, you know, because the spleens that
0:50:09 we saw on the mice were larger but less dense, or, you know, if there’s some other mechanism,
0:50:11 we’re not completely sure yet.
0:50:16 But yeah, it seems like these higher than average thyroid hormone levels, at least when the genetic
0:50:22 cause was what we saw in the C-nomads, increased the size of the spleen, increased hemoglobin,
0:50:25 increased hematocrit, increased red blood cell count.
0:50:33 I can think of two general scenarios where having a nice big spleen would be advantageous.
0:50:35 One is in the performance enhancement context.
0:50:36 You’re a runner.
0:50:41 Maybe there’s a way, I’m not suggesting this as a protocol that, you know, like getting your
0:50:45 face into some cold water, holding your breath could afford you a kind of a boost.
0:50:49 So instead of the scuba tank boost underwater, you’re getting the above ground boost in endurance
0:50:51 or in strength output.
0:50:57 But you said you have to be holding your breath at the same time in order to take advantage
0:51:01 of that deployment of red blood cells, which is a little confusing to me because I imagine
0:51:05 if the spleen contracts and the red blood cells are deployed into the body, that those are available
0:51:07 whether or not your mouth is open or not.
0:51:07 Yeah.
0:51:08 Yeah.
0:51:12 And we don’t, I don’t think know how quickly the spleen reuptakes those red blood cells,
0:51:13 but it does do that eventually.
0:51:17 So maybe this is something that would be advantageous for short bursts or something like that.
0:51:21 I mean, I think there’s a lot that we don’t know about the performance enhancing aspect
0:51:26 of this, but that’s really interesting because the work that we did in the mice where we replicated
0:51:31 what we saw in these divers, they had larger spleens, they had higher red blood cell count,
0:51:37 but they did not have any change in erythropoietin, which is how we normally think about changes
0:51:38 in red blood cell count.
0:51:41 This is a drug that was really popular with cyclists for a while.
0:51:45 And people would self-dose with erythropoietin and it would increase their red blood cell
0:51:48 count dramatically to improve their performance.
0:51:55 So this is like an erythropoietin independent mechanism of increasing your red blood cell count
0:51:58 that could have an advantage in performance, I think.
0:51:59 Fascinating.
0:52:04 And then the other scenario is for robustness of one’s immune system.
0:52:07 I, for one, don’t like being sick.
0:52:13 And if there’s anything I can do to increase the function of my immune system, including
0:52:18 sleep, exercise, sunlight, all those things, but in particular, if I feel like I’m traveling
0:52:23 an additional amount or not sleeping as well, I’d be willing to do pretty much anything within
0:52:27 the realm of reason to improve my immune system vigor.
0:52:35 And if sticking my face in a bowl of cold water, 50 degrees for, I guess, as long as I can hold
0:52:40 my breath in the morning is going to potentially afford that advantage, I’m willing to be the
0:52:45 idiot that is doing this thing without any specific clinical trial yet.
0:52:47 But I’d love to see a clinical trial on this.
0:52:48 Oh, absolutely.
0:52:54 Has anything been done to explore how that particular behavior or that is generating the
0:52:58 dive reflex can afford any enhancement in immune system function?
0:53:03 I haven’t seen any studies that look at that, but it would be really interesting because,
0:53:06 yeah, I mean, like you, I also would do anything to not get sick.
0:53:12 And we do see in these populations a lot of older people who are continuing to dive.
0:53:19 And there is a seeming health and robustness that I wonder if it’s related to the activity
0:53:20 of diving itself.
0:53:25 We have a family friend who’s 94, my mom just told me, 94.
0:53:29 And my mom said over the phone, she swims four miles a day.
0:53:30 And I’m like, there’s no way.
0:53:35 She goes, no, wait, she swims a mile a day four days a week, which is still pretty impressive.
0:53:37 Yeah, swimming a mile is, yeah, that’s quite impressive.
0:53:39 Four days a week at 94?
0:53:39 Mm-hmm.
0:53:41 Presumably that’s not backstroke.
0:53:48 Some of it’s, yeah, I think that, like, is there something to being in water that just
0:53:49 generally is good for us?
0:53:51 I would imagine.
0:53:54 I shower, I bathe, but, you know, is there something good about swimming or floating or
0:53:58 diving just for our general human physiology that we’re aware of?
0:54:05 Yeah, I mean, it’s so low impact and such a natural way to, you know, to move, to exercise
0:54:11 that, yeah, I think especially as we age, it would be a really wonderful way to stay fit
0:54:12 and healthy.
0:54:19 Has the size of spleens or rather the genes related to what you’re talking about, has that
0:54:25 been correlated with whether or not people evolved from coastal versus more central regions of
0:54:25 continents?
0:54:27 That’s a really good question.
0:54:31 We haven’t looked at that, but it would be really interesting to see because, I mean, you
0:54:35 know, the oceans are an incredible resource in terms of food availability, especially to
0:54:36 early humans.
0:54:41 So you would imagine that anyone living near a coast anywhere would take advantage of this
0:54:42 resource.
0:54:46 So it would be interesting to see if maybe coastal populations are more likely to carry the genetic
0:54:49 variation that enables this behavior.
0:54:53 Although there are actually skeletons that have been found in various parts of the world near
0:54:56 river systems that also suggest that those people have been diving.
0:54:59 So maybe it’s just being near water anywhere in the world.
0:55:03 I don’t think of humans as an underwater species, but you’re changing my view of this.
0:55:09 I feel like we need to think about humans as some humans in the past and now spend a lot
0:55:12 of time underwater without a scuba tank.
0:55:14 It seems to be that way, yeah, all over the world.
0:55:16 That’s super interesting.
0:55:21 So this isn’t the only population you’ve studied.
0:55:28 If you would, could you tell us about the recent work, the study on women in particular?
0:55:33 And I’m very interested in how this relates to cardiovascular health.
0:55:34 Yeah.
0:55:40 So, you know, speaking of older divers, there’s a group in Korea on an island called Jeju.
0:55:42 These are all female divers.
0:55:45 They’re called the henyo, which just means sea women.
0:55:50 And the average age of the henyo currently is around 70 years old.
0:55:54 So that’s when I think of robustness with age, I think of the henyo.
0:56:00 But this all-female diving population has likely been diving in that region for thousands of
0:56:01 years.
0:56:04 And what’s really extraordinary about the henyo, there’s a few things.
0:56:08 First of all, they’re diving in extremely cold water, especially compared to the Bajo in
0:56:09 Indonesia.
0:56:10 No wetsuits.
0:56:10 No wetsuits.
0:56:12 Well, now they wear wetsuits.
0:56:17 Up until the 80s, they were diving in these cotton bodysuits that you can see provide zero
0:56:18 thermal protection.
0:56:21 I mean, it’s just cotton, a cotton swimsuit, essentially.
0:56:26 So, you know, diving with no protection in extremely cold water.
0:56:30 And as women, they’re diving throughout pregnancy.
0:56:33 So they’re diving up until the day they give birth sometimes.
0:56:36 And then they’re back in the water a few days later.
0:56:40 So this has really shaped this population in really interesting ways.
0:56:41 I was wondering, how deep do they dive?
0:56:43 This is a really good question I get asked a lot.
0:56:46 How deep do any of these populations dive?
0:56:47 And there’s just, like, not really data.
0:56:49 So we don’t really know.
0:56:53 You know, now we’re starting to see, you know, we’re looking at the henyo.
0:56:54 We actually tracked some of their diving.
0:56:59 And their dives tended to be much shallower, you know, not really going any deeper than
0:57:00 10 meters, 30 feet.
0:57:04 But they’re also in their 70s, 80s even.
0:57:06 You know, we had an 81-year-old diver in our study.
0:57:08 And 30 feet’s not nothing.
0:57:14 We had a 20-foot deep end in the pool, you know, recreational pool near my home growing
0:57:14 up.
0:57:16 And when you’re down at the bottom, you feel significant pressure.
0:57:19 You can let some air out to relieve some of that pressure.
0:57:21 But you’re, I mean, 20 feet is 20 feet.
0:57:22 Right.
0:57:22 30 feet.
0:57:25 And it’s not a linear experience.
0:57:26 Yeah, exactly.
0:57:29 With every additional foot, like, you’re really experiencing more and more pressure.
0:57:30 So…
0:57:30 Yeah.
0:57:31 Yeah.
0:57:32 And I shouldn’t say it like that.
0:57:35 It’s just that compared to, you know, the Bajo have been documented to dive deeper than
0:57:36 200 feet deep.
0:57:37 Oh, I’m not countering.
0:57:42 I was just, I just forsake of people out there who perhaps haven’t spent time at the bottom
0:57:44 of a pool, a 20-foot pool.
0:57:46 Like, 30 feet is still really impressive.
0:57:47 Yeah, it’s very impressive.
0:57:48 Yeah.
0:57:50 And they’re bringing a fetus down that low.
0:57:51 Right.
0:57:55 When they’re, I mean, you know, again, there’s no documentation of how these women have been
0:57:59 diving throughout their pregnancy other than, you know, we know that they were diving throughout
0:57:59 their pregnancy.
0:58:05 But yeah, presumably in their youth, they were diving to these depths with their unborn child
0:58:06 inside them.
0:58:11 So it’s a really, I mean, when we think about natural selection and evolution, something that’s
0:58:17 able to act on a pregnant woman has the opportunity to take out two generations if there’s not genetic
0:58:19 variation there that’s protective.
0:58:24 So it’s like, if we want to talk about really fast examples of evolution, it’s anything that’s
0:58:26 acting on pregnancy.
0:58:28 And that’s what we think has been happening in this population.
0:58:33 I have so many questions, some of which are cultural, some of which are biological.
0:58:35 I’ll start with the cultural questions.
0:58:40 Why in this culture is it the women specifically that dive?
0:58:41 Are they revered?
0:58:48 And are they diving for a particular resource that is, well, because it’s underwater, presumably
0:58:50 is not available elsewhere.
0:58:51 But what are they diving for?
0:58:53 We don’t totally know.
0:58:58 I have my own personal theory, which actually relates to the fact that in a lot of places with
0:59:05 cold water, so in Korea, in Patagonia, in Aboriginal Tasmania, it’s all women diving.
0:59:11 So I suspect that there’s something unique about the physiology of women that makes us better
0:59:12 at diving in cold temperatures.
0:59:13 Where the men are afraid of the cold.
0:59:14 It could be that too.
0:59:19 I hear about a lot of guys that will spend dozens of hours picking apart deliberate cold
0:59:23 exposure when it would take them a fraction of the amount of the time to get into the water.
0:59:32 In my experience, this is not a controlled studies, women are more tolerant of the cold, at least
0:59:35 in terms of being willing to embrace it the first time around.
0:59:36 Interesting.
0:59:43 I have stories of, I won’t say which countries, elite special forces, it wasn’t the US, guys,
0:59:47 in that case it was guys, being terrified of getting into cold water, but otherwise being
0:59:50 willing to do very, very challenging and indeed very dangerous things.
0:59:56 I know a woman who first cold plunged 10 minutes, she was just in there.
1:00:00 In my experience, women are more willing to get into the cold the first time.
1:00:05 And then now there’s a lot of debate online about cold tolerance in the two sexes, but
1:00:09 I don’t, the data aren’t really solid there.
1:00:09 Right, right.
1:00:12 So maybe the men are just afraid of going underwater.
1:00:13 It could be.
1:00:18 These are some tough ladies, I will tell you that, even into old age.
1:00:23 My colleague, Ju Young Lee at Seoul National University, she’s been working with them for
1:00:24 a very long time.
1:00:27 And she did a study where she was trying to find retired henyo.
1:00:31 And the only ones she could find were over 100 years old, because they basically don’t
1:00:31 retire.
1:00:34 They just dive until they can’t, until they die, essentially.
1:00:41 So she had, you know, these two women who were about three feet tall, who were retired henyo,
1:00:42 because those are the only ones she could find.
1:00:43 You know, 100 years old?
1:00:43 Mm-hmm.
1:00:47 As we have this conversation, I think it’s very important to remind people that correlation
1:00:51 is a causation with all the obsession with longevity and living longer.
1:00:55 I’m not going to rule out the possibility that getting into cold water, in particular
1:01:00 diving or generating the dive reflex with cold water, doesn’t have a longevity effect.
1:01:02 But I don’t think there’s any direct evidence that it does.
1:01:03 No, no.
1:01:07 And yeah, I mean, it would certainly be interesting to explore, but I don’t think there’s any evidence
1:01:09 so far other than anecdotal.
1:01:10 I would love to do that study.
1:01:10 Yeah.
1:01:12 The problem is that you need to do a very long study.
1:01:13 Right.
1:01:17 And the other problem with longevity studies is you don’t really have a good control group,
1:01:20 at least within subject, because you don’t know when you would have died.
1:01:20 Right.
1:01:21 Exactly.
1:01:21 Yeah.
1:01:22 Okay.
1:01:27 So these incredible women are diving up until their 70s, 80s?
1:01:30 70s, 80s, beyond, I guess.
1:01:32 The oldest diver that I’ve personally worked with was over 80.
1:01:38 But yeah, they, and they, you know, I mean, they’re so athletic as they do it.
1:01:41 But yeah, in terms of are they revered?
1:01:43 I think now, yes.
1:01:44 I think that wasn’t always true.
1:01:48 One henyo told me that in her youth, she was kind of embarrassed to be a henyo.
1:01:52 And a lot of it’s because, you know, they’re exposed to the suns.
1:01:54 They have darker skin than a lot of other women.
1:01:59 They tend to be very loud because a lot of times they rupture their eardrums from diving.
1:02:04 You know, if they don’t pressurize correctly, you know, they can have hearing damage.
1:02:06 So they’re known for being very loud.
1:02:11 And so, you know, I think there was kind of a marginalization early on.
1:02:18 But now they’re recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage, like intangible site, essentially.
1:02:21 And there’s just, I think, tremendous respect for the population now.
1:02:22 Very cool.
1:02:25 What are they gathering down there?
1:02:27 They are diving for all kinds of things.
1:02:30 They’re diving for a sea urchin, abalone.
1:02:32 They also harvest seaweed.
1:02:35 I’ve seen them pull up octopus.
1:02:36 They’ll spear an octopus.
1:02:41 And they do it in a very interesting kind of controlled way.
1:02:45 Like they’re really guardians of their marine environment where they don’t, they make sure
1:02:47 that they don’t overfish things.
1:02:51 So the sea urchin season is very short because, you know, if they overharvest the sea urchin,
1:02:53 that population won’t replenish.
1:02:57 So they have this, you know, system where they really take care of the marine environment.
1:02:59 So it’s all the proteins again.
1:03:01 It’s the expensive sushi.
1:03:01 Yeah.
1:03:02 Oh, yeah.
1:03:04 I’m still developing a taste for uni.
1:03:05 I’m trying.
1:03:08 When it’s fresh out of the shell, there’s nothing better.
1:03:09 I’m willing to try.
1:03:14 Octopus, I have too much an affinity for cephalopods to eat octopus.
1:03:16 But I have in the past and it can be delicious.
1:03:26 And so it’s amazing to me if I step back from these two populations, and I think more broadly
1:03:29 as well, about what people are willing to work for.
1:03:33 Humans will work very hard to get protein.
1:03:39 It’s just kind of incredible how hard they’ll work for proteins and lipids combined in delicious
1:03:40 form.
1:03:40 Yeah.
1:03:42 I mean, we’re not aquatic animals.
1:03:43 Right, right.
1:03:48 And they’re willing to risk their lives and the lives of their fetuses to the next
1:03:49 generation, right?
1:03:54 There’s nothing, I think, that a species tries to protect more than the next generation, one
1:03:59 would hope, that they’re willing to risk their lives on a daily basis multiple times per day
1:04:01 to go collect protein, basically.
1:04:02 Yeah, yeah.
1:04:05 And in these cold temperatures as well.
1:04:09 So do you think between on-land hunting and what you’re describing, that if we think about
1:04:15 homo sapien evolution generally, that a big part of homo sapien evolution, as it relates
1:04:20 to selection of particular genes to drive particular traits and abilities, relates to this thing of
1:04:22 just trying to get more protein and fat?
1:04:23 I mean, it certainly could.
1:04:26 Diet is an incredible driver of selection.
1:04:31 So, you know, a very common example of natural selection is lactase persistence.
1:04:35 So our ability to continue to consume milk past infancy.
1:04:40 And that happened very quickly in multiple different human populations.
1:04:42 So it happened in Africa and it happened in Europe.
1:04:46 And another example is the Greenlandic Inuit.
1:04:51 A huge part of their diet was marine mammals that have really high lipid content.
1:04:55 And so they actually evolved to be able to better metabolize those lipids so that it wouldn’t,
1:04:57 you know, kill them from heart disease or something like that.
1:05:02 So, yeah, diet as a driver of selection is extremely strong.
1:05:06 So it may be that this has been shaping our species in ways that we don’t even know.
1:05:07 Super interesting.
1:05:16 So in this group of Korean women divers, what’s going on with their cardiovascular system?
1:05:22 You know, earlier we were talking about how this might have implications for oxygen utilization
1:05:26 in the brain and body and potential disease treatment ramifications.
1:05:27 Yeah.
1:05:29 So we found two different adaptations.
1:05:34 And I say adaptation, but there’s kind of adaptation in a physiological sense,
1:05:38 this thing that you can do by training, or adaptation in a genetic sense.
1:05:39 And we have found one of each.
1:05:45 So the training adaptation that we found was that I mentioned before that when you dive,
1:05:47 your heart rate slows down to try to conserve oxygen.
1:05:51 So their heart rate through a lifetime of training slows down even more.
1:05:56 So we could actually, you could visually see this when they were doing these dives.
1:05:59 Watching their heart rate, you could just see it plummeting.
1:06:04 We had one individual whose heart rate dropped more than 40 beats per minute in less than 15 seconds.
1:06:04 Yikes.
1:06:05 So really dramatic.
1:06:10 And the reason that we think that that’s a training adaptation rather than a genetic adaptation
1:06:12 was that it was only true in the divers.
1:06:17 So non-divers with the same genetics didn’t have this phenomenon.
1:06:22 So that was, I mean, that has, you know, it’s interesting to think about how,
1:06:25 what the potential health benefits of that could be.
1:06:27 I mean, it’s clearly something that you can train.
1:06:29 This has also been observed in other competitive breath hold divers.
1:06:34 But in terms of how that could benefit your health, I mean, maybe it’s good for your heart
1:06:37 to have that kind of plasticity in terms of its response.
1:06:37 Yeah.
1:06:40 When I think about heart rate, I think mainly about autonomic function.
1:06:44 And again, vagal innervation seems to be a theme there.
1:06:47 The vagus is responsible for slowing the heart rate down.
1:06:53 Anytime we exhale through, you know, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, we essentially slow our heart
1:06:53 rate down.
1:06:57 It’s the fastest way I’m aware of to consciously slow our heart rate down.
1:07:04 But so as one dives, I guess if they’re exhaling, letting out some air, dumping some carbon dioxide,
1:07:07 which is probably a good thing if you’re a free diver.
1:07:11 I don’t want to encourage people to do this because that shuts off the gas reflex that would
1:07:13 have you, you know, jolt to the surface.
1:07:19 But assuming no one’s going to go out and try this, by dumping air, you’re exhaling.
1:07:22 Exhaling slows the heart rate, but not 40 beats per minute.
1:07:22 Right.
1:07:23 Yeah.
1:07:24 It’s usually a fraction of that.
1:07:25 Yeah.
1:07:30 And so then we also found this genetic adaptation that we think is driven by the fact that they’re
1:07:30 diving through pregnancy.
1:07:37 So when pregnant women have sleep apnea, which is where you hold your breath in your sleep,
1:07:42 so it’s kind of, you can think of it as unintentional diving through pregnancy, they tend to develop
1:07:44 these blood pressure related complications.
1:07:50 So like preeclampsia, they’re just, they call them hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
1:07:54 And so we think that, there’s no studies that have been, that have shown this yet, but we
1:07:59 think that, you know, if you’re diving, same, different kind of apnea through pregnancy, that
1:08:01 would also increase your risk for these disorders.
1:08:07 And so what we saw was that there was a genetic variant that was actually driving their, like
1:08:10 a lowering of their diastolic blood pressure while they were diving.
1:08:15 And so we think that this is protective against these hypertensive or high blood pressure effects.
1:08:16 It’s interesting.
1:08:24 So for non-divers, so for pregnant women on land who aren’t from this population, the picture
1:08:27 I’m getting is that they’re sleeping on their back, perhaps because it’s more comfortable
1:08:33 as they get very pregnant and their airway is getting cut off at some point.
1:08:35 So they’re having these hypoxic episodes.
1:08:38 And then there’s some gasping as the carbon dioxide gets high.
1:08:42 This is also, incidentally, what people who are overweight or, by the way, people with
1:08:43 very big necks.
1:08:48 This is why a lot of big-necked, very lean men die in their sleep.
1:08:51 This is a kind of well-known thing in certain sports communities.
1:08:53 It’s very tragic.
1:08:56 You know, you say, well, this person’s, you know, fit, but they’re lying on their back.
1:08:58 They have big necks and their airway is compressed.
1:09:01 If you have a big neck, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to die early, but make sure you’re
1:09:02 breathing right at night.
1:09:04 Because sleep apnea is very dangerous.
1:09:05 It is, yeah.
1:09:07 I think we think of it as just snoring, right?
1:09:07 Right.
1:09:08 But it’s super dangerous.
1:09:09 Yeah.
1:09:11 You’re putting yourself into a state of hypoxemia.
1:09:13 So your oxygen is very low.
1:09:22 So for pregnant women who are concerned about hypoxia, what are the options that they have
1:09:27 besides becoming a diver and joining this incredible community in Korea?
1:09:28 Yeah.
1:09:32 I mean, I think, well, you know, that’s one of the things that we’re hoping to find from
1:09:32 studying these women.
1:09:37 So if they’ve evolved some kind of protective mechanism that protects them in the case of
1:09:41 apnea, maybe that’s something we could develop into a therapeutic that could be used to help
1:09:48 prevent that same, you know, hypertensive disorder pregnancy in pregnant women who have apnea for
1:09:48 other reasons.
1:09:55 But otherwise, I would say, I think, you know, preeclampsia used to be a death sentence for mothers
1:09:59 and fetus, you know, which is why it was such a strong driver of evolution.
1:10:03 Now I think awareness of it enables treatment.
1:10:07 But that’s only something that’s happened in the last, you know, I don’t know how many decades.
1:10:11 So that’s why it was, it could have been such a powerful force in this population.
1:10:15 Uncomfortable topic, but I think an important one.
1:10:21 Earlier, you were talking about genetic selection and what determines survival of offspring.
1:10:29 Is it the case that many miscarriages, if not most miscarriages, are because the mutations
1:10:35 that arise would have been destructive at some point postnatally, after birth?
1:10:43 So it’s a kind of a nature’s veto on the genetic program.
1:10:47 Yeah, I mean, you know, I’m not a maternal health specialist, but I do know that most mutations
1:10:49 create non-viable embryos.
1:10:58 And so, yeah, that’s, I think, I think that could certainly be driving early miscarriages, especially.
1:11:02 So it could be pre-implantation or post-implantation.
1:11:11 A mutation arises and somehow the genetic programs of embryology are somehow made aware that down
1:11:16 the line this is going to lead to a stillborn fetus or something.
1:11:22 So, I mean, nature doesn’t have a conscious logic in the same way that we think, but the
1:11:30 genetic decision, therefore, is to stop, is essentially a stop cell proliferation and the
1:11:31 pregnancy is terminated.
1:11:35 Yeah, because, I mean, a lot of proteins are involved in many, many systems.
1:11:40 And so if you have a mutation that’s problematic in one of those proteins that’s involved in
1:11:44 all these different systems, it’s just going to start to go haywire very early on.
1:11:53 I’m very curious about how these genetic adaptations and how they relate to behavior impact organs
1:11:58 versus things on the surface of the body that we can see versus both.
1:12:03 I don’t know if this is true, but long ago I heard that, and I don’t want to scare anyone
1:12:04 because it’s not true in every case.
1:12:06 I’ll repeat, it’s not true in every case.
1:12:14 But I was told by a friend of mine who’s a physician that a lot of the wine spot pigmentation
1:12:21 of the surface of the body, like a baby will come out with a very dramatic wine spot pigmentation
1:12:22 of part of the face or the head.
1:12:27 Sometimes, not always, it’s correlated with mutations in internal organs.
1:12:32 And this is having run a mouse lab for a long time.
1:12:39 You study mouse mutants, mice that overexpress or lack or are hypomorphic for a particular
1:12:40 gene.
1:12:45 And you learn as you work with one of these populations that oftentimes the mutation that
1:12:49 impacts, say, retinal development, for which I need to take the retina out, look at it under
1:12:55 a microscope and find which cells are miswired or something like that, correlates with something
1:12:56 on the surface of the body.
1:13:00 Where you go, oh yeah, the ones with the curly tails, those are the ones that are likely
1:13:01 to be the mutants.
1:13:02 You still have to do the genotyping.
1:13:07 You still got to send out DNA and, you know, or analyze DNA nowadays you send it out.
1:13:09 But in the old days we genotyped our own mice.
1:13:15 And what you find is that oftentimes there are these peripheral markers of central issues.
1:13:21 I’m also interested in the inverse of that, where there are peripheral markers of central
1:13:22 advantages.
1:13:28 So in these populations that you studied, they have these larger spleens or this ability to
1:13:33 dive deeper and longer, can overcome hypoxia through a drop in heart rate.
1:13:40 Is there anything about their external appearance that isn’t about soft feet or exposure to the
1:13:42 sun that tells you, like, this population is different?
1:13:48 They look different in ways that we don’t expect different populations to just look different.
1:13:49 Does that make sense?
1:13:50 Yeah, absolutely.
1:13:50 Yeah.
1:13:54 And I mean, you know, to your point, like the phosphodiesterase that we found that was evolving
1:13:58 in the Bajo, phosphodiesterases are involved in so many different functions.
1:14:04 And so there’s, you know, there are chances for these mutations to affect not just the systems
1:14:06 that we’re interested in, but other systems as well.
1:14:13 I mean, in both populations, the people look incredibly fit and athletic and they’re, you
1:14:16 know, they tend to have just a very robust appearance.
1:14:21 Now, is that because they’re diving every day, you know, and there aren’t that many 70 year
1:14:23 old women who are jumping off a boat every day to go to work?
1:14:26 Or is it something related to their genetics?
1:14:31 I don’t think we know yet, but it would be really interesting to look into that more.
1:14:38 The reason I ask this is that as we were discussing at the beginning of today’s conversation, mate
1:14:41 selection, we think of the, they smell so great.
1:14:42 We like them for this reason.
1:14:43 We like them for that reason.
1:14:46 And then, and there’s the, the conscious choices that we’re making.
1:14:50 And then there’s all this stuff working below our level of consciousness, like, oh, they smell
1:14:50 great.
1:14:55 And you’re actually selecting at least in part for their immune system and the potential
1:14:56 immune system of offspring.
1:15:02 Even if you decide you never want to have children with this person for whatever reason, this stuff
1:15:05 is happening in parallel, consciously and unconsciously.
1:15:11 And so when I think about, you know, the, the ability, the special abilities of different
1:15:16 populations at the level of internal organs, like a spleen ability, you also have to wonder
1:15:23 if this is represented at the level of, you know, I don’t know, like the, I mean, it could
1:15:24 be anything, right?
1:15:28 I mean, it could be the, the ones with the better spleens have really nice hands.
1:15:30 I mean, and, and you don’t think about it.
1:15:31 You don’t think to correlate those things.
1:15:31 Right.
1:15:36 But as in the example, I was discussing with the, with the mice in a laboratory, when you
1:15:41 get mutations that, you know, impact an internal organ, almost always there’s something about,
1:15:47 you know, they might have a particular fur pigmentation pattern, assuming it’s a whole
1:15:47 body mutation.
1:15:53 Or sometimes they’ll have like one webbed toe or they’ll have a pinkies that, pinkies, it’s
1:15:53 mice.
1:15:59 They have a little, little back paw digit that faces in, not, not out like the others.
1:16:02 And so you learn when you work with these things to say, those are the good ones.
1:16:03 Those are the mutant ones.
1:16:06 Or in some cases, those are the good mutant ones.
1:16:06 Right.
1:16:09 And I think as humans, we don’t tend to do this consciously.
1:16:11 It’s not how we’re trained to think.
1:16:12 Thank goodness.
1:16:14 That would complicate all the dating apps.
1:16:17 People would have to show their digits and Lord knows what else.
1:16:23 But human mate selection is in part genetic selection.
1:16:28 So what are your thoughts on this in terms of how these things correlate with human choice
1:16:29 and behavior?
1:16:30 I’m asking you to speculate here, obviously.
1:16:35 I think that certainly, you know, I mean, we know that these populations have been evolving.
1:16:38 We have theories as to what is driving that selection.
1:16:41 But there, I mean, could be sexual selection.
1:16:45 It could be like you’re saying, like that people carrying this genetic variation that happens
1:16:49 to also make them a good diver in ways that we expected to find, also make them more attractive
1:16:51 in ways that we weren’t even looking for.
1:16:56 And, you know, we weren’t even thinking about pregnancy, really, when we started the study
1:16:56 with the henyo.
1:17:00 It wasn’t until we got these results and we’re saying, you know, what is this difference in
1:17:00 blood pressure?
1:17:04 And speaking with maternal health specialists that we really pieced it together.
1:17:07 So I think it’s the kind of thing where, yeah, you just, you don’t even really know
1:17:09 necessarily all of the pieces of the puzzle.
1:17:13 And that’s where it’s a lot more questions for us to ask in the future.
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1:19:09 As long as we’re talking about diving underwater, as a vision scientist, at least that’s where
1:19:13 my initial training was, I have to ask about vision underwater.
1:19:17 Do these two populations use goggles?
1:19:19 So now they do.
1:19:20 Okay.
1:19:22 But I mean, you can imagine goggles haven’t been around that long.
1:19:25 So at some point in the past, they didn’t.
1:19:29 And this was, you know, the study that first got me interested in this was a study done
1:19:33 in Mokin children, where I think it was literally a researcher who was on vacation in Thailand,
1:19:38 noticed these little kids diving for things and, you know, having this ability to see underwater
1:19:45 and set up an experiment and had European children and Mokin children diving to look at things
1:19:45 underwater.
1:19:50 And the Mokin children had better eyesight underwater than the European children.
1:19:55 Now, that same researcher, after publishing this paper, went back to Europe and trained
1:20:00 European children to do the same thing, essentially, to perform at the same level as these Mokin
1:20:00 children.
1:20:06 And so, you know, there was this kind of dismissal, like, oh, well, you can train Europeans to see
1:20:07 underwater just as well.
1:20:09 So it must not be evolved.
1:20:10 It must not be genetic.
1:20:12 It has to just be training.
1:20:18 But I think that’s a logical fallacy that has stopped a lot of or has prevented a lot of
1:20:20 research from being done in these populations.
1:20:25 Because just because you can train someone to be at the same level, you know, as someone
1:20:27 else doesn’t mean that that person didn’t have an advantage.
1:20:29 And so I think that’s, yeah.
1:20:31 I mean, definitely there’s a difference in their vision.
1:20:32 And what causes that?
1:20:33 I think we still don’t know.
1:20:35 So interesting.
1:20:43 I’m just going to take one minute and explain to people the underwater thing because I find
1:20:46 it fascinating that the surface of the eye is rounded, obviously.
1:20:47 People get that.
1:20:52 And that’s what allows you to refract, to bend the light to a single point so that things
1:20:53 look nice and crisp.
1:20:58 And when you’re underwater, the water essentially fills in the roundness around it.
1:21:02 The air does, of course, above water as well.
1:21:07 But because of the similarity and basically the density of the water and the surface of the
1:21:12 eye, even though they’re different, you get less of a bending of the light to a point.
1:21:17 So the reason I’m saying this, the reason I’m giving this very crude lesson in optics
1:21:19 is there were really two possibilities.
1:21:25 One is that kids that dive a lot in their youth have a flatter eye, right?
1:21:29 If you think about a goggle or, you know, any kind of underwater seeing device, you’re basically
1:21:33 putting air between the eye and the water and you’re making it flat.
1:21:38 So the idea that the eye would become more flat through diving isn’t inconceivable.
1:21:39 I suppose it could happen.
1:21:43 But it makes perfect sense to me as to why the European children could do this also, because
1:21:45 you train it enough.
1:21:51 It turns out it’s the ability to constrict the pupil down really, really small that can
1:21:52 account for this adaptation.
1:21:58 So I wouldn’t have thought that diving underwater and learning to pick up small objects underwater
1:22:01 would make the eye more flat, kind of like wearing a goggle underwater.
1:22:07 But the point you make is an extremely important one, because if you take a population that
1:22:14 is already afforded some sort of potential genetic advantage, and you train them even further,
1:22:17 that’s when you get X-Men-like behavior.
1:22:20 And this is really all about the X-Men, right?
1:22:22 And women, as you clearly pointed out.
1:22:28 And I think that brings us to this question of like human super performance.
1:22:37 I think about the fact that almost always when I see a marathon winner nowadays, and I think
1:22:38 about, is it Elio Kipchoge?
1:22:44 Sorry, my, my, my, I’m normally I don’t bring him into the, the frame consciously here, but
1:22:49 for the audience here, but I, my producer and business partner at the Human Lab podcast is
1:22:49 a triathlete.
1:22:50 What is the guy’s name?
1:22:51 Elio Kipchoge.
1:22:56 Elio Kipchoge set the marathon record with it, with mile times on the order of?
1:22:58 4.35.
1:23:08 26.3, 26.2 miles at, you know, somewhere in the four and a half minute mile pace continuously.
1:23:10 Incredible.
1:23:14 So he represents among the pinnacle of, of that sport.
1:23:20 Almost always when we see these incredible endurance runners, they seem to descend from
1:23:22 specific regions of the world.
1:23:24 Can we talk about why that’s so?
1:23:27 Are they inheriting some sort of red blood cell trait?
1:23:29 Is it the light bonedness combined with that?
1:23:32 What leads to incredible human performance?
1:23:33 I know you’re a runner, your husband’s a runner.
1:23:37 So like how much hope is there for the rest of us?
1:23:42 And why is it that folks like Elio are so unbelievably spectacular?
1:23:45 You know, I would love to look at that scientifically.
1:23:47 He’s absolutely incredible.
1:23:51 I mean, breaking the two hour marathon record is also just unbelievable.
1:23:56 But I think, I think there have been, you know, I’m not as familiar with this literature,
1:24:01 but there have been studies looking at the, the proportion of like bone lengths in certain
1:24:02 parts of Africa, especially.
1:24:07 It’s also interesting to note that a lot of, of these really talented runners come from
1:24:13 Ethiopia, where there are highland areas where humans have actually adapted to altitude.
1:24:18 So in addition to some of these like biomechanical advantages, they may actually also have physiological
1:24:22 advantages that enable them to run faster.
1:24:27 But yeah, I think this is an excellent example of there’s clearly something biological making
1:24:30 people from this part of the world, you know, really excellent runners.
1:24:35 And just because you can train a European runner to compete at nearly the same level, that
1:24:38 doesn’t mean that there’s not something special about people like Kipchoge.
1:24:43 And so, you know, this comes up a lot with the Bajo as well, because people say, oh, well,
1:24:47 you know, they don’t hold the free diving depth record.
1:24:50 It’s like, well, yeah, but they’re not training to hold that record.
1:24:54 You know, they’re training, they’re diving just to collect food for their families.
1:24:55 They’re not training.
1:24:57 So what would happen if we did train them?
1:24:59 And I think it’s, yeah, it’s a great point.
1:25:07 If we take this out of the realm of physical performance, and we take it into cognitive or
1:25:13 mathematical performance, I feel like there’s some fun thought experiments we could do.
1:25:18 Before we started, you were talking about your time at Princeton as an undergraduate, seeing
1:25:27 John Nash, you know, famed for sadly having schizophrenia, diagnosed schizophrenia, the topic of the movie,
1:25:29 A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe.
1:25:36 But at the same time, having incredible abilities based on presumably things that either correlate
1:25:40 with or just by chance run in parallel with the schizophrenia.
1:25:44 Who knows what’s driving what, or if they’re in parallel.
1:25:51 We have examples, again, I’m pulling from movies like Rain Man, where there’s a person
1:25:55 has autism of a type that makes social interactions very challenging.
1:26:04 But in that example, which is, I think, representative of at least some people with autism, extreme
1:26:10 mathematical calculation abilities, especially in the physical space, being able to see things
1:26:11 and count them very rapidly.
1:26:17 Last example I’ll give is there’s this math competition held in India where the kids can
1:26:21 update the numbers by moving their hands with a sensor on it, and they’re adding the numbers
1:26:22 very fast.
1:26:25 And you just see this kid basically spooling numbers, spooling the numbers, spooling the
1:26:25 numbers.
1:26:30 At the end, they get one opportunity to answer the addition of this immensely long string of
1:26:33 numbers correctly, and this kid nails it.
1:26:38 And you go, whoa, like he’s adding things very fast, presumably through some training.
1:26:42 But is it possible?
1:26:46 Is it within the realm of reality, based on what we know about human genetics, that there could
1:26:54 be genes that select for, say, rapid updating of visual scenes combined with short-term memory
1:26:59 or whatever duration of memory is required, that would afford certain people certain advantages
1:27:03 in this based on inheritance that’s then combined with training?
1:27:09 Much in the same way that the ability of the spleen to expand if you dive a lot and you happen
1:27:12 to be born in one of these communities that we’ve been talking about.
1:27:13 Is that possible?
1:27:18 Yeah, I mean, I think certainly, you know, I mean, there’s an interesting correlation
1:27:27 between, like, between people in STEM fields and having family members with autism.
1:27:35 And so I was actually at a lecture in Princeton where the professor asked the incoming class
1:27:39 of students, you know, how many of you have a family member with autism?
1:27:43 And then of those, you know, and he had this, he displayed the statistics, how many of you
1:27:45 are joining the engineering department?
1:27:47 And it was, you know, it was much higher amongst engineers.
1:27:52 And he explained that this can have to do with the fact that, I mean, people on the spectrum
1:27:54 tend to have an ability to hyperfocus.
1:27:59 And that actually makes you, you know, the ability to really kind of narrow yourself to this one
1:28:00 thing can make you a really good engineer.
1:28:05 And so in that way, it’s, you know, it’s a huge advantage because it’s allowing you to succeed
1:28:09 in that field, you know, depending, obviously, where you are on that spectrum and how that
1:28:10 affects you in other ways.
1:28:15 And so if that in some way is giving you an advantage, you know, why wouldn’t it be selected
1:28:15 for?
1:28:18 Of course, there are other ways that it could be a disadvantage.
1:28:26 Oliver Sacks, I think, wrote about how people with Tourette’s may have faster processing speeds.
1:28:32 And so again, maybe this is a place where, you know, that is advantageous, despite the
1:28:35 other disadvantages that might come along with having that syndrome.
1:28:37 Huge Oliver Sacks fan here.
1:28:38 He’s amazing.
1:28:41 I’m sort of becoming a historian of him, an informal historian.
1:28:44 And he also loved to spend much of his time underwater.
1:28:45 Oh, did he?
1:28:45 I didn’t know that.
1:28:49 Yeah, he was an avid diver and snorkeler and scuba diver.
1:28:54 And I think in part, he said, because it’s so quiet down there.
1:28:58 Incidentally, he had prophesagnosia.
1:28:59 He couldn’t recognize faces.
1:29:00 I think I have that right.
1:29:01 I’ve known a few other people with that.
1:29:08 And prophesagnosia, the inability to recognize faces, also seems to correlate with this, for
1:29:11 lack of a better way to put it, kind of nerdy, quirky phenotype.
1:29:16 A former advisor of mine had this, although in part, I thought he told us that because
1:29:19 then it gave him an out anytime he couldn’t remember somebody’s name.
1:29:19 The disorder.
1:29:21 Yeah, it’s a great thing to put forward.
1:29:21 Yeah.
1:29:26 If you can’t remember people’s names, no disrespect to the actually clinically diagnosed people
1:29:30 with prophesagnosia, it gets you out of a lot of having to remember things.
1:29:37 Yeah, I find this fascinating because in this day and age of pathologizing everything, it’s
1:29:41 interesting to take, as you just did, and I really appreciate it, taking a step back and
1:29:45 saying, yes, there are instances where people on the spectrum have, you know, they need assisted
1:29:46 living their entire lives.
1:29:51 But there are also people who are living, you know, incredibly productive lives, even making
1:29:58 incredibly enormous, meaningful, and uniquely meaningful contributions to society who we would
1:30:00 say are probably on the spectrum.
1:30:00 Right.
1:30:05 And so the question then becomes, to what extent is it genetic?
1:30:12 To what extent is our genes driving a proclivity for numbers or a proclivity for engineering?
1:30:17 And on the opposite side, like our great creatives, are they carrying a different set of genes or
1:30:20 are they just the ones that can’t pay attention to anything so they start throwing things together?
1:30:21 Yeah.
1:30:23 That was a joke against the creators.
1:30:26 It’s interesting because it becomes a really difficult thing to test.
1:30:32 Because how do you measure creativity in a way that you could then link to genetic information?
1:30:36 So a lot of these kinds of understandings of genes come from things called genome-wide association
1:30:42 studies, where essentially they perform a correlation at every site in the genome to see which of these
1:30:46 sites correlates statistically with whatever phenotype it is.
1:30:50 So whether that’s, you know, kidney disease or, you know, creativity.
1:30:54 But you have to have a really good way of quantifying that trait.
1:30:58 So, you know, creativity is nearly impossible to quantify.
1:31:04 Something like, you know, mathematical ability, there’s so many potential environmental, you know,
1:31:09 nurture factors that could contribute to how that manifests in an individual that it also
1:31:15 becomes quite difficult to quantify and therefore difficult to find any genetic factor that’s contributing.
1:31:21 It’s so interesting how we classify intelligence, you know.
1:31:26 And some years back, there was a lot of debate about, you know, IQ versus, you know, emotional
1:31:26 intelligence.
1:31:28 But there’s this wonderful documentary.
1:31:31 By the way, there’s several movies by this title.
1:31:34 But the one I’m thinking of is the documentary Spellbound, which is about the spelling bee competition.
1:31:42 And it was the case for a long time that how well and how quickly kids could remember to spell
1:31:47 certain words was thought of as some important correlate of intelligence, which is kind of
1:31:50 crazy now in the day, an age of autocorrect and things like that.
1:31:53 But one could argue that being able to spell is an interesting one.
1:31:58 But the different kids that they detail, one from a farming community, one from a community
1:32:05 where the parents were really hard driving about academics, it tiles the entire representation of
1:32:07 every kind of background you can imagine.
1:32:12 Different types of parents, blue collar parents, highly educated parents, boys, girls, one that
1:32:15 set that’s clearly on the spectrum and you see it in the family.
1:32:16 You can see that.
1:32:18 And everything in between.
1:32:22 And what you come to realize is that training effects are very real.
1:32:27 Like if you take a kid in particular and you give them an activity and they repeat that
1:32:30 activity, no surprise here, they get very good at that.
1:32:34 But it also narrows the number of things that they can also be good at.
1:32:38 This is what I think we forget about neuroplasticity is that the choice to get very good at one thing
1:32:41 is also the choice to not get good at a bunch of other things.
1:32:46 So when you step back, and I’m not going to ask you for parenting advice, but when you step
1:32:53 back and you think about what you know about human genetics, is there a kind of a, assuming
1:32:57 one doesn’t have to hunt for their food the way these populations you’ve been studying
1:33:05 do, is there a kind of a optimal way to think about kind of genetic bias and what we perhaps
1:33:06 should focus on?
1:33:11 Or are you a equal opportunity to get after whatever interests you the most kind of person?
1:33:15 I mean, you know, there’s like companies where you can test yourself to find out what
1:33:16 kind of athlete you should be.
1:33:22 And I think that kind of gets into something called genetic determinism, which is this idea
1:33:25 that your genes determine everything about you, which we know isn’t true.
1:33:30 We know that it’s a combination of, you know, genetic factors, environmental factors, all of
1:33:31 these different things.
1:33:37 But I think it’s interesting how much the idea that we’re genetically predisposed to
1:33:42 something or, you know, we’re genetically better at something can actually influence how we
1:33:43 are at that thing.
1:33:49 So we talked a little bit before about, you know, there was a study where they told people,
1:33:53 they said, we’re going to take your DNA, we’re going to genotype you, we’re going to find
1:33:57 out, you know, whether if you train, you’re going to get faster or whether it’s not going
1:33:58 to affect you at all.
1:34:02 And so they did that, and they put people into these groups, and then they tested them
1:34:03 after a few months.
1:34:06 And the people who they told were going to do better did better.
1:34:11 And this was like something they could measure at the biological level.
1:34:17 They could measure specific molecules that had changed in that population of people compared
1:34:18 to the other group of people.
1:34:23 Now, the trick was that there was no difference genetically between these groups.
1:34:24 It was just what they were told.
1:34:28 So it’s really interesting to think about, you know, if you tell a child what they should
1:34:32 or shouldn’t do based on, you know, their genes, I think that’s a really dangerous thing.
1:34:35 Or potentially, you could motivate them through that.
1:34:36 So interesting.
1:34:42 I mean, I think mindset effects are so important, under discussed.
1:34:43 I’m so glad this is coming up.
1:34:51 Allie Crum was a guest on this podcast, and she shared with us some incredible data on it.
1:34:55 You know, you tell people that stress is good for them, you stress them out, their health
1:34:59 improves, you tell people stress is bad for them, you stress them out, their health gets
1:35:01 worse, and on and on.
1:35:02 There’s just so many examples of these.
1:35:07 Most of the time, people aren’t taking a genetic test to determine whether or not they’re likely
1:35:08 to be good or bad at something.
1:35:12 They’re looking at their family photos, or they’re looking at their parents, or their
1:35:12 grandparents.
1:35:16 This is the old version of genetic information.
1:35:16 Sure.
1:35:18 And I’m guessing here, too, one should be very cautious.
1:35:23 If your parents weren’t athletes, does that mean that you don’t have the genes to be a great
1:35:23 athlete?
1:35:25 Clearly, the answer is no.
1:35:25 Yeah.
1:35:26 Right?
1:35:26 Yeah.
1:35:29 Likewise for intellectual pursuits.
1:35:34 We really have very little evidence that intelligence is heritable.
1:35:39 So I think that’s a big one, especially, you know, if you feel like you’re not coming from
1:35:45 a very intelligent family, that doesn’t mean anything, really, based on what we know currently.
1:35:47 What about rhythm and dancing ability?
1:35:48 Oh, man.
1:35:51 I don’t know, but I’ll tell you, I did not inherit any rhythm from my dad.
1:36:00 I didn’t inherit any rhythm from my dad or my mom, although my dad is a bit more musical
1:36:05 by virtue of being more mathematical, but that is not the same thing as dancing ability.
1:36:12 I don’t know if we have any truly bad dancers in our family, but we have at least one with
1:36:13 exceptional rhythm and ability.
1:36:15 She happens to be adopted.
1:36:17 So there you go.
1:36:17 There you go, yeah.
1:36:21 That’s a different version of genetic variation.
1:36:26 And an important one, in the sense that it’s a cross-fostering experiment, to put it in
1:36:28 animal laboratory terms.
1:36:34 If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about the ethics of genetics and genetic engineering.
1:36:45 A few years back, a guy in China running a laboratory used CRISPR to modify the genome
1:36:46 of babies.
1:36:50 I believe he mutated the HIV receptor.
1:36:57 I believe it wasn’t to prevent them from contracting HIV under any circumstances, but
1:37:01 rather the relationship between the HIV receptor and some things related to human memory.
1:37:03 That was the speculation.
1:37:07 There was very little known about this because this was happening in China in a kind of a closed
1:37:08 format.
1:37:12 It wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal, but he showed up at a human genetics meeting
1:37:17 and he announced to the world that he had genetically modified babies through the use of genetic engineering.
1:37:23 Now, on the backdrop of this, up until now, we’ve basically been talking about genetic selection
1:37:26 through partner selection, through all sorts of things.
1:37:30 So there are kind of indirect ways to genetically select.
1:37:31 I think people forget that.
1:37:40 But here we’re talking about deliberate gene insertion or removal in embryos creating genetically modified
1:37:40 humans.
1:37:43 After he did that, there was a sort of pause, as I recall.
1:37:45 I was paying very close attention to this.
1:37:53 As to whether or not the international community of genetic ethicists and scientists would say,
1:37:59 wow, this is potentially a feat of human engineering that could prevent disease, et cetera, et cetera,
1:38:01 or they were going to chastise him.
1:38:03 And it turned out they chastised him.
1:38:10 And as it were, we were told that he was actually put into prison.
1:38:14 Now, whether or not that prison included a laboratory, we don’t know, right?
1:38:15 We have no idea.
1:38:19 And there were a few other countries that chimed in and said, oh, yeah, you know, programs like
1:38:21 this have actually been underway elsewhere for a long time.
1:38:22 And then it just went silent.
1:38:33 Right now, the idea of the use of CRISPR to improve babies or to protect them against potential diseases
1:38:35 is not commonplace.
1:38:38 Or if it is, it’s not discussed.
1:38:44 What are your thoughts on the use of CRISPR to protect children from certain diseases?
1:38:45 Let’s just put it in that domain.
1:38:49 And then, of course, we could talk about the misuse of this.
1:38:53 But, you know, you could think of parents who are maybe carrying a mutation.
1:38:56 They don’t want their kids to have Huntington’s, for instance.
1:38:59 And you could potentially fix that gene.
1:39:03 So I’m just going to cast all of that out there to give the kind of backdrop and get your thoughts.
1:39:06 And there’s clearly no right or wrong answer here.
1:39:09 But this is very likely to be a big topic in the upcoming decade.
1:39:09 Yeah.
1:39:11 I mean, it’s a really great question.
1:39:14 And I think one without, you know, a very good answer at this point.
1:39:23 I think one of the things holding back this discussion up till now is that, you know, CRISPR is still a little bit of a blunt tool.
1:39:36 You know, we’re not, we haven’t, like, the way that we’re applying it isn’t as precise as we’d like it to be to do the kind of gene editing that, you know, you would need to protect babies in the way that you’re describing.
1:39:40 And this is, there are things like off-target effects, they say.
1:39:47 So, you know, you’re trying to edit one very specific part of the genome, but it ends up editing places that you didn’t intend it to edit.
1:39:59 So that’s kind of one of the issues, I think, technologically that, I think, if I remember right when that happened, people were a little bit like, that technology isn’t ready to be used in that way yet.
1:40:02 But, of course, that’s something that is changing really rapidly.
1:40:04 We’re getting so much better at this.
1:40:07 We’re able to do it successfully in lab animals.
1:40:18 And so, yeah, ethically, I mean, it’s just, I think it’s also interesting to think about, you know, enhancement versus, you know, like correction.
1:40:22 Like at what point, you know, where is the line between those two?
1:40:28 So if we’re correcting some kind of genetic defect, first of all, some defects, other people might not even see them as defects.
1:40:30 They might just see that as variation amongst humans.
1:40:35 And so, you know, where is the line between defect, normal, enhanced?
1:40:47 And so it’s, yeah, it’s, I don’t know who would make those decisions once the technology is even available to apply that in unborn children.
1:40:54 I mean, of course, it would be a dream to prevent disease using these technologies, but it’s a slippery slope maybe.
1:41:01 Yeah, there’s a lot of debate right now online about some of these companies that allow for a deep sequencing of embryos.
1:41:16 In particular, in cases of IVF, there’s a company, I believe it’s called Orchid up in the Bay Area that’s kind of foremost in this where, you know, typically for IVF or even for a natural pregnancy, there’ll be an analysis of like, is there trisomy?
1:41:22 Like, you know, extra chromosomes, which we know can lead to Down syndrome, et cetera.
1:41:32 But these companies, for a price, offer deep, deep sequencing of genes that correlate with, like, they’re not causal in many cases.
1:41:42 Sometimes, yes, but oftentimes correlate with, you know, potential spectrum phenotypes or, you know, things of that sort.
1:41:44 Cancer susceptibility, BRCA mutation, right?
1:41:49 I know several people, unfortunately, that died from cancer and they carried BRCA mutations.
1:41:52 So there’s a, this is real stuff.
1:41:58 I think that the challenge for a lot of people is that as it stands now, it’s very costly.
1:42:11 So it sets up a scenario where wealthy people can afford to analyze embryos more vigorously than people who don’t have the means to do it.
1:42:24 But if we look back 10, 20, 30 years, you know, getting your whole genome sequenced in the early 90s, was it when Venter and those guys first nailed that ability?
1:42:25 Something like that.
1:42:26 I’m just thinking 90s sometimes.
1:42:29 Okay, maybe I’m a little early or a little late on that one.
1:42:31 But it was extremely expensive.
1:42:35 But now it’s like, what, 100 bucks or even free in some cases.
1:42:36 Yeah, depending on the coverage.
1:42:39 Yeah, you can sequence a genome for pretty cheap these days.
1:42:41 Yeah, so most technologies tend to advance that way.
1:42:46 So it gets back to also this issue of how much information do you want.
1:42:55 And so I guess given your training and understanding of human genetics, there’s obviously no one-size-fits-all answer.
1:43:07 But when it comes to understanding how much control to exert over the genome, where do you land on this?
1:43:08 I’m not trying to put you in the hot seat here.
1:43:09 Yeah, I know.
1:43:13 I think people are going to hear more about these technologies and just want to understand how to frame them.
1:43:13 Yeah.
1:43:16 Well, first of all, for context, I only have dogs.
1:43:19 So I don’t have to think about this in terms of human babies.
1:43:27 But yeah, I think say you get your baby’s genome sequenced and that baby is going to be blind.
1:43:30 Is that a problem?
1:43:33 You know, a lot of blind people would say no.
1:43:37 So, you know, I think it’s such a personal question.
1:43:38 I think that’s a great answer.
1:43:42 I think it’s a really hard question to answer for any of us.
1:43:48 I appreciate you being able to look at it and consider dog genetics is fascinating.
1:43:53 There, the selection seems to be for phenotype, but also behavioral type.
1:43:53 Yes.
1:43:55 Which is fascinating.
1:43:57 Yeah, my fur babies were 100% selected to be cute.
1:43:59 That was the basis?
1:43:59 Yeah.
1:44:00 It was the eye contact?
1:44:01 Well, for that, yeah.
1:44:06 I mean, actually, literally, one of my dogs is a type of dog that was bred to be a companion.
1:44:09 So the only thing that they selected for was cuteness and companionship.
1:44:10 This is the Bolognese?
1:44:11 Yes, that’s right.
1:44:11 Yeah.
1:44:14 There is a dog named after the spaghetti sauce or vice versa.
1:44:16 Yeah, named after Bologna in Italy.
1:44:17 Oh, right.
1:44:18 No, I was joking.
1:44:21 Tell us, what is the breed of dog?
1:44:22 Bolognese.
1:44:23 And it’s a mix between?
1:44:29 It’s in the family of like the Maltese, Spichon, Cotone family.
1:44:34 So these little fluffy white dogs that are in Renaissance paintings sitting in the laps of royalty.
1:44:58 It strikes me that whether or not we’re talking about Mendel’s peas in the garden, whether or not we’re talking about dogs, whether or not we’re talking about corn varieties, or we’re talking about humans, that for some reason, we like to underestimate the power that genes in natural selection have.
1:45:02 And behavioral selection, I guess, is the more appropriate term, right?
1:45:05 I’m very curious about this concept of ad mixing.
1:45:08 If you could explain what ad mixing is.
1:45:15 And what I’m getting at here is probably the biggest question for me, which is, are we all really one species?
1:45:20 I mean, I like the idea that we are all one collective consciousness and unity and peace on earth.
1:45:21 Awesome.
1:45:25 But really in a serious sense, is Homo sapiens one species?
1:45:27 I mean, there’s a lot of genetic variation.
1:45:39 And so if you could explain ad mixing and if you’re willing to go out on a limb and address whether or not there might be multiple species of primates walking around that we say, oh, that’s a person.
1:45:41 But they might be that much different than us.
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1:46:14 Yeah, so starting with admixture.
1:46:19 Admixture is just when different ancestry populations mix.
1:46:27 So it’s, you know, it’s kind of this relative term because, you know, if we’re all descended from one ancestral population, then maybe we all have one ancestry.
1:46:29 But I always like to put it in the context of myself.
1:46:32 So my dad is 100% Italian.
1:46:33 My mom’s a mix of Northern European.
1:46:38 I am an admixt individual, you know, if you think about it that way.
1:46:53 And the reason that this is important in genetic studies is that if I claimed to be Italian and were included in a genetic study of Italians, the genetic variation that I have coming in from my mom’s side would confuse that analysis.
1:46:57 So admixture creates a ton of problems when we try to do genetic analyses.
1:47:02 And so that’s generally why we try to quantify it in genetics.
1:47:08 But, yeah, you know, when we’re talking about it depends on kind of what scale, because I’m 100% European.
1:47:12 So in that way, I’m not admixted if we’re talking on the scale of continents.
1:47:20 So it becomes kind of a blurry concept of admixture, depending on what level we’re looking at.
1:47:30 But as to your question of whether we are all one species, I would say I’ve actually, this is not the first time I’ve been asked this, especially given these, you know, we call them superhuman populations.
1:47:37 These people who have these extraordinary abilities, extraordinary physiology that makes them, you know, really good at what they do.
1:47:43 I think the thing to keep in mind is that some of that variation can come from just a single base pair difference.
1:47:48 I mean, a lot of times it’s multiple genetic changes that create the differences between individuals.
1:47:56 But, like, when you think about, you know, eye color, that’s just one genetic variation or genetic variant in some cases, like the case of blue eyes.
1:48:03 You know, so you could be exactly the same as someone else, except for this one change out of 3.5 billion.
1:48:10 You know, so does that, like, at what point do we need enough genetic diversity to call a group of humans a different species?
1:48:15 And I don’t think that’s something that we see anywhere on the planet that I know of.
1:48:19 Well, this has been incredibly illuminating.
1:48:23 I’ve learned so much, and I know everyone listening has as well.
1:48:28 I don’t think we’ve ever had a discussion about these topics on this podcast in a solo episode or guest episode.
1:48:31 You’re truly the first person to come on here and talk about human genetics.
1:48:51 And these incredible populations that you study are not only interesting in their own right, but they really shed light on the interplay between culture, selection, behavior, genetics, and basically what’s possible in terms of human potential.
1:48:55 And they also have important relevance to human disease, as you mentioned with the hypoxia work.
1:49:11 And it also shines light on something that I don’t think we can get enough of, which is the incredible things that humans are capable of in these very different populations that, you know, grew up and continue to exist in ways that are so different than us.
1:49:19 I think it can’t help but turn the mirror on ourselves and ask ourselves, like, what are we doing in our daily lives behaviorally?
1:49:21 How might that be impacting our genes?
1:49:24 And to start to speculate about that in constructive ways.
1:49:30 So I just really want to thank you for coming here today and sharing your knowledge, for the incredible work that you’re doing.
1:49:33 To be honest, I’m envious if I were ever going to do a sabbatical.
1:49:36 I don’t think I’ll ever have time to take the sabbatical that I’ve been accruing.
1:49:42 But if I ever did, I’d love to study one of these incredible populations and try the free dive thing.
1:49:46 It’s really wonderful work, and it’s having a huge impact.
1:49:51 It’s in the news often, as we’ll put links to, and recently as well.
1:49:57 I’m not going to ask you what you’re on to now and what’s coming next because we’ll save that for a future installment.
1:50:01 But I just want to really extend my gratitude on behalf of myself and all the listeners.
1:50:04 Thank you so much for the work you do and for educating us.
1:50:07 Thank you so much for having me, and you’re welcome in the field anytime.
1:50:07 Awesome.
1:50:12 Thank you for joining me for today’s discussion with Dr. Melissa Alardo.
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