Yale Professor Nicholas Christakis, "It's Nature AND Nurture!" | Joe Rogan

Dogs my whole life and one of the things that you do What kind do you have? Right now I have a golden retriever. We have a white lab. Yeah. Yellow lab. And I've had a bunch of different dogs. I've had mastiffs and pit bulls and German shepherds. No small, we have a Dachshund too. You don't have small dogs? My oldest daughter has a tiny Chihuahua. It's a pain in the ass, aren't they? He's the best, I love him. They just bark all the time, huh? No, he doesn't bark that much. He barks a little bit, but he's really smart. He's actually a mutt. He's Chihuahua and Australian Shepherd, but he's like that big. He's a tiny little thing. He's the best. But my point being is that you can see if you get a dog from a breeder, you really can see how they can cultivate certain types of behavior. Like a good example of my mastiff who passed away this year. He came from this guy who bred dogs for films and for police training. And he was the most calm, most chilled out dog I've ever had in my life. He was a giant dog, he's 140 pounds, but you could have him take him anywhere and trust him with a baby. And he was like, hello. Like everything was totally, but this guy purposely, anytime a dog showed any aggression towards people or any aggression towards dogs, he wouldn't let him breed. So how can anyone hear stories like that or know stories like that and not then also think that genes play a role in human behavior? Oh, you have children? Yes. You realize it when you have children. You see it like, okay, this is not, I didn't do this. This comes from me. There's certain traits that my children have that I watch and I go, okay, this is not. I didn't teach them this, they just started this way. They were born this way. They've got my fucked up brain. There's something in there. They're not seeing, they don't see how crazy I am in terms of how hard I work and things, how obsessive I get with things. They're just doing it. It's very weird. It's very weird because you see it go, oh, well, okay. Well, how much of this shit that's in me is, well, how much of me is me deciding to be this person and how much of me has no choice? About half and half, I would say, overall on average across traits. How much do you think gets passed down through genetics in terms of inclinations, like the nature of, Dispositions. Yes. About half on average. So for example, about half the, you know, how religious you are or how risk averse you are. Like I can, about half the variation in how, if you look at a group of people and some are more risk averse than others, about half of that has to do with their genes and half has to do with how they were raised or what environments they grew up in. So, you know, there's a kind of innateness to many of our qualities and you can shape them. You know, for example, you can't, you couldn't make me a musician, unfortunately. I have almost no musical talent. I can dance, I think. I mean, I think others would even say that I can do that. But that's not just like, I think I can dance, but I can't. But I have no musical ability whatsoever. I would say I'm tone deaf and, you know, I can appreciate music. I like, but I can't produce it. There's no way you could train me, I don't think, to be a musician. But, so some of it is inborn and some of it is taught for all of these qualities, yes. It's a fascinating thing to watch it emerge from a child, isn't it? Yes, as a parent, you see where it comes from. Although we have adopted, like I, my mother had three biological children and I have two adopted siblings that come from actually a multiracial family. I have a black sister and a Chinese brother. And my mother was an incredible human being. She died when I was 25, she was 47. And we have been foster parents, my wife and I. And so, and we have lots of adopted kids in the extended family, in addition to biological kids. And so you can see, you can see the play of genes, you can see the extent to which the kind of, the inherited traits that these people, we all have. And you see the shaping by how you're raised. And so both are important. And this is incidentally why, if you ever have anyone, it's not nature or nurture, it's both. Always, almost in every single trait, actually. Well, that's the case of so many things in this life. We want everything to be binary. Yes. It's nuts. It's a total, we were talking earlier, it's a total loss of nuance and an inability to see any gray. And some people think, and I think that's what you were talking about. Some people think that we are hardwired to like dichotomies, to see male and female and up and down and good and evil and left and right and to simplify the world by finding out, and that we like it, that it's soothing to us to think that the world can be divided into two categories. But in fact, many times, not always, like up and down is sort of clear. But many times it can't, there's shades of gray. And it's harder, that's harder to live in the gray. Yes, I completely agree. And that's why I've always been opposed, I mean, I think it's incredibly foolish to deny that, but people find comfort in denying that. They find comfort in being tribal. Yes. They find comfort in- Us and them. Yeah, us versus them is the classic, right? Yes, yes. It's a simplified view of the world and it's foolish and dangerous, actually. Yeah. Now, sometimes you're at war with an enemy, it's me or him or us or them. There are circumstances in which it's a different- For survival. Yes, for survival. Yeah, in that mode. Yes. Yeah, I get it. But I think a kind of worldview which says, we are good, they are evil, as we've been saying in different kind of ways in different parts of our conversation, is I think foolish and wrong and ultimately self-injurious, actually. Yeah. So.