I Don't Know About That - Genetics

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

In this episode, the team discusses genetics with Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine, and Biomedical Data Science, Russ Biagio Altman. Follow Russ on Twitter @RBAltman. Make sure to listen to “The Future of Everything" on Channel 121 On SiriusXM, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Go to LoopedLive.com to buy tickets to our live virtual event! Find it under upcoming experiences! Go to JimJefferies.com to buy tickets to Jim's upcoming tour, The Moist Tour.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

spock han solo who has the biggest penis and what do they feel about that you might find out and i don't know about that with me jimmy jeffrey why do they uh but see that's a trick question because spock doesn't feel anything about it no fucking emotions on the cunt. He's just like, whatever. Just a functional dick. I move on. I think Han Solo, Han Solo, he'd be stretching that dick out all day.

Not saying that wanking makes your dick bigger, but... Jack's back. Jack's back. Speaking of giant dicks. We missed you, Jack. You were doing a job for me last week and he couldn't be here, so he's got two segments for us today. Do you have two segments?

I have one. Oh, for fuck's sake. You had an extra week to think of two. Let's plug some things. We've got a live podcast. A live virtual event. We're trying something different, a virtual event. It won't be one that's aired.

You just have to join it virtually to actually watch the thing. It's just going to be a bit of fun. Kelly, you got the info? November 9th, 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. But if you can't make that time, it'll be live for 72 hours for you to watch afterwards. So you can buy tickets. Go to our Instagram IDCat podcast for the link

or Jim's website, jimjeffries.com. But there'll be like Q&A session, right? There's going to be prizes. There's going to be trivia. There's going to be games. You can do a meet and greet with Jim. And the rest of us. Yeah, and the rest of us.

If you want to meet Jack. Not me. Of course. He's going to leave. He has a place to be. Me too. Me too. Also, this is the week before we're doing the shows at the Ace.

The Ace Theater, downtown LA. One of the shows is sold out. I believe the show before that, it's the 6th and the 7th. I believe the 6th isn't sold out, but one of them isn't. Go to jimjeffries.com. These are always good shows. I always have a lot of fun at these ones. Everyone comes along.

So I'll be putting a lot of effort in because my agents will be in the room. So, you know, I won't be phoning it in. I'll get in a bit of trouble if I don't put the effort in. So it's a good show to come to. Jack, what do you got for us? Comment world. Comment world. We should mention that Amos Gill is in the room with us right now.

So he might be commenting on the comments. Hi, Jack. Hi, Amos. Jack and I, I feel like we've got a beef. We need to bury that. There's no beef. I don't know why you're so scared. I don't know, man.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, I think they all really thought Jack was upset that he couldn't be here last week. Jack's like. I don't know why you're so scared. I think they all really thought Jack was upset that he couldn't be here last week. Jack's like, I don't care. No, I cared. I just wasn't hurt. I didn't have hurt feelings. It wasn't Amos' fault. No, but Amos is looking smug as a fuck.

He's looking like he's about to drop some fucking things on us. You got a segment ready to go? No, I've got nothing. I don't even know why I'm here. Can I promote something? Yeah. I forgot to.

I will not be at the Ace Theatre with you. I'll be in Victoria, British Columbia. So anybody that cannot make it to the Ace Theatre because you don't live there and you do live in Vancouver, I don't even know if Vancouver is that close to Victoria, but Victoria, British Columbia, where I know there's people listening. November 5th, 6th, and 7th, I'll be at three different places. I'll be at Herman's, that's to Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, where I know there's people listening November 5th, 6th and 7th.

I'll be at three different places. I'll be at Herman's. That's what it's called. And then Heckler's comedy club. It's not a great name for a comedy club. And Herman's jazz club on the seventh. So the fifth, sixth and seventh on my website for shot.net.

If you live in Victoria, British Columbia, please come out to a show and see me there. Or you could fly down to the ice. Yeah. I guess since we're all promoting things, it'd be. Or you could fly down to the ice. Up to you. I guess since we're all promoting things. If you're very rich, just fly down to the ice theater.

But if you don't have a lot of money, come down. If you're living in LA and you don't like me, cop to Herman's. Herman's. Heckler's Comedy Club and Herman's Jazz Club. The fifth, sixth, and seventh. Are the Herman's connected at all? I don't know. I don't know.

I'm just going where they're telling me to go. And I'll promote something really quickly My Venmo is at Kelly Blackheart Okay Jack what do you have for us? Comment world What do you get for sending your Venmo? Is there anything sent to you? No I mean

I'll send a nipple if you want No I didn't mean anything like that It's not my nipple A piece of soiled underwear or something I don't worry Never mind. Amos is like, what the fuck? He doesn't have headphones.

It really is. That's more production than we've ever put into anything we've done here. It's fucking hell. It's good. That was a new song? No. No, we've had that one before. It's so good. It's so good.

I'd love to play it. Yeah, yeah. It's like Blink-187. Give us a comment. 182? Was it 187? 187. 182?

I'm a bit Herman's this is to Jim they said love seeing you your love seeing your moist tour Sunday night in Jacksonville

Florida had a fucking blast good yeah we had a fun time in Jacksonville Amos was there in Jacksonville Amos went to one of the

the Jacksonville Jaguars I went to the football game, and I'll be honest, that was the first time I was aware COVID might be around me. Yeah. I put on my LA Dodgers mask, and it's the first time I've been shamed for mask wearing. A group of people said, mask, pussy, mask, pussy. Take it off, you pussy.

Go back to LA. Yeah. I didn't know that. I'll tell you what, I've been down on some pussies that ate a mask. Someone else did ask who opened for you

in Fort Lauderdale. So Amos is one. That's good. Lisa Curry. They said the Aussie had us cracking up. Good work in Fort Lauderdale. I just did the Jacksonville

Jack and Loser shit tape material. That's true. I was a real hack that night in Fort Lauderdale. He went up and did what Whitehead material. I was a real hack that night. He went up and did what Whitehead did. Your team's no good, man. Like he did a bit of that.

But people were writing to us. Amos obviously had a very good gig and they were going, who is the Australian bloke who opened for you? And Lisa Curry, who's Lisa Curry? And so I was writing back to people that Lisa Curry was Kylie Minogue because Americans don't quite know. And then when they Google, they'd be like, wow, she does other things. And I called you, what was it? Harvey Epstein.

Harvey Epstein. And I said, his name is Harvey Epstein. I was going to go Jeffrey Cosby, right? But I thought that's too on the nose. Harvey Epstein. And no one flinched. And then we took an edible and Jim went live on Instagram. Yeah, that was a good time.

We went live on Instagram and we talked about this and then you got upset because my brother called you fat. Yeah. Also, speaking of Lisa Curry, her comedy album is going to be up for Grammy consideration soon. Fantastic. You should go follow her on Instagram at Olympian Lisa Curry. Is she an Olympian?

No, but there is an Olympianian named lisa curry so she's trying to take all the heat all right there's also an australian swimmer who was called lisa curry for australia might have been her um on the tv episode uh a couple weeks ago uh someone said i really enjoyed kelly on this one she had a lot of interesting input and brought up some really good questions love you guys thank you for the show someone responded to that saying i'm always impressed by ke Kelly's intelligence. Oh, thanks guys.

I wrote that last coming. She seems so dumb every other time. And the word was surprise, not impressed. I've seen her wasted. On that same episode, someone said,

Kelly, you're looking awfully pretty today i love your voice oh thanks jim and forrest hilarious as always that was a misquote you're looking pretty awful today that's what i felt those two days i definitely felt awful looking that day they said jack dot dot dot uh frowny face jk love you bud be sure to audition for the next season of love on the spectrum let's turn that frown upside for the next season of Love on the Spectrum. Let's turn that frown upside down. The second season of Love on the Spectrum is out, and it is fantastic.

Have you ever thought of going that way for dating, infiltrating their- You think you could be the king of that world? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you're trying to deal with the rest of us. Go into the spectrum, dating pool. I have not considered it, now the hefner of autism i didn't want to make any fucking aimless is coming in biden's rvf signs real

people came up with some merch ideas for us uh someone really wants a t-shirt that says still born shark do do do do still born sharkshirt that says stillborn shark. Do, do, do, do. Stillborn shark. Do, do, do, do, do. Stillborn shark. Do, do, do, do, do. Stillborn shark. Do, do, do, do, do.

Yep. Yep. And then someone wants a Korag the caveman t-shirt. You can make these at home. You don't need us to make them. I believe I did send Korag the caveman to a graphic designer. I've never made an April 18th t-shirt and my audience is filled with them every show. There's people wearing them. I've never made one of meth t-shirt and my audience is filled with them. Every show there's, there's people wearing knockoffs. I've never made one of me live.

We are getting merch and I sent Korag the caveman to our graphic designer. So we're just waiting to see the designs back. So maybe we will have a Korag the caveman. And there's a Joe Finkel request. Joe Finkel for sure. Joe Finkel, first man on the moon. Saw at least five of those. So you guys remember a couple of weeks back,

I mentioned that tombstone that went missing. It was used to make fudge. Yeah, I remember that. So someone said, I'm from the area the fudge slab came from. People are obsessed with fudge. Someone stole that on purpose, and I guarantee every generation discovered its past and said, screw it. They're from a village where everyone's obsessed with fudge?

I guess so. I think it was like in Pennsylvania or something. Yeah, those people are weird. It would be those Dutch Pennsylvanians or whatever they are. Who are those fucking weird cunts? They're speaking like a different language in Pennsylvania. They're not even Amish. Oh, the Mennonites?

Like whatever Dwight Schultz meant to be. They speak like German or some shit. I don't know. I think they're Mennonites. There is like a breed of people there that are just like speaking German to each other or some shit, and they americans odd looking it up but i'll you can keep going um in that same episode you mentioned that you didn't do any dissection in australia so we had people right of course well that's not my experience and it was mine go fuck

yourself or were they agreeing with me what? Some people agreed with you they didn't do any dissection. But we had people writing from all over the world to see who did dissection and dissected what. So Canada, they did worms, starfish,

and fetal pigs. And apologized each time. Finland was fish, which I feel like makes sense. Herring, yeah. France was cow hearts and cockroaches. Yeah, but that was just them doing

cooking class hungry they said they didn't do it there which is weird because you know they're hungry be hungry um iran was cow's eyeballs right ireland just said yes they didn't say what the whole country said yes ire just said, you don't know me. Kenya was yes. What did the Kenyans dissect? Didn't specify. What, just a yes? I don't know if these polls are official, Jack. Oh, these are in the YouTube comments.

Oh, okay. Take what you will. Real stuffy. The Nigerians said yes and that they were a prince and they needed $1,000. New Zealand said they dissected mutton bird. Oh, mutton bird. That's someone taking the piss. They know where they didn't dissect mutton bird.

That's like dissecting lobster. Yeah, you can't dissect the mutton bird. Yeah, it's too good eating. I think Mennonites is right for the ones. Yeah, weird, isn't it? Now, for Australia, some people said, I didn't dissect shit and it's dumb. Other people said, yeah, we dissected a lot of things

and it was really bad. So someone left a horrifying comment. They said, in Adelaide, South Australia science class, they opened up living rats, stretched them, and pinned the skin to the board and watched the organs do their thing. Yeah. Amos, you went to school in Adelaide.

Was that your experience? Well, I went to a private school. So they did living people. We did public school kids. Yeah, they did their cleaner. This last one came from Nashville about dissection. They said, my biology two class in high school outside of Nashville, Tennessee went to an autopsy.

We were supposed to just view it, but then everyone was super into it and the examiner let us handle everything he took out two bodies male and female homeless people died from smoke inhalation in a building fire they were squatting in he was also the medical examiner that did elvis's autopsy oh i once had an ingrained hair in my back and it was like, it was quite like, you know, it was pronounced. And then I was in my 20s or something and I was in a doctor's place in Britain and they fucking brought in students to check it out. That's when, you know, they go, this is quite a difficult one. I haven't seen one quite like this. And then they're like, do you mind if we bring some people in?

This is a good one. And then all the students came in and go, well, what do you do here? And the doctor's like, we're not sure. This doesn't fill me with fucking optimism. Did they pop that? Oh, yeah, they cut it out. They had some stitches and everything. It wasn't just a pop.

It was like right in there. It was a fucking full fucking afro inside me back. It was krypton growing and curling around. I didn't like that. I didn't like that visual. Flash IDK. All right. Please welcome our guest today, Russ Biagio-Altman.

G'day, Russ. Now it's time to play. Yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, no. Judging a book by its cover. All right.

Okay. Let me see here. Russ is sitting in a room. There seems to be a kitchen off the side. That means Russ is probably at his house. All of our guests are in a room usually. That's not true. TJ was in an ice cream shop.

No one with a bloody kitchen off to the side. He's got a fireplace to the left. So he's in a sort of a waiting area. It's not an office as such. He lives in a home. He lives in a home. So that means I'm going to go not a doctor because doctors normally have a closed off area, you see, where they do doctor-y things. Are you a doctor?

Are you a doctor? Yes. Ah, fuck. Alright, so that changes my whole perception on doctors. Are you a medical doctor? Yes, I am. Do you specialize medical doctor? Yes, I am. Okay. Do you specialize in people? I should ask, are you a veterinarian? That's the other way to ask that question. Not a vet. No, not a vet.

Okay. But then you said people and everyone paused and sort of went, well. I just was thinking, wow, veterinarian would be a good subject. Yeah. I was thinking, I was like, she's talking about vet medicine, but not today. I was definitely thinking, well. They're fascinating vets, aren't they?

It's like, fuck me. All they know about is dogs and cats, right? Someone brings in a goldfish, they know fuck all what to do. They're doing a lot of guesswork with the turtle. They're going, oh, he's had some shell problems here. They don't fucking know. I will say, though, that Russ, and he told me I could call him Russ, just so everyone knows out there.

I will say that he's not limited to just people, what we're talking about today. It's all living things. All living things. Yeah. Is our subject today disease-related? Can be. It could be.

Okay. Is it? Yeah, I mean, it's not specifically disease related, but it could be related. Is it a part of the human body that we're going to discuss today? Yeah. In a sense. Sorry, you can answer. Okay, so

mental health. Are you involved with mental health? That would not be the focus. No. I'd say no. So when people come to you with mental health problems, you just go, can't help you. I'll give you a hint. You're a nut job.

I'll give you a hint. So you just had, you just had another kid. Yes, I did. And when you have kids, this is something that is, whether you think about it,

whether you know it or not, you're thinking about it. On suicide. No, you're looking at your newborn and you start looking at him and you're like okay and then when you're looking at him you're thinking about this subject whether you know it or not oh um uh care no it's kind of like all right it's got a lot of hair you pass this one yeah ethnicity the doctor of ethnicity.

Yeah, but that's what you do when you have a baby. You go, God, this doesn't look like. How about DNA? This is the best clue I can give you. Is it, are we talking about DNA today? Yeah. That's a clue. Yeah. Yeah. I would say yes. I would say yes to DNA. Genealogy.

Genetics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Genetics. Genetics. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I'm not a great genetic, genetic. We all know that you're not. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Genetics. Genetics, okay, yeah, okay. I'm not a great genetic species. We all know that you're not. Oh, yeah, both. I thought you were going to say you didn't know about genetics. No, I'm not a good, my genes aren't good.

My mother's side of the family pissed in that gene pool repetitively before it got to me. We got every problem under the sun. You want psoriasis? We got it for you. You want red dots that you can't explain all over your body? We've got it for you. You want to be dyslexic?

Join the Jeffries family. All right. Ross Biagio-Altman is the Kenneth Fong Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine, Biomedical Data Science, and by courtesy, Computer Science, and also the past chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. That's a good one.

Stanford University. I've heard of that one. That's a good one. Stanford. He is the founding editor of the annual reviews of biomedical data science and hosts a serious XM radio show show and an iTunes podcast entitled the future of everything. What I love about that is you said like medical things, that type of stuff. And then you fluff the word show. Yeah. All your other words, you're fucking out on lockdown man

so uh if you are interested in learning more about this subject or just in general uh uh subscribe to the podcast the future of everything on itunes podcast and what is it on sirius xm uh what channel is it on there it's the the business channel, which I think is 132. The business channel. They got a lot of channels. Oh, yeah. I once had a TV show on FXX, which was up in the sports section, and I had to try to sell it to people.

It's like, just pass the Premier League channel to the left. And Ross Altman, if you could just tell us a little bit more about yourself or what led you to this life. Yeah. So I was born in New York and I met the love of my life in Boston. And so we came out to graduate school at Stanford and we never left. Both of us are on the faculty. She's on the faculty in the law school. And I'm at the medical school in the School of Engineering. the faculty in the law school, and I'm at the medical school in the School of Engineering. Always interested in computers, but also wanted to be a doctor and just kind of paying attention to the world.

Noticed that not only was biology exploding with the Human Genome Project and things like that, but also computation was exploding. And they kind of intersect in genetics and genomics because it's a lot of data. And so you need to be familiar with computers and you need to be familiar with health. And I had my MD, I'm a general internal medicine doc, and you had to be familiar with genetics. So they kind of, that, what would you call it? That Venn diagram that intersects medicine, genetics, and computers is where I live. And I've been a faculty member at Stanford for almost 30 years,

and I love it. And it's great to see you guys today. And this is amazing. So your wife's a lawyer. Yeah. You're a doctor. You have kids? Three kids. Let's talk about genetics right now, right? Your kids are, I assume, extraordinarily smart, right? So my son is in law school. He's actually at the same law school that my wife went

to. And my youngest daughter is in medical school. And my middle daughter is in finance and law and has provided me with a grandchild who's three years old. I look at my children and I'm like, just don't burn anything. Well, let me be honest. That's what you're thinking for the first 20 years. And then they turn into upstanding, good contributing members of society. And it's like, Oh, thank goodness. Is it just me or do all of our experts make me feel like I'm doing nothing with my life? He's just like, yeah, I was a doctor, but then I decided it's like, I would have given up a long time ago. So kudos to you. Yeah. When I stopped doing standup comedy, I'm thinking I might be a doctor. You get yeah. You get the mature-age

student, right? They just let you in if you have a good letter. Your bedside manner would be impeccable. My bedside manner would be alright. I'd be good at that. I'd be like Patch Adams, but more sweary. What the fuck's going on here? Yeah, yeah, they should remake that

movie with me. Just me coming in with a red nose saying the word cunt a lot. Russ has a cousin that's a comedian, Ted Alexandro. You know Ted, right? I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He checked up on you because he didn't know you and Ted said good things about you.

Oh, that's very sweet of Ted. At least I'm assuming he did. I don't know. Russ just said he knew you. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm here. Russ is here. He's game.

He showed up. Yeah. Okay. So I'm here. That's why I'm here. Russ is here. He's game. He showed up. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to ask Jim some questions about genetics. And you can sit there and listen. And then at the end, give him a score of 0 to 10, 10 being the best on his accuracy. Kelly's going to grade him on confidence.

I'm going to grade him on et cetera. We'll add them all together. If you get 21 through 30, gene edX. Right? 11 through 20, khaki netX. 0 through 10, jort netX. You don't want the, gene edX. All right. 11 through 20, khaki netX. Zero through 10, jort netX. You don't want the jort netX. Kygo pants netX.

Yeah. Kygo pants netX. That would be a good one. I like jorts. All right. What is genetics, Jim? I knew that was the first fucking question. I was already sitting there going, he's going to ask that question.

Yeah, we got to ask the broad one. Genetics is what makes you you the biology of a person that passed down to you from your relatives that go into you so you can be genetically gifted at something because your parents are athletes you can be genetically smart because your parents are smart it's it's what's passed down through your genes who is considered the father of genetics Your parents are smart. It's what's passed down through your genes. Who is considered the father of genetics? Levi Strauss.

No, I would say the father. That would have something to do with DNA. Your DNA holds your genetics. That's the next question. So what is the father of genetics? Just a name. Fucking hell. I'm going to say, no, Andrew Dice Clay.

Okay. What is DNA and what does it stand for? DNA is the compound of, I think there's three different things and they can be in all the different combinations and they go in a spirally shape down there and everyone has a unique DNAna spiral club uh it's the the the fucking if i if i could have read up for five minutes i would have been good it's it's it's the genetic core okay it's the it's the strain strain the strain of dna what does dna stand for? Strain. Do not answer.

You said genes. What are genes? Genes are the DNA that is passed down to you from your relatives. What about mutations? Mutations is when your mother gets pregnant from your father, but another bloke was wanking in the spa and throws a little bit of cum in there. And that makes a mutation. Now, mutation is like, so when you watch Jurassic Park, right? You should just refer to Jurassic Park with the whole thing.

When you watch Jurassic Park, they put the genes together to make a velociraptor. And then they go, but we want him to have webbed feet. They throw a bit of duck in there okay i was just watching jurassic park last night and i will have a question for you russ about that i'm sure i don't know if you have the answer uh what are chromosomes wait what's a genome first uh a genome yeah is is what you say when a gnome enters the room gee no chromosomes what are chromosomes chromosomes you you want me to keep asking questions you don't want to have two y chromosomes at once that's what makes you down syndrome no i'm not saying bad but you don't that's you want to have an x and a y you'd have

an easier life you don't say yeah you'd have any you know ideally okay that's the answer for what are chromosomes x you have X and Y. The X and Y. You want one X and one Y. How many chromosomes do we receive from each parent? Fucking one each. Okay. Do you know what an allele is?

An African animal. Of course it is. We're going to skip ahead. It's a lionfish. It's like a snake with a lion's head. Let's see. I don't know. Fuck all about this.

I never did good at science. I was always bad at science. I stopped doing science. But then I believe in science. I just believe in other people doing it for me, and I will trust you. That's why I'm always harping on about atheism and all that type of stuff, and we have scientific proof. I'm not the guy who finds the proof.

Okay. I'm the guy who talks about the proof later on. What about homozygous? What does that mean? Homozygous, that would be the missing link. That would be the link between us and the apes. It was the first upright standing monkey. All right, I'm going to just ask you a few more.

Fuck. I'm going to ask you a few more. Give me nothing of confidence. I'll get through that. I'll come back to the questions. How about this? Are our personalities passed on through genetics? I believe so.

I believe that personality. I am a believer that nature over nurture and all that type of stuff, I believe that nurture has a little bit to do with how your personality is. If you're from abusive parents, you might grow up to be abusive. If you have something traumatic in your life, that will structure you as a person. But I think things like sense of humor and stuff like that. That's because you watched that documentary,

The Three Perfect Strangers. Oh, I've seen that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe that people come out of the womb pretty much well 80 built on what they're going to be like i have nephews and nieces and they're being brought up by the same parents and they have very distinctive personalities and there's no reason for it one one might be shy one will be more extroverted stuff like that i look at my brothers and we have three very different personalities i'm gonna ask you two more this one you might get since you've had kids yeah

what diseases are passed through genes because i know you've oh there's fucking tons of those yeah just name a couple um the red dots blood blisters that are on your fucking body i got them from your fucking mom those bloody things are passed on um i believe oh god what diseases apart there's loads of them. Loads, we'll put that. Yeah, I know. But let me think of some classics. Diseases that are passed on through genes. Dwarfism, it's not a disease, but it's a condition that is passed on if you have the disease. And then, because what happens is when you have a baby now, and they didn't do this before,

they will test you for certain diseases to see what you have and then they will test your partner to see if they have those diseases and and if you both have it there's a high chance that the child might have it if one of you have there's a very small chance that they will have it but if you both carry these things not meaning that you have the condition yourself but you're a carrier of it. I have a few different things. Extraordinary handsomeness was one of the things they had. But my wife didn't have any. But when I had my child with Kate, I remember they tested her and she had like 10 different things in her, right?

And then they tested her. Now there's hundreds of different things, but she had like 10 things she was a carrier for. And then they only tested me for the 10 things that she had because the other ones didn't really matter. So they tested us. And then we go back to the doctor and the doctor goes, oh, it's fine.

He doesn't have the 10 things. And then she was like, but what does he have? Because she assumed I was riddled with fucking birth defects coming out the fucking wazoo. Right. I said, what difference does it make? She just wanted me to have more than her.

Yeah. All right. That's one more question. Then we'll, we'll talk to Russ. Who is mitochondrial Eve? I get the fuck out of here. Forrest, you think I'm going to know what,

who mitochondrial Eve, I didn't even knew the word mitochondrial was a word. She's a rapper. Yeah. Mitochondrial Eve. She's the most, okay. The most intellectual porn star. She's a rapper. Yeah. Mitochondrial leave. She's the most, okay. The most intellectual porn star. Okay. All right. Uh, Ross Altman, how are you doing there? I'm good. I'm doing good. That must've been hard for you, Russ.

How did Jim do zero through 10, 10 being the best? Well, look, I heard a lot of truth. I heard a lot of truth. So there were some edges. There were some rough edges. But this is definitely not a zero to ten. And I'm going to give it in the high teens, low 20s. Am I allowed to say this? No, no, no. You go zero through ten.

We each do ten. Zero through ten. Yeah, ten's the best. I'm doing a seven. All right. Welcome. There's no way. Jim Jeffries. We're going to go back through these. Yeah, yeah is the best. I'm doing a 7. All right. Welcome. There's no way. Jim Jefferies.

We're going to go back through these, you know. He gets a 1 from me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Minus 25. I am kind of famous for being well-known as a pretty easy grader at Stanford. I think I should. Now is the time to mention that. Because somebody just talking about something I'm interested in,

he starts out with a 5. Yeah. All right. That makes sense now., he starts out with a five. Yeah. All right. That makes sense now. So he gets a two from me, technically. And I knew the thing about the testings with babies. Yeah, you just harped on about that. That's what Jim's trick is.

He goes, oh, I know sort of something about this. Let's keep going on. That's what everyone's trick is. That's how you get through conversations in life. Find a little niche that you know about and ramble. Ramble. Jortnetics. You're a jort. That's what you got. I don't even know what that is yeah jorts you know the jean shorts yeah who wears those

exactly they're like daisy dukes or are they no they're not they're bad no they're like where chorus pants and right now why are you why are you dressed like a fucking pitcher from the 1950s all right this isn't about me this is about. I didn't know you owned such long socks. I do. I love them. Alright, what is genetics? Jim says it's what makes you you. The biology of a person that has passed on you through your relatives. Is that the exact definition or what?

You know what? I gave full credit for that. That was in normal words, that is a very good description of what genetics is. I would have said the study of inheritance and that's essentially would have said the study of inheritance, and that's essentially what Jim said. Yeah. Study of inheritance.

Yeah, yeah. Don't call it that. The fucking government will tax it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The inheritance of traits, the inheritance of physical, disease-related, biological traits. We want 50% of your DNA.

So very good. So what's passed down through your genes is what he said, and that was full, full points. Okay. I asked him who is considered the father genetics. He said Levi Strauss or Andrew Dice Clay. So it is neither of those. I think the answer,

the answer is typically considered to be this guy, Gregor Mendel. He's the guy who did the crossed peas. He grew peas. He crossed the peas. However, I have to say that his name has come under question recently because there have been accusations that he might have fabricated some of his data. Some of the data actually looks too good so that maybe there was a little bit of cooking of the

books. So I'm not going to call anybody the father of genetics. And so I don't think I took no points off for not knowing about greg ormando but he would be the one traditionally who was cited i'm not gonna fucking give any credit that p hack yeah that seemed personal you can see you gave no points off even though he said no points off it was as good as anything i really gotta enroll in your class uh what is dna and what does dna stand for he said it's three different things that can be in different combinations and they go in a spiral and genetic core is the spiral the strain the strain of dna i wrote that in all caps dna do not answer i know he couldn't have

gotten points on that and don't give him points he's circling around truth there, but there's a, this is one of the rough edges. So first of all, DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, deoxyribonucleic acid. On the tip of my tongue. No big deal. It has four components, not three. So three is good. Three is in the ballpark of four. It may be in your family. They're the famous DNA bases, A, T, C, and G. uh he's right about the spiral we call it the helix the double helix um because you you get this beautiful you can't see me i don't know if you

can see this beautiful yeah a beautiful uh double like a double spiral staircase um which are complementary to one another uh and that is the dna double helix that was discovered in 1953 by watson and crick uh and they won nobel prizes and of course were very acclaimed for that they're also motorcycle bike attorneys yeah exactly they were big uh they were big partiers i read a book about they were uh what was the name of the book maybe it was called the double helix yeah and i remember they were just like they're big drinkers right they were like on party and drink and then they go do research and then they yeah i made this the pub was key to their discovery yeah i i um i russ you were just saying that you didn't know if i could see you i've only just figured this is a new new place where we're working out of the improv in

hollywood and um i know they're looking at you through a camera. I'm looking at you on a separate TV. I've just realized that for all the guests, they must think I'm so rude. I'm looking directly at you on a separate screen, but I'm not looking at Daniel down the camera. Gotcha. Yeah. In college was when OJ Simpson, you know,

allegedly had murdered some people. And I had two friends that decided to go as OJ Simpson's DNA. That's what they went as for Halloween. And so they just got all these balloons and put them in a spire around their bodies. And I'm like, there's no way anyone's going to know what you are. You're going to literally have to tell everybody. Why was it so specific that it was his DNA too? Because that was, you know.

My, my, my, my. It was of the times. My friend Dave Johns, who you'll know from I, Daniel Blake, and he won the Palme d'Or and everything like that, but he's a fantastic guy and an amazing comic, and I worked with him for many years, did one of my favorite jokes on this, and his joke was, they've just invented a morning after pill for men. What you do is you take it and it changes your DNA.

A morning after pill for men. What you do is you take it and it changes your DNA. All right. What are genes? Jim said the DNA that is passed down to you from your relatives. Yeah, that's so you could be more specific, but that is definitely true. We have our genome, by the way, is the set of all of our genes. So it's just that's all it is. The genome is all of our genes. So it's just that's all it is. The genome is all of our genes.

And each gene is a segment of DNA that is responsible for some part of biology. Like maybe it's involved with the color of your eyes or maybe it's involved with how well you metabolize certain kinds of food. So a gene is just a segment of the DNA that has a job. And so then you read about in the newspapers that a gene was found for X. It means that they found the segment of the genome that looks like it helps control X, which is a disease or a trait like how tall you are. Many traits, I use this word trait, many traits are the composite of multiple genes. So there's only a few things where one gene determines the whole thing.

So for height, for example, there are literally hundreds of genes that conspire to make you tall, short, or something in between. Okay, I thought you were going to say something. No, no, no. Look, we're about to get on this stuff about what makes you, right?

Because I've got a theory on what makes me me. Well, that genes, that's part of it. I've got a theory on what makes me well that jeans that's part of it i got a theory on what makes me my mother right my father's one of the funniest men that has ever lived but has zero stage presence right my mother has had nothing to say but commanded a room thank god it went this way it could have gone horrible you have nothing to say and don't want to be around people Thank God it went this way. It could have gone horrible. You have nothing to say and don't want to be around people. I could have gone the other way. So we can skip ahead there because Jim just brought that up.

Are our personalities passed on through genetics? He believes so. So is he being accurate there when he says that that's being passed down? There is no doubt. So this is an active area of investigation. So I want to be obviously always want to be totally candid about this. It is an area of research, but there is evidence for sure that this is one of those typical nature nurture. There is a huge component of nature, and that would be the genetics, just as Jim described with mom and dad and their sense of humor, these are very advanced. Sense of humor is one of the most advanced human capabilities. When you're learning a language, being able to understand jokes in that language is the last thing that you learn because it takes so much complexity understanding. So I think it's fair to say that large parts of your personality are

certainly inherited, but that nurture component also plays a role. And exactly how they trade off and how they interact is still an active area of research because you need geneticists, you need psychologists, you need social scientists. It's just very hard research to do because it's interdisciplinary and it's way beyond any one discipline to figure this out. So me and my brothers, right? I don't think I'm speaking out of turn here. They might get upset with me. Who knows? But my eldest brother doesn't have the funny gene. My middle brother does have the funny gene. My oldest brother has a lot of qualities that I wish I had. He's calm under pressure and doesn't freak out over fucking everything,

you know, wonderful things to have. But he doesn't have the funny gene. But then I look at all the nephews and nieces and my children, and there's certain ones that have the funny gene, and I knew it from when they were about one. I knew that one's got it, that one doesn't have it, that one hasn't. And so now a lot of pressure. My son has it.

My eldest boy has it. He's funny. New baby. The jury has it. My eldest boy has it. He's funny. New baby. It's jury's out. He's only seven weeks, but he hasn't made me laugh yet. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

One of the things that they say about parenting is that a lot of parents go in for the first kid and they think it's all about nurture because, you know, they've never had a kid before and they're going to say, I'm going to do all the things. And then they have the second kid and the first kid grows up. They have the second kid. And most parents move from nurture to nature in exactly the way I wanted to comment on this. And exactly the way that Jim mentioned at the top of the show, where you really become convinced that your kids, you can affect them at the edges. But a lot of what they

have seems to be built in. Yeah. Some kids are more sensitive than others. Some are a bit more tough. Some lose their temper quicker. There's not a lot you can do, man. My oldest brother is seven years older than me. And so we didn't really grow up together because he's really smart. So he was going to boarding schools and stuff like that throughout my youth. And we joke around that we met for the first time when I was 18. And it's, it's uncanny how similar our sense of humor is and just how much our personality is the same.

Especially because we just didn't grow up together. Right. So yeah, I have a friend, a good friend of mine and his, his mom um was uh his mom had a daughter that was taken away from her when he was when when she was born never met her never saw her and then through dna testing she found out this is saw her daughter like you know through

that met up with her i think she was in her 30s or 40s or whatever. And they both had the same degree in college and they had the same profession. Wow. And yeah, a doctorate in the good, pretty amazing. Like that kind of stuff. Yeah. So I give Jim, the way he said it was actually at the perfect level of certainty where he should have been. All right.

Have you seen that documentary? Three Perfect Strangers? Yeah. Three Perfect Strangers. Oh, I would like to see that. Oh, good do you know about it or yeah i've read a little bit about it three triplets and they all meet each other they all got adopted out the other families and there's a whole lot of stuff about the government doing tests and we won't get into that if you haven't seen the documentary oh i haven't seen that one yet for some reason i was

thinking you guys were talking about the other one where the kid was in an accident or oh no that's one where the mother got the kid molested all the time? Yeah. This one's not quite as dark. Okay. I think that these three guys were almost exactly my age. I think it happened just at the time that I was born is when they were born. And they showed up in college together, right?

One of them shows up to just I'll just say that one of them shows up to college after the other one had just left or something. And so they're all like, hey, how's it going? And they're like, what do you mean? I haven't met any of you. Exactly.

And that's how they end up connecting. And then they find out there's three of them because they were separated at birth. And I won't give anything away other than that. Three identical strangers. But they were identical in personality, everything. They were just the same guy. It's a nature nurture type thing, which is what you mentioned, too. So I should say that people who are identical twins are hugely valuable for that reason.

In fact, I think it's okay for me to say my daughter is dating an identical twin and he gets mail and email all the time asking him to sign up for studies because this is how you can do this nature versus nurture research. You take two people who are identical genetically and then you look for similarities and differences and that's how you figure it all out so if you know any identical twins they're golden oh we we know an identical twin that are the same fucking person finish each other's sentence and talk at the same jay nikita friends of the show i guess friends of ours yeah they're your family yeah yeah they're good friends of ours and they're the most fucking identical people i've ever met in my entire life they freak

the fuck out of me in a good way but they still are different they're still different qualities that are different about them but they're very similar so jim when he said he said he thinks they're 80 nature and then 20 nurture is there any like do we like is there any that would be different for every single thing you could ask that about would have would be different in that spectrum because there are things that we know are a hundred percent nurture yeah uh like your ability to speak a foreign language that has nothing to do with you well you know maybe some intelligence but basically that's nurture whereas there are other things that are 100 nature and. And for anything you could ask me, height, predilection to get a heart disease, diabetes,

I would have to give, I would have to put that bar somewhere different between zero and a hundred. Oh, this is an, so I was an egg donor for like 11 years and I got matched with this couple at one point. And then they found out I have tattoos and they decided not to go with me. And they're like, they were like, I was like, tattoos are not genetic, but is there like a proclivity to get tattoos or piercings? I'm wondering if that's something that they test in genetics is like, is there like a daredevil gene or something like,

I've jumped out of a plane, I've done all these things. Thrill-seeking. Yes. I'm sure it's been studied. I'm not up on that literature, but I would be stunned if there isn't a literature on people who are risk-takers versus people who are more like, I'm not going to be a risk-taker. I've had a couple of, I would say, mild addiction issues in my life, tobacco and this and drinking and whatever. But I hear addiction's a thing that's a genetic thing as well that you you have a a predisposition to being an addict if you had a parent who was an

addict is that a nature or nurture thing because you saw someone drinking all the time because you have the gene in you that's a great example of something that's both in fact that's my area my so my area of specialty within genetics is your response to drugs. And it turns out that like when you, some people, when they take opioids like codeine or morphine, they have a much different response than others in terms of the high that they get. And that has been shown to correlate with the people who are more likely to become addicts. It doesn't explain everything, but that's part of the equation. But the other part of the equation is access to the stuff and other things that might be more part of the nurture side. But yeah, so that's a great example

of something where not only is your surroundings might be leading you to either be exposed to drugs or try them, but then your physiological response makes that first experience that much more pleasant than the guy next to you. I don't think I'm speaking out of turn here either. I've suffered from depression on and off in my life. My father had quite bad depression throughout his life. Is that something that's passed on or is it just misery? Depression is very genetic.

So, again, it's not a hundred percent but when you look at families it it tracks through the family in a very reliable way and in fact a lot of you know you hear about alcoholism running in a family a lot of times that alcohol is a self-medication for the for the depression and so what you're actually seeing when you see a family history of alcoholism which by the way is in my family as well, could be also a family history of depression. Yeah, I'm I'm going to see my dad next week for the first time in 30 plus years or whatever. But when I hadn't spoken to him in almost that long, too. And when I spoke to him, he told me I'm a compulsive gambler.

And I found out he was, too. He didn't say he was a compulsive gambler, but he told me a lot of stories about gambling and losing money and he kind of said i had some gambling problems and i go all right thanks a lot dad he actually he actually said i bet i had it worse than you so i blame him i find it must be hard for people when you go okay so i gave that 80 is genetic and 20 and we can't put a number on that as we've just sort of said, but it like when people say things like, how does Jeffrey Dahmer's brother feel when he's sitting there going, Oh,

I'm a bit of a different person. Like it must be hard for him to date. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. That would be, don't put that change your last name. Well,

I, but that, that, that really, Jim, that's that really, Jim, that's a super important point that I'm going to take a moment. I'm going to get on my professor pedestal. It's super important for people to feel that no matter what their genetic

background is, you know, you're as a human with a, with a brain, you can overcome a lot of the things that you might not be worried that you might be worried about. So I, I don't like, there's a phenomenon called genetic determinism where people find out, oh, I have a slightly increased risk for depression or for smoking. They throw in the towel and they say, well, that's it. I'm going to smoke. I'm going to be depressed. That's not the lesson I would want people to hear because we have many stories of people overcoming despite a predilection to go in one direction they figure

out how to go in another direction and i want to give that's an important message for people for obvious reasons that you want to be in control of your life i know i feel like i'm the best version of myself i've been in my life but it's it's very hard to change it's just little tiny steps i'll do this better i won't do that wrong again i'll learn from my mistakes some sort of stuff and you fucking hell man well it's easy to use those things as a scapegoat too for things that you don't want to put the work into change like just in any situation where somebody's like well i'm not good at this thing so deal with it it's like well you can get better at that thing just fucking try i've always said if you learn from your mistakes i'm a fucking genius there you go what are mutations jim just said jurassic park

he said to my doctor that way we don't know that's basically what i got from his description so so uh yeah so let me just say uh i i um yeah there was a whole thing about mother getting pregnant from another guy that is not that we're not given any points for that. That's not quite. I didn't even mention that. That's right. Yeah. My mother didn't like that. So a mutation is when you have your DNA and something happens that changes one of those DNA letters.

I said there were four letters, A, C, T, G, C, A, C, T, G, A, C, T, G. And if one of those gets changed, and it often happens during procreation. So, you know, mom gives you A, A, A, but all of a sudden, because something messes up during the process of infertilization, it's now A, A, T. That T, that used to be an A for mom, is a mutation mutation and that can change the gene and how the gene works. And so we all, we have, so I don't want to get too much into numbers, but one genome, one human genome is 3 billion DNA letters. So that's ACTG in a long, long string, 3 billion long,

which by the way, fits on your phone. So it sounds like a big number, but it is very finite. If I had a flip phone, would it still fit on that one? Well, flip phones, it would be tight. Every time we make a new human in the usual way, there are probably 50 or 100 of those DNA bases that spontaneously change letters. So you're not getting it from mom and you're not getting it from dad. It was just literally a little mistake in the copying that the cells were doing at the time that they made you. So that's where mutations come from.

I should say mutations are important because over the billions of years of evolution, it's the mutations that introduce the changes that allow selection to happen in the Darwinian sense of natural selection. So now all of a sudden, if that mutation that I got gives me fitness so that I can survive in a situation where my parents would not have been able to survive, I'm going to grow up and be able to reproduce. And that's how evolution happens. So I'm trying to follow this. So we all, we all have mutations. Everybody has 50 or a hundred mutations. And then do they become our core genetic pools?

Those mutations get passed on to somebody else. They just become standard in our genetic pool. That's exactly right. And then your kids are going to have 50 or a hundred different ones. I tell you what, I've had two children now with two different women and fuck me if the women don't get upset when the baby looks exactly like you. Both times this thing came out looking like me and the women get depressed. I go, you know, it's yours. You were there. You've got dominant genes. How do I get to be able to control the weather that's a mutation i want that that's a tough one yeah yeah you think this is like x-men yeah exactly

that's what a mutation is like storm yeah yeah exactly what are chromosomes jim said you want to have an x y y y makes you have down syndrome that was his answer so so jim was jim was circling the truth i'm gonna i'm gonna give him so i'm gonna say circling that's gotta be the neumonic special circling the truth that's actually great circling the truth that's a good name you're gonna have to send russ some 50 for that time men and women have 22 chromosomes that we all have then uh men have x and y where for their sex chromosome. And so Jim, you were talking about sex chromosomes where women,

women are XX. So you get an X from dad and an X from mom. That makes you a woman. If you got an X from mom, mom only has Xs to give. So mom is always going to give an X, but whether you get a Y or an X from dad determines whether you are a biological male or

female. So there are 23 chromosomes, the 22 that everybody gets, uh, plus X and Y, which is the sex chromosome, which would be number 23. So at the risk of getting out and you've heard of this company, for example, 23 and me, that's why they're called 23 and me. It's about your 23 chromosomes. So, so at the risk of getting us in a lot of trouble right now. So when it comes down to sex, scientifically, there's only two sexes or can that be, you know, there's people like hermaphrodites and stuff like that. I'm not talking about what people feel about internally or whatever,

but scientifically you can only do it that way, right? So it's tricky and I want to be, as you said, I want to be very sensitive. So XX would be a biological female. XY would be a biological male. But as you said in your answer, sometimes we get an XXY or we get a YY. That shouldn't happen under a kind of typical situation. And so, those folks, really, there's not a good name for what they are. And what people tend to do is they call them by what they look like. And maybe that's okay, but there are these unusual, atypical combinations where we really

haven't defined it. And then you're absolutely right that gender which is how somebody identifies is a whole different ball that's another conversation altogether i don't want to get anyone in and it's interesting when you talk about something that's so complex where it's you have three billion what would you say three billion genes or three billion of those letters yeah so it's like and mutations happen regardless it seems crazy to me that people can't fathom the idea that mutations can happen that make people feel different ways or genetically predisposed to do certain things. It's like the body's so complicated. How is it so hard to understand that something like this might happen?

Here's a question for you. And is there any evidence or any tests that have been done? Is your sexuality given to you by your genetics? That is a, what we would call a third rail question, right? Very sensitive. Yeah. There have been lots of publications about this, and it seems that there may be some genetic determinants of, for example,

whether somebody is gay or not gay. And that is an active area of study for some and not an active area. I'm a believer that you're born gay. I don't believe that people, I don't believe it's a nurture thing. I believe you're born a homosexual or heterosexual. But I didn't know if there was any tests to go, you had Arnie Flo was a lesbian and now you might be, you know, I didn't know if there was any, any, any information.

I'm unaware of any genetic test I can call that. It looks to be too complex for it to be at least a simple test. Yeah. If only two gay fellas could have a baby, then we'd find out. Yep. Well, they could try. With help from Kelly. How many chromosomes do we receive from each parent?

Jim said one each. Yeah, I was right. 23. I was way out of that one. Yeah, you get one genome from each parent, but really you're getting the 23 chromosomes from each parent. Is that why Jordan's number was 23? Because he's perfect.

Yeah, probably. It could have been. I don't know if he's perfect. Is he a documentary? He's a perfect basketball player. He had some social issues. Maybe he was a little bit too competitive. I'll tell you what, I was chatting to my son the other day,

like a competitive nature, that must be a genetic thing, right? People who are athletes have things. Because my son is showing a bit of skill in sport, more skill than I had. His mother's more athletic than me. But I realized like two days ago that my son will not grow up to be a professional athlete because I was watching the Dodgers play. And he said to me, he goes, why do people care if they win the World Series?

Is it actually important? And I was like, well, it is important. And he goes, why is it important? I go, because we say so. He didn't understand. He goes, if you lose, so what? We all move on with our day. i'm like oh no yeah but i mean i i was the same way at his age like and i played division one volleyball like i was i was never individually competitive i was still you don't want an overly competitive child

that's a fucking pain in the neck the one that flips the monopoly board over every time they don't get fucking mayfair those cunts are fucking off the hook but i didn't i didn really care about winning them. I won a lot. My mom told me a story one time. I was at a swim meet and I got second for the first time. And so I got a red ribbon and I went up to the ribbon table and I go, excuse me, I get the blue ones. So, you know, it's funny you're mentioning this. One of my good friends is a sports writer, and he's written for almost all sports. He said that the one thing that is universal in these high-level professional athletes is incredible competitiveness over anything. They just are competitive. And probably that's a case where a part of that is going to be nature. And part of it is nurtured is they would not be competitive professional athletes if they didn't have this incredible level of competition.

I felt I was more competitive in my twenties than I am now. My competitive nature is almost gone. No, you're pretty competitive. Yeah. But you didn't know me in my twenties. I was a pain in the neck. I play video games against you. You're also very competitive with yourself.

You hold yourself up to a really high standard. It's the whole thing. If you want to be the best, you have to in the neck. I play video games against you. You're also very competitive with yourself. You hold yourself up to a really high standard. That's the whole thing. If you want to be the best, you have to beat the best. What? I set it up. He knocked it down. Allele. Jim said it's an African animal.

I said it's a- Yeah, it is not. Yeah, go ahead. You want to amend that? I'm sorry. No, it's a lion eel. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm sticking with it, man. Anything you say to amend that? I'm sorry. No, it's a lion eel. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I'm sticking with it, man. Anything you say, I'm going to disagree with. What is it? In genetics, because I'm going to steer clear of Jim by just saying in genetics, an allele is the type. Okay. So as I said, you get one from mom and one from dad. Well, I didn't actually say this, but for every gene, you're going to get one copy from mom and one copy from dad. And they may have little differences because not all humans are the same and they're not identical twins.

And the allele is the different versions of a gene that are available. So for some genes, we know that there's hundreds of different versions of that gene floating around in the human population. So there would be 100 alleles. For some genes, they're so critical to human biology that it cannot tolerate any mutations. If you get a mutation, you don't live. And so for those, there's only one allele because we've never seen any living human who was able to have a mutation that didn't wreck that gene. So the alleles are simply the choices for the number of choices that are available for any particular gene or genetic element. Here's a question I'm pretty sure I know the

answer for, but is there anything you can fix in a parent that can be passed down to the child already fixed? In the sense that, so I've struggled with hair loss. I'm follically challenged. I've done a lot of transplants and take tablets and stuff to keep my hair. If I could take a pill now to fix that, would my children be safe from the misery of going bald? Up until today, the answer has been no. Up until today, the answer has been no. But a Nobel Prize was given a couple of years ago to a woman named Jennifer Doudna, who has figured out a way to edit your genome in such a way that it could be passed down

to your children. So the next big thing in medicine, and this is somewhere between five and 50 years away, but it's coming, will be our ability. And there are trials, there are clinical trials for some very focused ones, even right now. So, but the future is coming. And that was a question that we didn't get to, but I'm glad you asked this question because it's, I think it's really important for people to realize that our ability to go in and fix things about your genome and then have you pass it down to your children is rapidly coming. And that's going to be a huge ethical and technical challenge. The technical challenge is how do we do it and not

have people totally messed up? The ethical challenge is what are we allowed to change that is not going over the line? Right. So I imagine ethically the things would be things like if you could cure diabetes in a person. So diabetes isn't something that runs in the family. Ethically, if, I don't know, if a woman wanted bigger breasts or something like that, something cosmetic would be an ethical thing or is it just. Exactly. Exactly. Do you use a bazooka to solve problems that might not be bazooka level problems?

And then this is not, the important thing to say about this is this is not up to the scientist to decide. This is a social, cultural, societal conversation is where do we want this? Like what's insurance going to cover? You can think about, there's a little bit of a precedent in plastic surgery. There are plastic surgeons who do things like after a burn that your insurance would probably reimburse. There are other types of plastic surgery that you might want. We don't have to go into the details where the insurance company would say you are on your own. And it may be that someday that will be the same conversation, but it may even be that society will say certain things are just not

allowed. We value diversity in our society and in our population. And just because everybody wants to be six foot four doesn't mean we're going to allow everybody to be six foot four or everybody to be blonde or whatever the trade is. So this is going to be a very interesting discussion, which has already started. But my basic point is that that will be a capability that we will have probably in our lifetimes. Both times when I found out that I was having sons, I asked the women I was having the child with, what was your dad's dick like? Because I wanted him to have a fighting chance. How did those conversations go?

You don't want to inherit this thing. Great example of where society needs to have a conversation. Yeah, we were going to get to that question when we got there, so we're skipping around. Alleles, we covered that. But allele, so any, just getting back to allele, that could be variant, would be the color of your eye or like shape your body or something like that. But then there's other ones that you say have to be the same always. Okay. What does homozygous mean?

And Jim just said the missing link the link between us and the apes yeah i'm gonna say that i think he was thinking of and this is totally understandable jim uh there's you know our species is called homo sapiens and there's homo australopithecus and there's a million homo this homo that which are different human-like um human-like strands uh of baboons basically we're a baboon and there were others that we were competing with and obviously we won and they were all extinct and i think that's where your mind was going but the word homozygous is actually unrelated to that okay homozygous just means uh the allele that you got from mom and the allele that you got from dad are exactly the same. So you have two copies that are identical.

And that's important because you were mentioning the screening that you might have done for the kids. And what they were asking is, mom had this problem at a certain gene. If you had a two, then there was a risk that the kid would be homozygous and have two bad copies and would get disease. And so what they were telling you during that counseling was that mom had a bad copy. You had two good copies. So no matter which of the copies you give to the kid, the kid will have at least one good copy. And so

we don't have to worry about that disease. Right. So this is why you shouldn't impregnate siblings and stuff like that, right? Exactly. Because we're going to have the same genes. And you'll have the same problematic genes and it's a much higher chance that your offspring would have two bad copies and lead to problems. How far can you go into your family gene pool? I'm not asking for a friend. Look, there's this hot cousin I have, right? How many cousins removed?

Yeah, how far can you go in your gene pool when it's okay? Because, like, you know, you grow up in a small town, so you don't know that your third cousin, for example, the royal family, the royal family, the queen and Prince Philip were cousins, distant cousins, but they were related. How far can you go before you don't get Prince Charles ears? So this is not my expertise, but just because I'm interested in it,

I have read recently that they think that third cousins are probably safe and fourth cousins are almost certainly safe. So siblings are a no. First cousins are a let's just stay away and then uh second cousins are borderline but then third cousins you begin to be like okay this is the baseline risk that you would have if it was a total stranger right okay good news for you louise now remember a third a third, wait. Louise. You can't see Louise. You can't see Louise.

He's little face. I don't know what Kelly's referring to, but Louise is the one recording all the sound for us now, and he does all the editing. I'm sure he's got a hot cousin somewhere. Oh, I thought you knew. He's got so many hot cousins. So just to review, a first cousin shares a grandparent.

A second cousin shares a great grandparent. A second cousin shares a great grandparent. A third cousin shares a great, great grandparent. But if you're at a club and you meet somebody who shares a great, great grandparent, you probably can go for it. Yeah, right. All right. The thing is, I'm asking is you might find out too late. Yeah.

That happens. There must be a lot of people that did Ancestry.com and go, let's just send in these things and then the results came back oh my yeah um all right personalities pastor genetics we talked about nature nurture oh what diseases are pastor genes jim said red dots blood blisters loads i've got loads of stuff but there's yeah he's right there's things baldness and stuff i wouldn't call baldness a disease but it should be called a fucking disease bloody kills people extraordinary handsomeness is that one of them well uh well well to some degree yes and in fact so i'm giving full points to jim on this question because he made a lot of

comments a lot of his side comments were right on target like there's loads yes he he even i think at some point he said well that's not really a disease that's just kind of I forget the word he used but it was like trait or just a condition that was also correct so that was that showed a high degree of sensitivity and that was good and and so you know that there are diseases that are called Mendelian diseases remember Gregor Mendel the guy who might be a cheater Mendelian disease are where it's a very straightforward uh inheritance like um if some of these those are like if you're if one parent or the other has it you're very likely to have it and others are both parents need to have

it and then you might get it um and then there are much what we call complex diseases and those are the ones that tend to involve many, many genes. But if you include, there are thousands of Mendelian diseases, and those are the ones, by the way, that they were checking in your kids. Most of those are Mendelian, where they're looking for two bad copies. But if you count diseases that are complex genetics, then depression, diabetes, schizophrenia, Crohn's disease, certain types of cancer all have genetic components. So the answer really is loads. And it's infectious disease even where you say, well, how could that be genetic?

I just got exposed to, you know, I got exposed to E. coli and now I'm sick of stink. Even those have some genetic determinants. So, yeah, this is one of the promises of genetics is to kind of help health. I got to tell you, man, you got comedy special titles out the wazoo. What was this next one? What was the other one? Sick of stink. Sick of stink.

Sick of stink. I'm writing these all in the notes. So we went over, can we alter genetics? Do genes control how we respond to drugs? You spoke that you said that was your specialty too right yeah that was yeah so i have a clinic where um folks come who've had terrible side effects to drugs that they weren't supposed to have and then we look at their genes and we figure out if any of these bad side effects can be explained because they have a different version of a gene that causes them to either metabolize the drug or respond to the drug differently. Here's a question for you. I'm

sure there hasn't been any research done, thank God. But is there any animal we can procreate with? Like, you know, you can make a liger, a lion and a tiger, you can make a liger. Can we make a half gorilla person? Is that possible? Asking for a friend? That was going to be one of my dinner party ones, but I have another one. So let me just tell you. There is evidence that humans like us made babies with Neanderthals. And in fact, you can see in the DNA of almost all people who have European ancestry.

Any Trump rally. You can see the DNA. have european ancestry any trump you can see the dna right you can see evidence of that neanderthal dna in many people of european descent even today in our dna and in fact some of these companies will tell you what percent neanderthal you are yeah based on that analysis yeah i did 23andme and it says i had no neanderthal but but i could i was like what i didn't even know that was a thing so i am not aware of any other non-extinct species that we can make babies with but if you guys find out about one let me know all right well i'll go around fuck some animals and tell you what my results are okay last question here before we

get to denny party facts glad you have another one. Who is Mitochondrial Eve? Jim said, I'll get the fuck out of here for us. Most intellectual porn star. Wrong. So I liked his answer, and this is in the weeds. So I don't think you could. I'm not faulting Jim for not knowing this, but it's kind of a cool idea. So most of your DNA, as I've said like three times, is half from your dad, half from your mom.

But there are these little tiny things in your cells called mitochondria, and you inherit your mitochondria pretty much 100% from your mom. Which means that if you think about a young woman, she has mitochondria that she got from her mom. Her mom got them from her mom. So it's a maternal line all the way back. And so mitochondrial Eve is the very first homo sapiens human woman who had the mitochondria that basically all her daughters, daughters, daughters, daughters, daughters now have. So it was basically the first woman mitochondria. And so we like to think about the mitochondria leave,

and this is the Adam and Eve idea, is that she was the first Homo sapiens probably in the middle of Africa somewhere, probably about 200,000 years ago. And can they test your blood for it? And if you have a high count, can you become a Jedi? That was just for Jack. That was good. That was good.

I'm speechless. What is that called? Midichlorian. Yeah, midichlorian. Yeah, that's close. Very good. Very good. Were you listening to his answer at all?

No, I was just ready for that joke. There's no clue what mitochondria are. Here's what I have to ask, just on a personal level. With the, okay, so is this a wives tale old wives tale the um the baldness gene comes from the mother's father or is that just bullshit no i think that is based in some truth it's one of these traits that is more complicated than just that but um i believe that there is scientific evidence that um and and that would be tricky right because the mom is supposed to be handing down things randomly.

So she could give you her mother's or her father's. So right there, you know that it can't be 100 percent because let's say there was just one gene for baldness, which there almost certainly is more than one. But let's say it was just one. And if your grandfather had it, he there's only a 50 50 chance that he would have given it to your mother. And there's only a 50 50 chance chance that he would have given it to your mother. And there's only a 50, 50 chance that she would give it to you. So there's still an effect of your grandfather on you statistically,

but it's not in stone because of these like dice rolls that happened during, during reproduction. Cause I don't know if I subconsciously did it or consciously did it, but both of the women that I've had children with their fathers have got great headed hairs. Yeah. Awesome. Kate's dad. And huge dicks. He kept his hair during chemo. He died of pancreatic cancer.

He kept a full head of hair during chemo. I like those odds. All right. As you mentioned, it's time for the dinner party fact. You have another one for us that you can tell us, our listeners, something interesting. I thought you just called him Forrest. I thought I was about to go, that's your name? You have another one for us that you can tell us our listeners something interesting you just called him forest i thought i was about to get that's your name yeah like you have another one forest yeah i'm losing my mind uh so what do you have for our listeners that they can use to impress

people at a dinner party or bar okay have you guys heard of genghis khan i have yeah the restaurant. He was also a, you know, a very a savage guy who took over most of what is now Mongolia and and Western China. Well, he was reproductively extremely successful. What I mean by that is by hook or crook, he had a lot of children and his children who were of course the son of Genghis or daughter of Genghis but I'm talking about sons here um his sons also um were very uh reproductively successful so why am I telling you all this uh Genghis Khan has 16 million direct descendants alive on earth today. One out of every 200 males on the face of the earth is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. The rest of us is Sinatra. How do you find out? Can you find out?

It's very easy to find out because in the same way that I was telling you about the Maya Angia, I think many of us know because we were talking about before you get if you're if you're a guy, you get your Y chromosome from your dad. Your mom doesn't have any Y chromosome. That's what makes you a man. And so your dad's dad's dad's dad, that Y chromosome comes right from your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather on the paternal, paternal, paternal, paternal side. And so what they have is they have all these men who have the exact same Y chromosome. And when you go back and look in Mongolia, you see a concentration there. And then when you go to the historical records and open up a history book, the only place they could have come from would have been somebody who was having lots of children

about 900, 1,000 years ago, and guess who that is? Genghis Khan. Okay, that's when we meant to end the podcast, but I just thought. Is there doctors like yourself or is there anyone out there or are there computers that can look at your DNA strains and your chromosomes and all that type of stuff without looking at a person and say, that's going to be a white person with blonde hair and blue eyes or a black person that's this tall or whatever? Can you do that? For ethnicity? Absolutely. For $100, you can get

that. And I have it. My whole family has it. And it can tell you, in some cases, it can tell you within 50 miles where some of your ancestors were from. And so I know that I have a little bit of Irish, a little bit of Italian, and they can do that across the globe with different levels of resolution. So the ancestry, the answer is definitely yes, and it's 100 bucks or less. Trickier to do things like your traits, like what color, but we can estimate height to within three or four inches, I believe is the latest work. Hair color and eye color, we can estimate. And so that's what genetics is all about. You've actually taken us full circle.

Genetics is about taking the DNA and seeing how much we can predict, hopefully useful information about health, but also about other stuff. That'll be a good game show. Just put three people up there, a couple of scientists. What's your DNA? I'll host it. Dr. Russ Biagio-Altman, thank you for being here. And I want to mention the podcast again.

It's called The Future of Everything. There's a couple of podcasts. I just subscribed to it. There's a couple of ones. This one said Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything. Yes, Wall Street Journal has one. They stole the name from us, but I can't get anybody to sue them. Well, your kid's a lawyer.

Your wife's a lawyer, right? We're going to work on that. Just ask a dinner, man. So please listen to that podcast. I'm just looking through it. A lot of cool guests on there. You have a lot of episodes on there. So subscribe.

160. Yeah. Subscribe and listen to that. Also, if there's anything else you'd like to promote, I see you have a Twitter handle. It looks like you're active on there so subscribe 160 yeah subscribe and listen to that um also if there's anything else you'd like to promote i see you have a twitter handle or you it looks like you're active on there do you want that's all it's all professional stuff at rb r rb as in boy altman and that's stuff related to the show but also related to stuff that happens in genetics or computing that i think is interesting yeah that's on twitter well thank you very much for being here

uh we really enjoyed it. It was a lot of interesting stuff. Yeah, Russ, I love this. I'm going to listen back to this episode to pick up on what was said. Thank you so much for being on the show. We really appreciate it, Doc. If you're ever at a party, right, someone walks up to you and goes, you're not related to Genghis Khan.

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