Boy Man

SPEAKER_13: Listener supported. WNYC Studios. SPEAKER_09: Dr. Joy Buolamwini warns that AI could hardwire all of the biases of today's world into our future. But this week on Notes from America, the poet of code explains how we can write a different future in tech. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_05: Hey, it's Latif here. Before we start the show, I'd like you to meet… SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I'm recording now. Oh, he's recording. All right. Appreciate it. Okay. Diane. Diane Kelly, and I'm part of your team of fact checkers. Diane, do you… I think you know what we're doing, but do you want me to just tell you SPEAKER_05: what we're doing? SPEAKER_06: Please do. Tell me what we're doing. SPEAKER_05: So we're here because I used to be a fact checker on this show, and I don't think people really understand how important this job is. SPEAKER_06: Yeah, most people don't think about fact checking at all. SPEAKER_05: Like at all? SPEAKER_06: Because I am completely invisible. SPEAKER_05: On the air, that is. She's not invisible in real life. That wouldn't pass fact check, obviously. SPEAKER_06: But in real life… SPEAKER_05: You know, behind the scenes. SPEAKER_06: I am absolutely on a team with the reporter and the producers. I am there to literally check your work. SPEAKER_05: Diane's checking the accuracy of things like… SPEAKER_06: Proper names, company names, university names, distances, numbers, dates, random facts. Superlatives, I feel like is a big one, right? SPEAKER_06: Oh, superlatives. They're the worst. SPEAKER_05: I think it's even the tiniest mistake. SPEAKER_06: Misattribution, misunderstandings. You could imagine. I'm the one who's supposed to like catch it and make sure it doesn't get through. And the thing is that 90% of the time, as we check, everything's fine. But sometimes things get weird. Where should I begin? SPEAKER_05: SPEAKER_05: For example, when Diane was fact checking… The humpback and the killer. Reported by Annie McEwen. We're heading out into the Antarctic Peninsula. SPEAKER_06: So I'm reading through the transcript and everything's great. SPEAKER_05: All the facts are checking out. That is right. Until Diane sees this fact about… SPEAKER_06: Whale milk that it tastes like butter. SPEAKER_05: This tiny innocuous line, right? Three words. SPEAKER_06: Tastes like butter. SPEAKER_05: She's like, hmm, how do we know that? SPEAKER_06: Then it's like going on a treasure hunt through the entire internet. SPEAKER_05: For first-hand evidence… SPEAKER_06: About whale milk, mouthfeel, and flavor. She's going to whale experts… SPEAKER_05: Whales, dolphins, and porpoises. SPEAKER_05: Livestock experts. SPEAKER_06: Food and agriculture organization for the U.N. And milk experts. I also went to the U.S. Dairy Export Council. She's also looking through books. SPEAKER_06: Book called Whales of the Southern Ocean. My copy of On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. A great reference source. SPEAKER_05: Along the way she learns… SPEAKER_06: It is very creamy. Good to know. Good to know. But it still doesn't tell me anything about what it tastes like. SPEAKER_05: Don't tell me you drank whale milk for this story. SPEAKER_06: I did not drink whale milk. Okay. SPEAKER_05: But she did have to find someone who did. SPEAKER_06: So I kept looking… SPEAKER_05: Until she found… The Japanese Institute for Science. SPEAKER_05: A scientific, peer-reviewed paper… SPEAKER_06: Where someone had actually tasted whale milk. SPEAKER_04: No, you didn't. I did. SPEAKER_06: Bingo. Okay, and what did it say? SPEAKER_05: Mouthfeel like butter. SPEAKER_06: Taste like fish. SPEAKER_05: Did you recommend any change that? Or what do you… So, I recommended… SPEAKER_07: Their milk apparently tastes like fishy butter. Fishy butter. Well done. SPEAKER_05: How long, approximately, were you chasing… That weird little fact. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Um, that's probably about a 45-minute question. SPEAKER_05: It took her more time to fact-check those three words than it does to listen to the entire episode we put into the feed. Yes. That's like so much work. Yeah. I know. You're probably thinking, this sounds like a big waste of time. Is it really worth it? Well… And to that we say… Hell yeah. SPEAKER_06: Because we're asking the audience to trust us. SPEAKER_05: Even though you're probably never going to drink whale milk, having a fact-checker means that you can trust that this, you know, neato-science factoid is legit. Ukraine is sending at least 10,000 of these drones up into the sky. And that means that you can also trust us when we're covering… I mean, you know, Predator drones fly a bit like 30,000. Worse. You just take the votes for Donald Trump in each of those pre-explanations. Presidential elections. Yeah, here you got 462. Here you got… SPEAKER_07: Since Andrew, there have been about 50. That's 5-0. Climate change. Tropical storms that have caused… SPEAKER_05: And… The judges have this power. The Supreme Court. To keep experts out of the court. SPEAKER_05: This is where I ask for your support. So that we can continue bringing you stories that are not just lovingly reported, but also thoroughly fact-checked. Because Diane's work, and not just Diane's work, Emily's work, Natalie's work, all our fact-checkers' work, it costs a lot of money. Which is why the vast majority of podcasts out there do not fact-check. We do. Because we believe in it. And if you believe in it too, and if you like being able to trust what you hear, consider supporting us. Consider joining us. Join our membership program, The Lab. Super easy to sign up. Go to radiolab.org slash join. And when you join, you get all kinds of perks. Access to the members only, ad-free podcast feed, you get bonus interviews, special invitations to events and things like that. And as a little extra, we just designed a set of stickers for new members this month. We weirdly noticed that over the last year we were kind of obsessed with birds. So there are a bunch of stickers of like kind of iconic birds that we covered in the last year. Again, if you want to support us, join The Lab. Few bucks a month. Radiolab.org slash join. Pick whatever amount is right for you. Thanks for listening. And now to today's episode, which Diane fact-checked. Enjoy. SPEAKER_04: Oh, wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. SPEAKER_13: Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. SPEAKER_01: Radiolab. From WNYC. SPEAKER_13: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser here again, still. SPEAKER_07: And I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. So where should we start this thing? SPEAKER_05: So the story I want to tell you, it is a coming of age story, but it's a poorly timed one. SPEAKER_07: Okay. What is that? It's a coming of age story, but just at the wrong time. SPEAKER_05: That's what it means. Although to be fair, is coming of age ever at the right time? SPEAKER_05: Well, I think you will have a completely different answer to that question after you hear this story. Okay. SPEAKER_02: I don't remember this, but I got my first pubic hair when I was one and a half. SPEAKER_07: Whoa. That's so alarming. SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So this is Patrick. I'm good. Sorry. SPEAKER_02: Patrick Burley. A couple minutes late. SPEAKER_05: Nowadays, he's a writer in Los Angeles, but this story starts many, many years before And I think that on the other side of the country out in New York City, it is the early 1980s. Patrick's parents are both actors doing their best to take care of this new baby when they notice this pubic hair. And as he starts to get older, I was like really aggressive, like on the playground, SPEAKER_02: you know, I was, I was constantly like punching kids and just losing my temper. So are these like, what, like how old are like, these are your first memories? I'm like three, four. Yeah. This is like, yeah. SPEAKER_05: And this kid is growing like no kid you've ever seen. SPEAKER_02: You know, I was like three years old for instance, but I looked like a seven year old. SPEAKER_07: Whoa. That is a big cap. SPEAKER_05: And what's happening here, I mean, it might be obvious, but Patrick has a genetic condition called testotoxicosis where his body started producing testosterone way earlier than normal. Which essentially meant that he was going through puberty as a toddler. SPEAKER_05: Precocious puberty. SPEAKER_05: You know, obviously this is, this is really an extreme story. This is a story about puberty happening earlier and more intensely than it does for the vast majority of us. But hearing him talk about it, I find so relatable because, you know, we all go through puberty, obviously, whether you went through decades ago, whether you're going through it right now and we all end up facing a version of these two huge questions. How much of the awkwardness and really the kind of agony of that time comes from inside of us. And then also, to what extent does it make us into the adults we become? SPEAKER_12: When I came to the NIH, I happened to join a lab focusing on this particular rare type of precocious puberty. SPEAKER_05: This is Ellen Leschek. I'm a pediatric endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Health. SPEAKER_05: She spent decades studying kids like Patrick. So I just asked her, like, what was going on in Patrick's body? SPEAKER_12: Well, SPEAKER_13: Puberty is a very important stage in your lives. SPEAKER_12: Normally what happens in puberty is when a kid gets to be about, you know, 11, 12, 13. This little part of our brain, the pituitary gland, the pituitary gland in the brain wakes up releases hormones, this new hormone, and it flows out of the brain, circulates around, SPEAKER_05: makes its way to this receptor, the testicle, the testes, plugs into the receptor. And as a result, the sex glands now increase their own production of hormones. SPEAKER_12: Testosterone is produced. SPEAKER_05: That testosterone swirls all around the body, go into your muscles, making you grow body hair, cubic hair, but also changing all sorts of stuff in your brain. SPEAKER_05: This is friend of the show, Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford SPEAKER_03: University. SPEAKER_05: And he says when the testosterone makes its way back up to the brain, it takes certain impulses, sexuality and aggression that ups the volume, ramps them up. SPEAKER_12: So that's the normal. That's a normal. Now for Patrick, with this particular disorder, the body sort of gets ahead of the brain. SPEAKER_05: What do you mean? Well, the receptor in Patrick's testes, the one that's typically activated by the pituitary gland in the brain, has a mutation. SPEAKER_12: And that mutation, it's a tiny little mutation. It causes that testosterone production to start before it hears from the brain from SPEAKER_05: day one. So in other words, like as soon as Patrick had testicles, even in utero, they were producing testosterone unregulated. SPEAKER_05: And so the physical effects of testosterone hit Patrick right away. SPEAKER_02: I would get these erections and like toddlers get these, but like these were like erections that were like, go have sex. SPEAKER_05: And when the testosterone doubled back to his brain, it wasn't coming back to the brain of a teenager. It was coming back to the brain of a toddler. I mean, at that point, did you even know what sex was? SPEAKER_02: No, I didn't understand sex. All I knew, it was like the most primal impulse. It was just like this thing is happening in my body and like it wants me to have some kind of like physical interaction with a girl. SPEAKER_05: Now precocious puberty, the specific version that Patrick had is super rare. SPEAKER_02: It affects about one in a million people. So I'm actually one in a million. I mean, yeah, I know. That's the silver lining of this all. You can say that. But also it's hereditary. So my father had had this, as had my grandfather and my great-grandfather. And we traced it back to my great-great-grandfather. So your mom knew this was coming? SPEAKER_02: Well, they knew that it could happen. But now it was happening. SPEAKER_05: They have a toddler who's going through puberty. SPEAKER_02: You know, they didn't know what to do. They didn't, you know, there was no, my father hadn't been treated. They were totally overwhelmed. SPEAKER_05: And then one day, one of my mom's friends, like this is an incredible coincidence that SPEAKER_02: she saw in the paper, like the National Institute of Health is, you know, looking for test subjects that have like exactly what I had. SPEAKER_05: So when Patrick was three years old, he and his mom got on a train and went down to the NIH. SPEAKER_12: One of the things that I remember about Patrick is that he was tall. SPEAKER_05: This is Ellen again. She was one of the doctors who helped treat Patrick's puberty. SPEAKER_12: We were trying to stop it. Stop. Freeze. Stop puberty. But a lot of times you're not able to fully stop and you're really just slowing. SPEAKER_05: She says when Patrick showed up, the scientists at the NIH were just starting to learn how SPEAKER_05: to do this in kids like him. I was like their lab rat, you know, and in exchange for free, I received treatment. SPEAKER_05: He tried lots of different stuff. Like Ellen said, there was one drug called spironolactone, which had been developed as a blood pressure medicine. SPEAKER_12: But when they started using it for blood pressure, men started complaining about impotence. And it turned out it was because a side effect of this drug was that it blocked the effect of testosterone. SPEAKER_05: And so you guys were like, this could be a feature, not a bug. Yes. And Patrick says it kind of worked. SPEAKER_02: It slowed it down. It slowed it down a little bit. SPEAKER_05: But it wasn't perfect. Like some of the testosterone was almost like sneaking around the edges, causing his body to keep changing. And so by the time he was in third grade, I was like this eight year old, you know, SPEAKER_02: like trapped in like a 16 year old's body. SPEAKER_05: Like he had a mustache. He looked like he should be in high school, which sometimes is cool. SPEAKER_02: You know, I was the first one hitting the ball over the fence in Little League, but mostly was not. I was like a freak because I looked so strange. I was so big. You know, I got picked on a lot. SPEAKER_05: Like what would they do? What would they say? Like, um, yeah. SPEAKER_02: So I, you know, I remember when I was in like fifth grade, I, I would walk home every day. We didn't live very far from my elementary school. And in New York still you were in. No, no, no. We had moved to LA. Yeah. LA. Okay. Yeah. When I was about seven, you know, my dad, he'd been like a theater actor in New York and I was like a New York City kid. And then we moved to Santa Monica and I, and I went to elementary school in Santa Monica. SPEAKER_05: That's a pretty big change for any kid. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was, it was a big change. It was always hard for me to sort of enter a new social environment because of like how I looked. SPEAKER_05: Like he was big on the outside, but you know, inside he was still small. SPEAKER_02: So anyway, I would, I would walk home from school every day and I would like jump this fence and walk home. And every day there were these kids who were, oh, they're probably like four years older and they would like wait. And you know, and they would like push me around and punch me or whatever. SPEAKER_05: Like they knew despite what he looked like, he was really just a little kid you could push around. And then there was kind of the reverse when other people who should have known how little he was treated him like he was much bigger. So one day I'm driving with my dad and on the bus stop is one of the kids who, who picks SPEAKER_02: on me. And I sort of like tell my dad and, and my dad, he, he like pulls over and he like jumps out of the car and he's like, do you want to fight my son? Like you think you can fight my son? And I'm like sitting in the passenger seat and I'm like, oh, please. And he's like, come on. Like, look at this like marshmallowy kid. Like you, you kick the shit out of this kid. You know, I'm like crying and I'm like, no dad, like, no, it's not the home. Please. And he's like, come on. Like Patrick, get out here. Like you can, you can take this kid. I don't want to like vilify my dad because he was like a very supportive and loving father. SPEAKER_05: But at that moment, Patrick says, I felt I felt that he absolutely had no idea what SPEAKER_02: I was going through. And and this is so ironic because he's like the only other person in the world whom I've ever met who had this condition. Like if anybody should get it, it would be his dad who also had been a little boy who SPEAKER_05: looked like and was forced to act like a man. SPEAKER_02: You know, like by the time he was 10, like he looked like he was like 18 years old. He was like a fully grown man at like 10 years old. And he also his dad, my grandfather, who'd all he had had precocious puberty as well. He kind of he he's he left. And so my dad, who looked much older at like 12, like he had to, you know, he like went and like worked in a cannery and like supported his mom and like his two sisters, you know, and like told that, you know, he was the he was the man of the house. SPEAKER_02: He was the breadwinner. Yeah. And yet, like growing up, we never had that kind of heart to heart. He was never like, Patrick, like, I know this is really hard. Like you're going through this and I went through this. What I've just told you about my dad and his dad and like that, like that's like my mom like told me that. And only when Patrick got older, did he learn other stories, too. SPEAKER_02: My great grandfather had been the youngest U.S. soldier in World War One. When he was 12 years old, he ran away from home and joined the Navy and fought in Europe. Because he looked because he looked on the way. Yeah, no, yeah. He looked like he was 19. And nobody figured out how old he really was until he was getting drunk with some other soldiers and they like hijacked a cargo plane. There are news articles about this. And they hijacked a cargo plane and like took it up joyriding. And yeah, they were all just wasted. And they grounded the plane and they court-martialed my great grandfather. And only then, only then did they discover that he was 13 years old. SPEAKER_05: They're like, son, you're acting like you're 13 years old. And he was like, well, I have something to tell you. That's because I am. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. SPEAKER_05: But when Patrick was a little kid, it was just like a big mystery. SPEAKER_02: He didn't know these stories. So, so in some ways I was kind of on my own. SPEAKER_05: As Patrick got older, he kept going in for treatments. I would spend two weeks every year as an inpatient at the NIH. SPEAKER_02: They tried all kinds of drugs on him. Like there were periods when I was taking 32 pills a day. Like I would, I would take 16 in the morning and 16 at night. But none of it worked completely. SPEAKER_05: It was very frustrating. And often he'd take that frustration out physically. I would break things. SPEAKER_02: I would punch things, punch people. You know, I felt constantly misunderstood because I looked like a normal child, just much, much older. All of this surface tension had built up and built up and built up over years, really, of having had precocious puberty, you know, and not knowing how to deal with it and lying about my age and acting out because I was hormonal and getting into a cycle of being in trouble and then sort of just embracing this kind of bad kid persona that, you know, in many ways had been foisted on me from an early age because of my behavioral issues as a result of precocious puberty. I was like on the edge of like going from being just like sort of a bad kid, but on the level of like a class clown to like being like a delinquent and like really getting into stuff like drugs and like other things that like, okay, like now it's like not just like getting into a scuffle in the hallway. It's like, you know, more severe. And so right around 12, my doctors, they were like, okay, like he's 12 and we've like sort of stemmed the flood for a while now and we think we're going to take him off his medicine and like see how he does and sort of let him like finish puberty, you know, finish puberty. And, you know, so it had been almost, it had been nine, almost 10 years that I had, you know, been on these drugs that had done, you know, a sort of a halfway decent job of like keeping, you know, the testosterone really at bay. And then all of a sudden I wasn't. SPEAKER_05: When we come back, Patrick finishes puberty and things get worse before they get better. SPEAKER_13: Hey y'all, I'm Rhiannon Giddens, host of Ariacode, and I'm here to spread the gospel of opera. SPEAKER_08: We are all gathered to experience the magic of great human voices, of beautiful staging and big human drama. SPEAKER_10: We're bringing together singers, experts, and unexpected guests to reveal the complexities of opera and life one aria at a time. Don't miss the new season of Ariacode. Listen wherever you get podcasts. SPEAKER_05: Lulu. Latif. Radiolab. Today we are telling the story of Patrick Burley, who started going through puberty when he was, basically when he was born. He was treated at the NIH, which slowed things down a bit, but when he was 12, his doctors there, they took him off the medications so he could finish going through puberty on his own. SPEAKER_02: And when they took me off the medication, there was like a precipitous change in my behavior. I like humbled over that line from like just like the troublemaker in class to like like a delinquent kid. SPEAKER_02: Fighting, writing graffiti, smoking pot. Did it feel like it was your body carrying you away or did you feel like these were choices SPEAKER_05: that you were making at the time? It felt like I was no match for my body. SPEAKER_02: Like it just had its way with me. SPEAKER_05: And that spring something happened that Patrick would look back on as sort of a culmination of everything that had happened before. SPEAKER_02: Right. So I met this girl at the mall. Her name was Marianne and she was 17. How old were you? 12, but I told Marianne that I was 16 and she believed me. Pretty soon they started dating. And we didn't have sex. I hadn't lost my virginity yet, but it was like close. And so anyway, so Marianne, she was living with this drug dealer in Venice. SPEAKER_02: So one night, it's like a Tuesday, it's a school night. So Marianne calls me up and she's like, oh, you know, this guy, this drug dealer that I'm living with, he just got in this amazing acid. You got to try some. SPEAKER_05: Did you know what that was? Like how? No, no, no. SPEAKER_02: But I was like maintaining this persona, this 16 year old persona. And in my persona, like, yeah, I knew all about acid. Like cool. Oh yeah. White unicorns. I totally, those are awesome. So I snuck out. It was like nine o'clock at night. I like snuck out and like this guy's, you know, car pulled up and like she got out and she like gave me three tabs of acid and I like paid whatever, $9 or whatever it was. That I had like your milk money or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and then, and then they left and I like snuck back in. I waited for my parents to go to bed and like, I took a tab of acid. SPEAKER_02: And I just, I don't know. I thought it was just going to make me feel really great. So I'm like, well, sit lying in my bed and I'm like waiting, you know? And I'm like, I'm like getting impatient. Like nothing's happening. And I'm like, this sucks. Like is this stuff like even work, you know? And so I take another tab and I fall asleep. 45 minutes later, I wake up and there are like stalactites coming down from the ceiling. There are like bugs all over me. Like all the worst things are happening to me. And I'm like up all night, like having like the worst trip imaginable. And I'm 12. It's terrible. The next morning I'm like, all right, I'm going to go. And I like, there's no way I can go to school. There's absolutely no way. So I, so I went into my parents and I was like, you know, I'm sick. Like I really need to not go to school. And they were like, but I was, I was trying not to act. I was trying to act like I wasn't on acid, you know? So, so, so that was like counteracting me trying to act sick. Like I didn't seem sick because I was trying to act normal, you know? And they were like, you're not sick. You seem fine. You know, they were like, this is exactly the kind of thing they would expect from you. SPEAKER_05: Right. SPEAKER_02: I was like, there's a total boy who cried wolf scenario. And so, so they sent me to school and I like managed to like stay in the nurse's office SPEAKER_02: for the morning. But she was really skeptical of me being sick also. And I did like to have a temperature. And so, so finally at lunch, she was like, you can't stay here anymore. Like you have to go out to lunch. And I had stupidly, I had brought the third tab of acid with me to school because I was so paranoid. You know, my parents were, they were very, they didn't trust me. And I was afraid that they would find it. And I was also, I was on acid. I was still tripping. So I went out onto like the school yard when my friends were having lunch and I joined them and they were also like amateur delinquents. And I like went up to them and, and I was like, Oh, you know, instead of saying like, I had the worst experience of my life last night, like never do acid. I was like, Oh my God, dude, I did acid last night. It was the best thing, man. Like I had this incredible, you know, cause like you just, I wanted to seem cool. And, and I was like, you know, I have one more tab. One of you guys want it? SPEAKER_02: And they were all, they were like had the sense to be like, Oh no, no thanks. You know? Yeah. Maybe another time. But one of my friends who was like sort of the instigator of our group, he was like, I have an idea. You should take the acid, the tab of acid, and you should like put it in someone's drink and like, and like see what's going to happen. Before I could say anything, like he had turned to our friend, this girl, and he had said like, okay, can I have a sip of your Coke? And he like turned around and we like put the tab of acid in her Coke. And she drank the Coke. And so there were two periods after lunch, fifth and sixth period, and sixth period was like computer class. And I had it with this girl who was our friend. She was like, you know, we hung out with her a lot. So we're sitting at these long rows and, you know, practicing like how many words a minute we can type. And I look down the row and I'm like watching her and all of a sudden, like she starts just like laughing, like maniacal, like maniacal, like Joker laugh. And then she like jumps up and she like runs over to me because I'm like her friend in the class. And she starts just bawling. And the teacher comes over and takes her down to the nurse's office. And I like freak out and I run down there and I just, I like confess everything. Oh wow. Because I'm like worried about her. An ambulance comes. Oh my God. And they call the police and they march me out, you know, and they put me in the cruiser and they take me to the station, you know, and they book me. SPEAKER_05: So what are you thinking when, I mean, what is going through your mind this whole time? SPEAKER_02: I feel, I mean, I'm mostly worried about my friend who's in the hospital, like having her stomach pumped. I mostly feel like overwhelming remorse. SPEAKER_05: And how long after you had gone off your medications was this? Like a couple months. Yeah. And I don't know, like, do you think like, is precocious puberty or is it or to what degree is it responsible for what happened? SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good, that's a valid question. One that I have often asked myself. And I think that, listen, I don't mean to like absolve my 12 year old self of responsibility. It's unquestionably the worst thing that I have ever done. What I will say is that I was this incredible mixture of naivete and, you know, 12 year oldness and also just, you know, being advanced and really not entirely in control of my impulses. I mean, you know, I had this testosterone just coursing through my body at an age before, like I knew how to reason. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. SPEAKER_05: This is Sapolsky again. And when I told him about this, he said that the reasoning part of Patrick's brain is this area called the frontal cortex. Whose job it is to tell you like, hey, maybe let's not put acid in our classmates drink. It makes you do the right thing when that's the harder thing to do. SPEAKER_03: That part of his brain was not really online yet. SPEAKER_03: It's the last part of our brain to fully mature. Not until you're about 25 years old. There's this lag time between when Patrick's body matured and when his brain did. SPEAKER_05: And the fact is we all experience some version of this lag time. Like even if you go through puberty at a typical age, it's still going to be way before you turn 25. And this is why juveniles behave in juvenile ways. SPEAKER_07: It's so weird to see it spelled out so clearly. Like we have humans have this built in decade, at least where they have a fully mature body full of fully mature impulses and a little pea brain that doesn't know how to wrangle with them. Like that that feels like a glitch in the design. That feels like a problem. Yes. SPEAKER_05: But according to Sapolsky, there's a reason that we're set up this way. SPEAKER_03: If you're trying to get this part of the brain that tells you to do the right thing, even though it's the harder thing, it takes a hell of a long time for you to learn what counts as the right thing. It's complicated. Thou shall not kill. On the other hand, if you kill one of them, we're going to be really nice to you. Never, ever lie. But if you're like harboring refugees in your attic and the guys in the brown suits are there coming for them, you should widen that. That's messy stuff. SPEAKER_05: And over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, there's been selection to SPEAKER_03: delay frontal maturation to give the brain time to learn the rules. But the downside is you come up with adolescents and adolescent behavior because there's this mismatch for quite a few years. SPEAKER_05: For all of us, that gap is big. But for Patrick, it was enormous. Wait, so when you went to they took you to I mean, they booked you. The police did. Did they did they file any charges or anything? They didn't file charges. SPEAKER_02: They didn't file charges. Luckily, you know, I should say we reached out to the girl whose drink Patrick and his SPEAKER_05: friends put the LSD in. She's grown up. She has a successful career. She did not want to do an interview with us. And because of that, we don't really know what the aftermath of that event was like for her. But Patrick, after this incident, he did not go to jail, but he did get expelled from the entire school district. And in 1993, his parents decided to send him off to a military school in Indiana, thinking SPEAKER_02: that separating me from my friends in L.A. and from the things I was doing in L.A. and that world would, you know, would help me. But it didn't. They told me that I had amassed more infractions in like the six months that I was there than any cadet in the history of the school. Things didn't really turn around for Patrick until, weirdly, he went back to where he kind SPEAKER_05: of bottomed out. Yeah. SPEAKER_02: So that so then I came back to Santa Monica and they let me back in. When Patrick was in the ninth grade, so he's 15 years old now, his parents convinced the SPEAKER_05: school district to take him back and he transferred to this big public high school. SPEAKER_02: And when I came back from Indiana, like I was still smoking pot every day. I was still hanging out on the street. But I was older now and there was a different feeling about it. And I started to have these glimpses of what it looked like down the road because I would hang out with these people on Venice Beach or I would encounter these people. I would get high with them or skateboard with them or whatever. And I just had this moment where I remember coming home from school and I had Spanish homework to do. And I was too stoned to do my Spanish. There was just no way that I could barely read. And I had a minor panic attack. And I was like, I'm going to end up homeless. I'm going to end up on the street if I don't make a change. And so it almost was overnight. SPEAKER_05: He stopped cutting class, started going to school. And when he did, he noticed something. The other kids were catching up physically to me. SPEAKER_02: I no longer stuck out. And I just, I don't like the, you know, for my entire life, I had been under a microscope. And so when I finally ended up at this big, anonymous, just kind of factory of a school, like I was like in the pond with everyone else and sort of swimming at the same pace, you know, and it was very, it was liberating. SPEAKER_05: And in that last stretch of high school, he did a complete 180. SPEAKER_02: Like I really sort of lost myself in books and reading. Like that was like my escape. Got his grades up. I like started playing sports again, which I hadn't done for years. Made new friends. Who were just more conventional, not in a bad way. They were just, they were like going to go to college. And eventually Patrick does that too. SPEAKER_05: He applies to and manages to get into Dartmouth College. He goes to an Ivy League school. And he says, once he got there, he would walk around on campus, just kind of marveling at how unremarkable he felt there. You know, just like, oh, I'm like a high achieving Dartmouth student, SPEAKER_02: you know, who's like, you know, I'm just like a normal male. SPEAKER_05: This precocious puberty, this thing that had defined his whole life to that point, just felt like it was gone. SPEAKER_02: You know, because it's not like I have like a deformity on my face because of what I went through as a child. There's no outward sign that I had this very unusual childhood. SPEAKER_07: It's interesting because like so many disability stories I've heard don't work this way. Like, it usually goes like either you come out and you are disabled and you come to some form of acceptance or whatever, or like you are non-disabled and then you become disabled. And this is a story where it's like early, early, someone becomes, like has a kind of disability or a difference. You're so right. SPEAKER_05: Usually the story is like, and then I came to terms with my disability and I learned to find a way to live my life in my way. And this is like, no, he gets a free pass back to normieland, you know? Yeah, no, I think that's very astute. SPEAKER_02: You know, I could kind of like go under the radar. SPEAKER_05: And that's how it stayed. A secret about his past. Until many years later, almost by surprise, Patrick was confronted with a decision that forced him to dredge it all back up. SPEAKER_13: Lulu. SPEAKER_07: Latif. SPEAKER_04: Radiolab. SPEAKER_07: So where else do we go? It feels like your protagonist, your guy, Patrick, came of age. But where are we going? SPEAKER_05: Okay, so there's one more part of the story. So, okay, so let's fast forward to several years ago. Patrick is an adult at this point. He's become, he's a writer. He's a successful screenwriter. Has even written on a Marvel movie or two. Which one? The one that I know is Eternals. SPEAKER_02: Which was the movie that Chloe Zhao directed for Marvel. It actually had this one character. SPEAKER_05: There's a character named Sprite. Who in a weird way sort of reminded him of himself. She is, you know, there are these immortal creatures who have come to Earth. SPEAKER_02: And Sprite is trapped as a teenager. But she's 7,000 years old. And so, you know, in many ways, it's the inverse, you know, of sort of what I went through. You know, but I always like her plight. Made sense to him, given what he had been through. And I'm not saying that I was a superhero as a kid, you know, but I, you know, I definitely bring my experience of feeling different and feeling other and yet also sort of having, you know, abilities that my peers didn't have. So, you know, Patrick wrote some of that into the movie. SPEAKER_05: But for most of his adult life. I didn't talk about precocious puberty and I didn't want people to think of me as different. SPEAKER_02: And that's how it was as he finished college, started his career, met his future wife. SPEAKER_05: My name is Meredith Brower. SPEAKER_11: Was there a thing that drew you to him that you felt like that was like this was the guy? SPEAKER_05: I mean, Patrick is obviously very handsome. SPEAKER_11: I can objectively say he's and this for radio, I can objectively say he's a very handsome guy. SPEAKER_05: So he's like hot? Yes. SPEAKER_05: But also, as he and Meredith fell in love and got married and started to build the life they wanted to have together, it gradually became clear to Patrick that that thing that made him different wasn't actually gone. Interestingly, when we started to try to get pregnant on our own, we didn't have many frank SPEAKER_11: conversations about the possibility of having a son with precocious puberty. But we ended up having a really hard time getting pregnant. My wife and I, we had to do in vitro fertilization. SPEAKER_02: And it was at that moment. SPEAKER_11: Where they were like, oh, wait a second. SPEAKER_05: Maybe like we should go in and like biopsy these suckers to like see if which ones have SPEAKER_02: precocious puberty. So the thing about IVF, which you may already know and which they definitely knew because SPEAKER_05: by coincidence, Meredith herself is an IVF doctor. But so the thing is that when you do IVF, doctors typically create several embryos. And you actually have the choice. SPEAKER_04: You can choose which ones you want to use. The technology is available that you could screen for the mutation in an embryo and just SPEAKER_11: pick one that doesn't have it. SPEAKER_05: I really did feel like it was his decision to make. SPEAKER_11: You know, I was I was I was worried about it. SPEAKER_02: Patrick says he was pretty split. Was like going to cost a bunch of money. And it was, you know, it's like an invasive procedure like you don't know. But on the other hand, his childhood was rough. You know, why why would I roll the dice and and and sort of chance that it might happen to my child? Like isn't my job as a parent to kind of prevent to prevent hardship for my child? So he's trying to figure out what to do. And then one day he's like driving home, pulls up to his house and his dad calls. SPEAKER_05: And his dad calls. Now, remember, his dad does not like to talk about precocious puberty, which is why he didn't talk to us, to be honest. It's like the era of which we do not speak. SPEAKER_02: It's like the dirty war in Argentina or something. You know, it's like like they he just. But it's all Patrick can think about right now. You know, so I told him I was like, look, you know, I'm concerned about puberty and, SPEAKER_05: you know, explained how because they were doing IVF, they could test the embryos, pick one that doesn't have it. SPEAKER_02: And my dad, he was kind of like, why the hell are you going to do that? He was sort of like like, what the hell is wrong? You know, he it's like a mix of kind of being defensive about like or being sort of too proud to admit that like this is a difficulty that like he had and then he passed on to me and that I could pass on. Like, I think there's like some shame in there and and and some denial. But then he he also said something to me that kind of resonated, you know, which was that like this is like this definitely shaped me like more than anything else in my life. And he's like, you know, I don't know. He's like, you know, in a way, in a way, you know, testing for precocious puberty, like testing these embryos for precocious puberty and selecting them out is, you know, in a sense, kind of like rejecting my own experience. SPEAKER_05: So it was so your father was saying this is the thing that that formed you, that defines you, defines you. Yeah. And so why would you reject it? SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Why would you deny your child the thing that shaped you? SPEAKER_05: Right. And why and why would you stigmatize the thing that that is this thing that is, SPEAKER_02: you know, such a part that makes you one in a million? Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly. And he and he, you know, and he and it came like him saying this to me, it came out of love. You know, he's like, I love you. SPEAKER_02: So much like why, like every thing about you, like, why would you? Deny that as hard as it was. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: So. Oh, yeah. So we didn't do, you know, we didn't do that test and we kind of just got, you know, we prepared for the scenario in which our baby would have that and, you know, kind of hope for the best. SPEAKER_05: A few weeks ago, I went to meet up with Patrick and his son. I'm wearing Pumas. SPEAKER_05: He's eight years old now. Showed off some of his skateboard tricks. Sometimes it takes me a lot of warm up. SPEAKER_05: And when I asked him about puberty, I would say he said, I don't know, kind of exactly SPEAKER_05: what you would expect an eight year old who is not going through puberty to say, I know SPEAKER_14: this. It's when you get a little older. It happens when you get a little older. SPEAKER_07: So that that means he does not have the mutation. He doesn't. He doesn't have precocious puberty. That's right. SPEAKER_05: He does not have it. Precocious puberty. SPEAKER_14: He knows what it is, though. SPEAKER_05: It means that you like you get you get puberty when you're like really young, like two or SPEAKER_14: three years old. Patrick has talked to him about it. SPEAKER_05: Well, I felt very, very surprised. SPEAKER_15: It's just crazy. He told his daughter about it, too. SPEAKER_15: Just crazy that that actually happened. SPEAKER_05: She's six. Also doesn't have precocious puberty. The condition Patrick has only affects boys. SPEAKER_15: Girls can be carriers, though. SPEAKER_05: And Patrick says there is a test for that. But it feels like doing that might be a bit. Premature. SPEAKER_02: We can go to the skate park in like 20 minutes. I was thinking maybe we could play a game of Go Fish. SPEAKER_14: Yeah. In like 20 minutes. SPEAKER_13: Like 20 minutes, huh? Where are the carts? Daddy, did you know I had a very bad day today? You had a very bad day? Yeah. This episode was reported by me with help from Kelsey Padgett, SPEAKER_05: a. It was produced by Pat Walters, Alex Neeson, and Alyssa Jung Perry with help from a. Mixing help from Arianne Wack, fact checking by Diane Kelly, and edited by Pat Walters. Special thanks to Nick Burley, Alyssa Voss at the NIH, and to Craig Cox, who was the one who first introduced me to Patrick and his story. To read Patrick's own writing about his precocious puberty and to see photos of him as a child, check out his article in the cut, which is linked on our website. That's it from us. Thank you so much. SPEAKER_01: Radio Lab was created by Jad Aboumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, Kety Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyana Sambadam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Alyssa Jung Perry, Sara Khare, Sarah Sambak, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. SPEAKER_00: Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.