Cuts Both Ways

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0:38We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. I want to start the show with an apology to those of you who are nervous flyers, which includes me. Yuko Munakata knows how we feel. Yes, it is still hard to talk about even all this time away from it. This was a flight when we were living in Boston. About 20 years ago, after getting their psychology PhDs, Yuko and her husband were working at MIT. And we were traveling to Stockholm for a research collaboration.

1:28They were taking an overnight flight. And we had dinner and the flight attendants were clearing the trays. And we hit some turbulence and the plane just dropped. The plane just dropped suddenly. And, you know, my heart started pounding. At first, a bunch of teenagers at the back let out a whoop like they were on a roller coaster. So it felt like, OK, just some turbulence. It's going to be OK. But then it happened again, and it was incredibly strong. Just this huge drop that led the food carts to hit the ceiling. and the force of these drops led the panels in the ceiling to fly upward and that revealed the sort of wiring going along the length of the plane and the ceiling was crumbling dust.

2:30I mean, it just felt like the plane was falling apart. You know, those whoops just completely gave way to people screaming and sobbing. I just curled up into this ball and started rocking. And then it happened a third time. We weren't just falling, but we're actually being actively thrust downward. Oh, gosh. And finally, the pilot said, we don't know what that was. We don't know what's coming. Stay in your seats. Oh, gosh. And the screaming just started again. I mean, it just was the least reassuring thing. you could possibly hear. The plane finally leveled out. And the rest of the flight actually went pretty smoothly.

3:20And eventually they landed safely in Stockholm. A few weeks later, Yuko and her husband got a letter from the airline explaining what had happened. It was clear air turbulence. And we learned that the planes are built to withstand forces up to, I think, 8G or something, many times greater than what we experience, which is really mind-boggling. So despite terrifying the bejesus out of the passengers, their plane was never in any danger of crashing. But Yuko and her husband reacted completely differently to this news. So he came away from it feeling like planes are incredibly safe. Gosh. We could have gone through things way worse than that and still have been completely fine.

4:13Planes are great. This is this amazingly safe way to travel. Whereas I came away from it feeling like I just I've never been able to fly like I used to fly before this incident. Even just talking about it now, you know, my palms are sweaty, feel myself trembling a little bit. And even if I know all these things in the abstract, I still can't help it. If there's turbulence, my mind just, you know, immediately goes back to that experience. We've all heard the saying, there are two sides to the same coin. Like an awful experience that traumatizes someone but reassures another. Or a person's charisma and drive that helps them become wildly successful but also causes their downfall.

5:01or new technology that has the potential to make our lives infinitely easier, but could also ultimately destroy us. Today on the show, cuts both ways. We investigate the mixed blessings and volatile flip sides of things that appear intensely wonderful. And for psychologist Yuko Munakata telling the story about that long-ago flight, where she finds it helps explain her research into parenting and child development. It had a really strong influence on me. I still carry that with me more than 20 years later. But it had a completely different influence on my husband, who was there right next to me experiencing the exact same thing.

5:43So just as she and her husband walked away from the same incident with different perspectives, Yuko says there's no predicting the impact that parents will have on their kids. There are some really surprising findings from this work that attempts to tease apart all the many influences that are often swirling around and intermixed in shaping who kids become. Here's Yuko Munakata on the TED stage. Parents want what's best for their children. And parenting books promise to show how to achieve the best outcomes. To address the difficult decisions that parents face every day. and in the process to reveal why each of us turned out the way we did.

6:30The problem is that parenting books send conflicting messages. Tiger parenting or free-range parenting? Parent like the Dutch to raise the happiest kids in the world or like the Germans to raise self-reliant children? The one consistent message is that if your child isn't succeeding, you're doing something wrong. There's good news, though. The science supports a totally different message that is ultimately empowering. Trying to predict how a child will turn out based on choices made by the parents is like trying to predict a hurricane from the flap of a butterfly's wings. If you are a parent, you are the butterfly flapping your wings.

7:21Your child is the hurricane, a breathtaking force of nature. You will shape the person your child becomes like the butterfly shapes the hurricane. In complex, seemingly unpredictable, but powerful ways, the hurricane wouldn't exist without the butterfly. Wait, you might ask, what about all the successful parents with successful children? Or the struggling parents with struggling children? They might seem to show the simple power of parenting. But children can be shaped by many forces that are often intertwined, like successful parents, successful genes, and a culture of success that they grow up in.

8:04This can make it hard to know which forces influence who children become. I mean, it's the old age-old question, right? Like nature versus nurture. And are we getting any closer to actually answering that question? Yeah, so parents can be one part of that, but there could be any of these other things. Studies that have tried to pull apart all these interacting factors have led to a surprising conclusion, which is that who we turn out to be is shaped by the genes we receive from our parents and by something in the environment, too, but not parents. not something in the environment that leads kids growing up in the same home to be more like each other.

8:56So, for example, if you see a parent who's really impulsive and then you see their child is acting impulsively, you might think, oh, well, the parent, because they're behaving this way, the kid sees that and they mimic it. But if they're related genetically, it could be something about their genetic variants that are leading both of them to behave in that way rather than the parent shaping the kids. Millions of children have been studied to disentangle all those shaping forces that are usually intertwined. These studies follow identical twins and fraternal twins and plain old siblings, growing up together or adopted and raised apart.

9:38And it turns out that growing up in the same home does not make children noticeably more alike in how successful they are or how happy or self-reliant and so on. Imagine if you had been taken from birth and raised next door by the family to the left, and your brother or sister had been raised next door by the family to the right. By and large, that would have made you no more similar or different than growing up together under the same roof. On the one hand, these findings seem unbelievable. Think about all the ways that parents differ from home to home, and how often they argue, and whether they helicopter, and how much they shower their children with love.

10:24You would think that would matter, enough to make children growing up in the same home more alike than if they had been raised apart. But it doesn't. In 2015, a meta-analysis, a study of studies, found this pattern across thousands of studies, following over 14 million twin pairs across 39 countries. They measured over 17 ,000 outcomes, and the researchers concluded that every single one of those outcomes is heritable, so genes influence who children become. But genes didn't explain everything. The environment mattered, too. Just something in the environment that didn't shape children growing up in the same home to be more alike.

11:11You cite a meta-analysis that came out in 2015 about so many studies that were done about twins and their outcomes, right? If you have two people who are genetically as close as possible, this is the standard way of studying this? So this is one of the standard ways. There's multiple ways that all lead to roughly similar conclusions. So they looked at how similar identical twins are, and they compared it to how similar fraternal twins are, with the idea being because identical twins overlap 100 % genetically or close to that, and fraternal twins on average overlap 50 % genetically, you can estimate how much of their variation in outcomes can be attributed to genetic variants.

12:06So this meta-analysis, they found that what you reliably see, study after study after study, that first genes matter for every single outcome. They also found effects of the environment that were leading identical twins growing up in the same home to be different from one another. Yes, the environment shapes us, but it doesn't seem to be the parents because if it were, then that should lead identical twins growing up in the same home to be more alike each other. I'm thinking of a friend, like his parents are religious and their eldest child completely rejected religion. The second child became very religious and the third child feels conflicted.

12:48Wow. Yes. That's a great example. Same parents and they might have wanted a specific outcome for all of their kids and they may have raised them as similarly as they could. But the kids are different. Coming up, what does that mean for all the parenting advice that's out there? what Yuko learned after becoming a parent herself. On the show today, cuts both ways. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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15:15So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, cuts both ways. Ideas about the wonderful and awful sides of things, like parenting. We were just talking to developmental psychologist Yuko Munakata about the research that shows that parents don't shape who their children become as much as they might think they do. Yeah, there's not a simple, easy answer about here's what you should do and here's how your kid will turn out. Which, if you're a parent, can make you feel pretty helpless.

16:03On the other hand, I think it's beautiful and empowering in a way for parents to be able to embrace that complexity, you know, that kids have this agency. They are their own people. There's not a formula one way that fits all kids that's going to lead to certain outcomes. And I think that can empower us to not be so stressed and worried that we're not doing the exact right thing. At first, Yuko came to this conclusion based on the research. But then her son was born, and it made her question everything. Yeah. When he was born, he seemed perfectly healthy. And we were so, so happy. I feel like the first two days of his life were just complete bliss.

17:01And we sent all these messages to loved ones and sort of announcing the wonderful news. And we would just add this PS at the end of the messages that said, we're just waiting for poop. And then we're going to go home because they won't send you home from the hospital until your baby has pooped. Just to make sure everything's okay. But they didn't send us home because he didn't poop. They sent us to another hospital where we handed him over to a surgeon who took him back for an operation to open up his intestine and clear out a blockage and then put his intestine back together. and at that point they determined that he did not have functioning neurons in his intestine these neurons would normally do the peristalsis this kind of squeezing motion of the intestine that pushes the food through it and allows us to absorb nutrients in water so he did not have these neurons.

18:09And when they first said this to us, I just felt like the walls were closing in on me. This is quite rare. And at that time, some kids were still being sent home just to die. Parents were told that there was nothing that could be done. We didn't know. We didn't know if he could live, if he did live, what kind of life he would have. At first, their baby was fed intravenously. So having intravenous nutrition is, you know, a miracle, an amazing, amazing thing that can allow kids to live and to thrive. I think, you know, we just switch from this kind of uncertain, overwhelmed state to empowered, and we're going to do as much as we possibly can.

18:59And we started to see that he was growing, you know, showing a lot of the healthy things we would want to look for, getting bigger. He started to smile, which was the most beautiful thing, you know. But eventually they realized that the very treatment that was saving his life was beginning to cause liver failure. and he was turning yellow and then orange with jaundice with these high levels of bilirubin and just started to scratch and claw and was really really miserable and that's when we really I think came the most face to face with this idea that he may not be able to live. Yuko and her husband were desperate to find a treatment that could possibly work And then they did, but it was very experimental.

19:53Boston Children's Hospital had developed a way to give intravenous nutrition that was restoring health to these kids who were dying from the prior version of the intravenous nutrition. we learned that all of the other babies all the other 34 babies except for one had been saved by this miracle fish oil that that was given intravenously and they looked at our baby and looked at all his information and said we can we can save your baby gradually gradually gradually first his toes started to turn pink and that's what we heard that's the first place where you see the jaundiced, yellow or orange skin start to turn back to pink.

20:46And we saw it there, and then it just spread through the rest of his body. How old is he now? He's now 16. Whoa! Yeah.

21:00Parenting, I've come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere. That's all there is. I had thought that my expertise in child development would help prepare me for becoming a parent. Instead, becoming a parent helped me to see the science in a whole new light. Appreciate how powerful the moments can be because of what they mean for you and your child right now. Not because of what they mean for your child long term, which you do not know. if we can embrace the complexity of our children's development that can transform how we approach those parenting decisions we face each day and empower us to realize how much more there is to having a child than trying to shape a specific outcome.

21:54You very poetically draw a conclusion that, you know, as much as you know about the psychology of child development and parenting, you too had to struggle a bit to accept the lack of control you had. Tell me about how your son's illness changed you as a parent, as a researcher, in terms of the work you do. Yeah, so knowing about all the science, still so natural to fall back on thinking that what we're doing could have this long-term impact, at least in this time and place, given the kinds of messages that are out there for parents. But I think there's so much about parenting that is really about being with our kids in the moment.

22:46And all that stuff in the future is unknown. And it's unknown because we just, I mean, every parent, we just do not know how much time we have with our kids. But that doesn't mean I have no influence. All experiences ultimately go into the mix of forces that shape children. But it's also a little bit unsettling. It's going to take them in different directions. But unsettling in this way that I think really recognizes kids for who they are. They are not carbon copies. They are unique individuals who are going to respond differently to what you say and do as a parent. That's developmental psychologist Yuko Munakata.

23:34She's a researcher at UC Davis, and you can see her full talk at TED.com. Oh, and her son, by the way, is now 17 years old. on the show today, cuts both ways. And for our next speaker, the very thing that felt like his superpower was also what brought him down. I always got a charge about this idea of doing something that no one has ever done before. This is Andy Dunn. He's a very successful entrepreneur. And like many startup founders, he's got a story to tell. And his starts with pants. I had a housemate who felt like men's pants didn't fit, of all things, which I thought was a silly idea at the time.

24:22Silly until his housemate, Brian, started actually making and selling his own pants. That our classmates started buying, myself included. So in 2007, Andy and Brian started a company. And Andy's vision was to upend the entire retail industry by selling stylish khaki trousers directly to customers. The idea became, the dream became, build an internet site, deliver a great customer service experience that would give people confidence to buy pants online. Now, this was years before Warby Parker or Allbirds or Bomba's Socks. Online only, right to the shopper, was not a thing. And that got me charged up.

25:08And that was the beginning of a journey of, hey, let's go be the first brand ever built on the internet from the ground up. Bonobos was born. And like with every tech startup, CEO Andy pitched any investor who let him through the door. Most people that I pitched said no. And so maybe I had to speak to 500 people over the course of three years. Boardroom after boardroom. Same pitch. We make fitted khaki pants, sell them online. And guess what? I mean, it's amazing what we're doing. They're going fast. $90 ,000 in our first month. I think we'll do$120 ,000 this month. I don't think we can keep growing 50 % month on month, but like something's happening here.

25:50Eventually, investors started lining up. $8 million raised over three years, then another$18.5 million in 2010. Bonobos expanded to suits, shirts, outerwear. And all the while, Andy maintained a relentless, burn-the-candle-from-both-ends pace. Like, I got on the roller coaster, and the roller coaster looked something like this. I would work all day, you know, I'd work a long 10 - or 12-hour day. And then every night, I would go out and do something social. In some nights, that might be for professional reasons, a potential investor or a potential team member. Other nights, that would be going out on the town with friends or going out on a date.

26:30And while that might be a normal way to approach life a day or a two week, I did it seven days a week. I would kind of make a joke that I was a little bit like Voldemort from Harry Potter. I'm not sure that I even existed, if not in reference to like sucking other people's energy. It was a pathological level of extroversion. Bonobos continued to spiral upwards, but Andy started to spiral too, in a different direction. It was, in fact, a hypomanic energy that was almost a requirement for raising money for this particular idea at that particular time. And this begins to get into the symbiotic and parasitic relationship that there can be between bipolar and an entrepreneurial career.

27:26Andy has bipolar disorder type 1. His girlfriend Manuela knew about it, so did his parents, but almost no one else. He had avoided dealing with it for a long time, but this episode was different. I cycled through a couple of mood states. Here's Andy Dunn on the TED stage. And a warning, this next section includes a description of violent behavior. Dizzyingly productive periods of hypomania, a misunderstood mood state that is a diluted form of mania without the telltale psychosis that leads to a diagnosis of bipolar 1. But all of the increased energy and creativity and ideation and joie de vivre and burning the candle up both ends.

28:12alternating with devastating periods of depression. For me, both mild and severe, often 50 or 100 days at a time, catatonic, can't get out of bed, disappearing on the team, unable to go to work, sometimes undesirous of living. And all of it was amplified by what was happening at work, a gutting co-founder divorce, a rotating door of executive turnover, maddening and expensive flights into shiny new objects and distracting ideas and a whopping cash flow burn rate that at times reached$5 million a month. And all of it boiled over in 2016. In a manic episode at my New York apartment, I rose from my bed, literally howling at the moon, convinced I was the president and Batman, man, which is actually a high potential combination if you think about it.

29:15And then the darkness really set in. I hit my head on a doorway. I was bleeding from the head. Manuela came to try and help me. I struck her. She called her mom who lives in Manhattan. Her mom came to try to help me. I pushed her mom, kicked her mom. They called 911. Eight cops flooded the room. I was pinned to the ground. I was taken to Bellevue, a psychiatric ward there. I spent a week on the ward. And I may well lose everything that I care about. This woman who I love may leave me. Am I going to have to leave my job? And I walked out ready to deal with it and was met upon discharge from Bellevue by four NYPD officers.

29:54And I was arrested. For what? I was arrested for felony and misdemeanor assault of my now wife and my now mother-in-law who were just trying to protect me from running naked into the streets of New York. And while they were prepared to share their perspective, which was that this was a mental health episode, Andy wasn't himself, the city of New York, to its credit, doesn't just believe potential victim narratives about what happened. They want to figure it out because not everyone who's in an abusive situation is free to be transparent. And so it was a harrowing six months where I was in and out of the courts.

30:33Were these charges going to be dismissed? and a number of amazing things happened. First, Manuela said, as long as you take your medication and see your doctor, this is no different than any other physical illness. I'm here for it, which was amazing. Her mom said the same thing. My board and my executive team stuck by me while they knew I was working to get better. They said, we believe in you. We believe you can make a comeback here. As my arresting officer joked when I asked him if there would be PR about this, he goes, dude, you're not the founder of Google. You know, you sell pants. So I was low profile enough.