TED Talk
Then the TED people asked me to come and give a talk and I told them about this. This is the important story, about certain biases in science, in medicine. We can only have embryonic stem cell research; we can’t have large grants for adult stem cells, which are living in our own body. I was going to talk about that, about that bias, that if you are not with the mainstream of biomedical sciences, then you do not get funded. It is that easily. They said: “yes, that’s okay, but do you have anything personal?” This was my second mistake. I said: “yes, I got this screwy story that happened to me”. I swear I did not think it would be that interesting. And Chris Anderson goes: “that’s it, that is a story”.
I gave this TED talk. I stood up there like a horse’s ass and spilled the beans. Now, at the time – in 2009 – they weren’t publishing these talks on YouTube. They hadn’t started doing that, so what they were putting up were like Bill Clinton gave a talk, or Al Gore, but none of the other people were being put up. I thought it was just like any talk that you would give as a Professor, which is once you give it, everybody forgets about it. You never hear about it, unless you really bomb or something and you never see it shown anywhere. Well, at this particular one, this is when they first started it. About four months after I gave the talk in January, at the TED, I got calls in the morning from my colleagues. “We are so excited”, they said, “they put your TED talk up on YouTube and you got like 30,000 hits overnight”. I said: “what are you talking about?” I didn’t even think it was going to be on, seriously. I got on there and I do not know anything about business, but that morning I learned about marketing, which is if you ever put up a video on YouTube and the keyword says psychopathic killer, you are going to get 30,000 hits really fast. That is all I know about marketing.
This started a whole series of interviews and all this stuff. Then I was called by Simon Moran, the show runner for Criminal Minds. He says: “I saw your TED talk and I want you to come and act it, like a joke”. We went on from there because he really got it. What I was really talking about wasn’t so much my story. You have to be a thoroughbred to write a story. The real story was the subtext, which is about transgenerational violence, epigenetics, and how using the continuing violence in different areas of the country or different areas of the world, whether it is Los Angeles, or Somalia, or Chicago, or any place we have these neighborhoods, or parts of countries, where the kids are seeing violence for more than three or four generations, you can build a model of epigenetic and transgenerational changes. That is what the TED talk was about. But, saying that at that time, nobody really got what we were talking about. It was the personal talk (note: that got the attention). He got it and he is not even a scientist. It was fantastic. I am sorry this is a long story, but this is how it went, this is part of it.
Oslo Talk
After that, I was asked by the president of the University of Oslo and the Embassy to give a talk with the ex-Prime Minister of Norway. He had bipolar disorder and in his first term, around 2000-2001, he started to show all the signs of bipolar disorder: very depressed and hypomanic. Here is something that Europeans do not admit: their psychiatric disorders. You go into an American bar, especially in Southern California, you know each man, how much they make, the divorces, who would have an affair with, psychiatric disorders, everything. But in Europe, and especially in Northern Europe, and really especially in Scandinavia, they never talk about this stuff. You can’t imagine a Prime Minister saying: “I have a psychiatric disorder”. And he did it. I thought this was another great act of heroism and I said: “yes, I will come over”.
We did the talk together and we had a clinician who also talked. I had to use some data. I couldn’t use other people’s data because of the IRB regulations, but I could use my own, I get out myself. I showed them my PET scans, my genetics, and all the disorders I had from the time I was born until the present. It was not just to show this – it is so small you can’t really see – it was to say that we create statistical models, where we weave in the psycho metrics, all the symptoms, the scans of different parts of the brain, the alleles of the genetics, and we have a general model of linear equations, and then we say: this gene is causing that, etc. It is a very powerful way to do these studies. I wanted to explain it, so I used my data.
Well, I finished the talk. It was a public talk, but there were a lot of psychiatrists in the audience too, like in this audience there are some neuroscientists and you always worry not to make things too simple and all that stuff. You have regular people who are smart, but don’t take this. That was a mixed audience too. At the end of the talk, the chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oslo says: “first of all, thanks, that was pretty interesting”. Then he says: “you are bipolar and you don’t know it”. And he went on to tell everybody that, in the United States, back in 2010, the way we were defining bipolar is not considerate; now it is. He said: “you are bipolar and you don’t even know this. The thing is that you are hypomanic, you are up all the time”. Of course, that is what is defined by, not the depression, but the mania or hypomania. And he saw that. He also says: “we want to talk to you afterwards”. So I am over to my friend’s house, he is the president of the University of Oslo, with these psychiatrists and psychologists, and they said: “we were looking at your data and you are probably a borderline psychopath or really close to that”. And I went: “what ???”