Today, it's great to have Paige Hardin on the podcast. Dr. Hardin is a professor of clinical

psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she's director of the developmental

behavior genetics lab and co-director of the Texas twin project. Her new book is called

The Genetic Lottery. Why DNA matters for social equality? Dr. Hardin, I'm so excited to chat with

you today. I'm really excited to be here too. I feel like we've been planning to talk to each other

about this book for such a long time, so I've been looking forward to this one. That's true.

That's true. And there's lots of areas of interest overlap, but areas such as intelligence

and the role of nature, nurture, free will, responsibly. There's so much, there's so much

to unpack. I think we could do it layer by layer. I think that's the best way of tackling

the situation. But yeah, congrats on your book. How are you feeling about how it's been received?

Congrats on the New Yorker profile as well. Yeah, I've been surprised. I think, especially

as an author of my first book and an academic press book, I really didn't know what to expect

in terms of what we're going to be my opportunities to talk about the book and get people excited

about it. The New Yorker article obviously kicked off a lot of attention. So I will confess to you,

I'm a little tired. I think I was a little bit delusional about how much work it is to promote a book.

And I'm also teaching my class this semester. So it's a pretty busy season right now.

But it's a good problem to have, to have the opportunity to talk to so many different people

from different perspectives about what I'm trying to accomplish with this book.

Yeah, you know, before we get to what you're trying to accomplish and all the juicy bits of the book,

I just want to just start with this question that I think that this concept that's so misunderstood

and that's this concept of heritability. It's amazing how many people use the word heritability

as synonymous with inborn, you know, unchangeable. It comes with like a whole network of things

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