Superbabies?

Summary

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Unexplainable (Vox) – "Superbabies?"

Release Date: January 12, 2026
Host: Noam Hassenfeld
Guest: Seagal Samuel (Vox Reporter, "Your Mileage May Vary" advice column)
Theme: The Moral and Scientific Dilemmas of Embryo Genetic Screening

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the growing trend of genetic screening of embryos during in vitro fertilization (IVF), examining the ethical, social, and scientific questions that arise as parents gain increasing power to select for traits like health, intelligence, or even a child’s sex. Host Noam Hassenfeld and guest Seagal Samuel engage in a thoughtful exploration of whether parents “owe” their future children the best possible shot at life—and what “best” really means.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Seagal Samuel’s Value Pluralism Approach

• [01:08] Seagal introduces her advice column, built on the philosophical idea of value pluralism, the tension between multiple, conflicting values like honesty vs. kindness.
  • Quote: “Those values are often in tension with each other... you might have conflicting values in a situation like honesty versus loyalty or honesty versus kindness.” – Seagal Samuel [01:52]
• She relates her own struggles with moral “optimization” and how the pressure to always “do the most good” can be emotionally exhausting.

2. The Reader’s Dilemma: What Does a Parent Owe Their Child?

• [02:45] Seagal reads a letter from a prospective parent grappling with choices about genetic embryo testing:

  • Standard PGT-A testing checks for Down syndrome and reveals embryo sex.

  • Newer polygenic screenings promise insights on intelligence, height, health risks.

  • Reader feels both hope and unease, worried about “over-medicalizing” parenthood and the ethical shadows of eugenics.

  • Quote: “On the one hand, it feels weirdly eugenicsy to do so much tinkering... But then again, if I could do something to make my baby healthier and happier, don't I kind of have to do everything in my power?” – Letter from Reader [02:45]

3. How Embryo Genetic Screening Works

• [05:00] Polygenic screening profiles each embryo for numerous traits and risk factors.

  • Quote: “They're gonna give you, like, a little chart... for each embryo they're gonna say this one, 12% more risk of diabetes, but minus 13 risk of schizophrenia, increased IQ potentially...” – Seagal Samuel [05:09]

• [05:52] Differentiating standard (PGT-A) and polygenic (newer, more complex, less certain) testing.

• [06:33] Tests for psychiatric traits and IQ rely on correlation, with much less certainty than for clear genetic mutations.

  • Quote: “A lot of people have overemphasized how much we know genetically about this.” – Seagal Samuel [06:33]

4. Limitations, Risks, and Misconceptions of Polygenic Screening

• [07:18] Medical claims can mislead; a small percentage-point reduction in risk doesn’t mean a binary outcome.
  • Quote: “These are conditions that are influenced by multiple genes. So it's not like you turn on this one gene, boom, we know it has X effect.” – Seagal Samuel [07:18]
• Seagal stresses that such statistics are confusing even for experts, let alone parents.

5. Subjectivity of Traits and Mental Health

• [09:55] Not all traits are universally “bad”—discussion of anxiety, depression, OCD, and how they can link to creativity and other positive attributes.
  • Quote: “Sometimes that's incredibly annoying for my life. But... I also feel like it's correlated with my creativity.” – Seagal Samuel [09:55]
  • Both hosts discuss whether they’d “eliminate” their own mental health traits with a magic wand; both are ambivalent.

6. Should You Select for the “Best” Baby? Ethical Complications and Societal Risks

• [14:44] The science:

  • Pleiotropy: Genes affect multiple traits unpredictably; selecting for one thing can unexpectedly influence others.

• [15:34] Socioeconomic implications:

  • The high cost ($2,500 per embryo) could entrench inequality. Even if costs drop, “implicit coercion” arises when everyone feels pressured to screen, risking a new “caste system.”
  • Quote: “You get this growing gap between rich and poor people because the rich people get to have the babies that are smarter, stronger, healthier...” – Seagal Samuel [15:47]
  • Social pressure grows as technology becomes accessible: parents may feel obligated to screen, even if they’re uneasy.

• [17:06] Child perspective and identity:

  • Selecting for sex may result in later emotional fallout, especially if a child’s identity doesn’t fit the parent’s selection, e.g., “you went out of your way to choose a girl, and later the child identifies differently.”
  • Quote: "You're gonna know... you went out of your way to choose a girl and it was so important to you... They have this sense of, my parents spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to achieve this consumer good and they might feel like, ooh, I extra feel like a disappointment to you now." – Seagal Samuel [17:06]

• [18:04] Eugenics and the Loss of Human Diversity

  • Concern that widespread screening removes entire “swaths of human experience," including forms of life compatible with happiness.
  • Seagal shares a story: a mother of a child with Down syndrome wrote to share her joy and the value of living with difference.
  • Quote: “Maybe we don't need to be so quick to get rid of all possible swaths of human experience that look a little bit different.” – Seagal Samuel [24:20]

7. Arguments in Favor of Genetic Screening

• [19:23] The “maximize well-being” position:
  • Philosophers like Julian Savulescu say parents have a moral obligation to ensure the best chance at the best life.
  • Screening for known severe diseases (like Tay-Sachs) is considered reasonable and routine—where’s the line between that and enhancement?
  • Quote: "Surely, you want to do the best you can for your kid... you have some philosophers... who argue that parents have a moral obligation to create children with the best chance of the best life." – Seagal Samuel [19:23]

8. Finding a Middle Ground: “Satisficing” Not Optimizing

• [20:59] Introduction of Herbert Simon’s concept “satisficing”: choosing what’s “good enough”, not always the absolute best.

  • Quote: “Opting for the good enough choice... to satisfice. And to me, satisficing in the context of like thinking about the genetic lottery for your child means, yeah, let's prevent them from having debilitating things like Tay Sachs... But...maybe we don't need to try to make them like the tall blue eyed Adonis, right?” – Seagal Samuel [21:24]

• Ultimately, Seagal advises parents not to be “bullied or shamed” by others or by companies with a profit motive.

  • Quote: “It’s kind of holding parents hostage to a moral logic that pretends to be giving them more autonomy, but actually it's robbing you of autonomy...” – Seagal Samuel [22:39]

9. Final Thoughts: Humility and Uncertainty

• Seagal and Noam close by emphasizing humility in determining what a “good life” really means—accepting surprise, uncertainty, and the limitations of human knowledge.
  • Quote: “We are deeply confused as a species about what is the good... I don't want to necessarily presume to know for my kid what's going to be the most beautiful kind of life.” – Seagal Samuel [24:52]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “It's exhausting and misery-inducing to try [to optimize moral life].” – Seagal Samuel [01:11]
• “They're gonna give you... a chart... embryo 1, 12% more risk of diabetes, minus 13 risk of schizophrenia...” – Seagal Samuel [05:09]
• “These are conditions that are influenced by multiple genes. So it's not like you turn on this one gene, boom, we know it has X effect.” – Seagal Samuel [07:18]
• “I feel like the same kind of thing in my brain that leads me into rabbit holes of worry also leads me into... finding cool scientific fact...” – Seagal Samuel [09:55]
• “If someone came to me and gave me a magic wand to just eliminate all of it, that seems like a harder decision.” – Noam Hassenfeld [10:38]
• “You get... this growing gap between rich and poor people because the rich people get to have the babies that are smarter, stronger, healthier, and the poorer people don’t.” – Seagal Samuel [15:47]
• “You're gonna know... your parent went out of your way to choose a girl... you might feel like a disappointment.” – Seagal Samuel [17:06]
• “Maybe we don't need to be so quick to get rid of all possible swaths of human experience that look a little bit different.” – Seagal Samuel [24:20]
• “We are deeply confused as a species about what is the good.” – Seagal Samuel [24:52]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:08 – Introduction to value pluralism and Seagal’s column
• 02:45 – Reader dilemma: Should I test/select my embryo for health, intelligence, sex?
• 05:09 – How screening works: The embryo profile
• 05:52 – Difference between standard and polygenic screening
• 07:18 – Test limitations and misinterpretation
• 09:55 – Subjectivity: Mental health as both challenge and strength
• 14:44 – Should you “optimize” your child? The science and ethics
• 15:34 – Cost, class, and coercion in access to screening
• 18:04 – Eugenics and loss of “human experience”
• 19:23 – Arguments in favor: The moral obligation to maximize
• 20:59 – “Satisficing” vs. maximizing: a middle ground
• 22:10 – Seagal’s advice to parents (don’t succumb to shame or profit-driven pressure)
• 24:20 – Email from a parent of a child with Down syndrome
• 24:45 – Humility about “the best life” for one’s child

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

The discussion is thoughtful, nuanced, and empathetic. Seagal Samuel and Noam Hassenfeld resist simple answers, focusing instead on the inevitable tensions that arise from having conflicting values and limited knowledge. They urge humility—reminding listeners that neither science nor philosophy can definitively say what is truly “best” for a child or for humanity as a whole.

For prospective parents wrestling with these choices, the episode’s verdict is not prescriptive, but reflective:

• Consider your values
• Understand the limits of science
• Beware coercion and commercial interests
• Accept that “good enough” may actually be best

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a rich, debate-laden, and honest exploration of one of the most profound questions in modern parenting: just because we can, should we?

Transcript

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[B]

I am someone who is a little bit obsessed with always trying to do the right thing.

[A]

That's Vox reporter Seagal Samuel.

[B]

Not just like the good thing, but the most good thing. And I just found in the past few years that that was really making me kind of pretty unhappy. Like it was torturing me somewhat, because often it's just impossible to optimize moral life and it's exhausting and misery inducing to try.

[A]

Seagal needed a way out, so she decided to start an advice column, something she thought could help her with her own ethical dilemmas. Seagal's column is called you'd Mileage May Vary, and it's pretty untraditional for an advice column because it's oriented around this particular philosophical idea called value pluralism.

[B]

The premise there is that each of us contains multiple values, multiple things we hold dear and awkwardly. Those values are often in tension with each other. It's not like one of them is dumb and one of them is the right one. You might have conflicting values in a situation like honesty versus Loyalty or honesty versus Kindness. The those are all good values, but what do you do when they conflict?

[A]

I wanted to talk to Seagal because her column kind of feels like a kindred spirit to unexplainable. She's way more interested in how to think about a question than she is about figuring out the exact answer. She tackles huge questions and she brings in wisdom from everywhere. Ancient Greece, Early Islam, Enlightenment philosophy, bloggers. But for this episode I wanted to focus on a particularly fascinating question about having kids.

[B]

So this is the question from a reader. My partner and I did IVF recently and luckily we ended up with several embryos. One of those will be implanted in me, so I hopefully get pregnant. But which one? My fertility clinic is encouraging me to do PGT A testing, which would screen for things like down syndrome and would also let me see the sex of each embryo so I could potentially choose whichever I want. And to be honest, I really want a girl. I'm also hearing about these new companies that can test embryos for all kinds of things, like how smart the kid might be, how tall they'll get, whether they'll have a lower chance of getting breast cancer, diabetes, mental illness. I don't know how to feel about any of this. On the one hand, it feels weirdly eugenicsy to do so much tinkering with embryos, and I can't help feeling a little pressured into over medicalizing everything with these expensive tests. But then again, if I could do something to make my baby healthier and happier, don't I kind of have to do everything in my power? What does a parent owe their child?

[A]

What does a parent owe their child? Yeah, it's such a weighty question. What did you first think when you read this?

[B]

I mean, to be honest, my first thought was, like, oh, man, that sentence. Like, don't I have to do everything in my power?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Really? That's the moral optimization thing that I've struggled with for years. Like, don't I have to do the best thing, not just a good thing? It's my child we're talking about. Don't I need to do the best I possibly can for them? So I really, right away, like, felt for this person, on the one hand, feeling pressured and feeling like, ugh, I don't want to over medicalize everything. But on the other hand, maybe I'm supposed to be over medicalizing this. It's my child's future. But the tacit thing that I hear behind this question is guilt and shame. I think new parents and especially expectant mothers are subjected to a lot of social scrutiny and shaming. So I think the context here that's unspoken in this question is your kid isn't even out in the world yet, but already you're a bad parent somehow.

[A]

How exactly do these screenings lower risk? Do they do sort of a profile of various embryos, and then you kind of get to pick your favorite?

[B]

Yes. Basically, what these companies will do is, let's say you've done IVF and you've managed to get, I don't know, 10 embryos. Amazing. Mazel tov. Great. They are gonna create a profile for each of your embryos. They're gonna give you, like, a little chart and it's gonna say like embryo 1, 2, 3, 4, blah, blah, blah. And for each embryo they're gonna say this one, 12% more risk of diabetes, but minus 13 risk of schizophrenia. Increased IQ potentially on the horizon, but ooh, higher risk of diabetes. Right. So they're gonna give you that profile for each of the embryos.

[A]

And what do we know about the tests? Like, how do they actually work?

[B]

Okay, so we should differentiate between a couple different kinds of tests, Right?

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So the first test that this person mentions, pgta, is a pretty simple test. It's been around since the 90s. It can screen for conditions like down syndrome. It can let you see the sex of each embryo. It's pretty common. The more new and controversial testing is called polygenic testing.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And that is something that tests for very complex conditions that are influenced by thousands of genes. So we're talking about like depression, breast cancer, but also selecting for a taller kid or a kid with a higher iq. So it's a lot more complex and.

[A]

Stuff like IQ and depression. Are these based on genetic markers?

[B]

So there is for depression a strong genetic component. IQ also has a strong genetic component. There's a lot of unknowns. A lot of what we have is sort of correlational evidence. Causal is harder, particularly with something like intelligence. A lot of people have overemphasized how much we know genetically about this. And they've tried to say, like, if you know X, Y, Z about the genes, you can pretty well predict the intelligence. I think there's a lot of researchers now who will tell you, like, no, actually we really don't know, like the interplay with environments and other things. So it's a lot more complicated of a story than some genetics based companies might have you believe.

[A]

And how accurate are they?

[B]

So it depends what you're testing for. So sometimes people want to know the risk of each embryo for diabetes, maybe a BRCA mutation that, you know, someone might end up getting breast cancer. That, broadly speaking, is going to be more accurate than psychiatric conditions, which these polygenic tests tend to not perform as well on. These are conditions that are, you know, influenced by multiple genes. So it's not like you turn on this one gene, boom, we know it has X effect.

[A]

Right.

[B]

I also think it's like very important to understand the statistical claims are like a little tricky here. So they can claim that if you choose a certain embryo, it'll have a 12% lower risk than others of developing type 2 diabetes. You might hear that and you might think, oh my God, that's amazing. The chance of my kid ever developing diabetes just went down by 12%. Yeah, but it's not like a on off switch. That's so just like black or white. You have it or you don't. Right. Things are often on a continuum. So if you hear that, really what it means is like a kid that might have developed diabetes is likely now at the high end of pre diabetes or they're going to develop diabetes but just a few years later than they otherwise would have. The same thing for breast cancer, right? Yes. You'd rather the kid develop it later if they're gonna develop it. But it's not like a bill of perfect health that the customer might be imagining when they hear these claims.

[A]

So they're kind of framing it in a sense of the kid won't get diabetes or they'll be less likely to get it. And what you're saying is that they just might spend less of their life with diabetes.

[B]

Yeah, I think the statistical claims here are very confusing even for experts, nevermind laypeople. So I think it's like really important to understand. It doesn't mean the embryo's not gonna get this thing. Right. It means conditions are on a continuum. It's not like one day you wake up out of nothing, suddenly you have like full blown diabetes. There's pre diabetic. Right. Like there's a whole continuum. And it's also worth noting, like mental health conditions are on a continuum. Right. You can have, let's say, depression. It could be mild, moderate, severe. So that's also something to think about.

[A]

Yeah, it feels like diabetes or, you know, a BRCA mutation for breast cancer or some of these more concrete things. They feel very different from an IQ score or depression or other psychiatric disorders which are both, maybe more diffuse and maybe more socially culturally related.

[B]

Yes. I think that's such an important point. No one is like sitting there pining, oh, I wish I, you know, had cancer. It's like, no, it just, you don't want it. Right. Bad, bad, you don't want cancer. But mental health conditions are a little trickier. Like I'm someone who has anxiety and some obsessive tendencies. Sometimes that's incredibly annoying for my life. But in my experience, I also feel like it's correlated with my creativity because I feel like the same kind of thing in my brain that leads me into like rabbit holes of worry also leads me into rabbit holes of I've just found out this cool scientific fact. Now I want to go into the wee hours of the morning researching it and Then write a children's book about it.

[A]

Yeah, I feel the same. I mean, I have OCD and I hate it. And then there are often times when it definitely feels like a superpower that I can hyper focus or I can hear details or I can, like, obsess over something to a point that I can make it perfect. And you can work on improving a mental health condition. You can work on emphasizing the pros and de. Emphasizing the negatives. But if someone came to me and gave me a magic wand to just eliminate all of it, that seems harder. That seems like a harder decision.

[B]

Yeah, same like if someone gave me the magic wand and told me I could eliminate my stuff, like, I would say, no, thanks. I don't want to romanticize these conditions. Like, you know, sometimes stuff can be really hard, but on balance, like, no, I wouldn't just be like, let's wave a magic wand and get rid of it. So I don't think I would want to do that for a baby either.

[A]

Coming up in a minute. What should the parent do?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, that's where it gets really complicated and hard. And this is where a lot of people are going to start fighting.

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[B]

Yeah, so I think the first thing is a scientific issue. It has a bit of a funny name. It's called pleiotropy.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

It's basically a fancy way of saying that we know not that much about which genes cause what. You might have a gene that's correlated with, let's say depression, but it might also be correlated with a bunch of other things. So if everyone were to suddenly start selecting embryos to try to prevent their kids from getting depression, we don't actually know what would happen. On a population level, it's possible other traits might be impacted. There does seem to be a general trend that, you know, decreasing the risk for like one disease also goes along with decreasing risk for other diseases. But it still worries me somewhat because there's a lot we don't know.

[A]

I also wonder how much this stuff costs. Like, would this only be available to rich people?

[B]

So right now, polygenic testing is not cheap. One company, for example, orchid, it charges $2,500 per screened embryo. So if you test 10 embryos, that's going to run you 25K.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So in the short term, at least, that does raise the specter of entrenching some kind of caste system where you get this growing gap between rich and poor people because the rich people get to have the babies that are smarter, stronger, healthier, and the poorer people don't.

[A]

And there might just be kind of pressure on people with less money to spend their life savings onto things like this.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually my concern about the longer term especially so technologies do tend to get cheaper as they mature. So it is conceivable that in 10, 20 years, you know, we'll have a way to do this kind of polygenic screening that is not 2,500 bucks a pop. But that still raises what I would call the specter of implicit coercion. So I actually get more worried about this when it becomes cheaper. If it's cheap enough that, you know, Joe Schmo can do it, then you start to have this cross society trend of lots and lots and lots of people are doing it. And now if you don't do that for your kid, you kind of start to feel like you're putting them at a massive professional and educational disadvantage. So that creates a risk of implicit coercion, which I do think is, is worrisome.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And from the perspective of the child, I don't know. Unless your parent lies to you later on, you know, you're gonna know. Like this kind of testing was done to arrive at the you that you became.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you might feel some type of way about it. So, for example, you can find out the sex of the baby. The question asker in the column said, to be honest, I really want a girl. So I'm really tempted. But like, what if you, you really want a girl? Oh, you select for the one that says it's gonna be a girl. Ten years later, 20 years later, the kid says, actually, I'm trans and I, you know, I don't identify as a girl. And then they're gonna know, unless you lie to them that you went out of your way to choose a girl and it was so important to you to have a girl. They have this sense of, my parents spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to achieve this consumer good and they might feel like, ooh, I extra feel like a disappointment to you now.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, kids have to deal with enough disappointing their parents all the time as it is.

[B]

Right. I worry, like, this is gonna create a lot of therapy sessions on, like, topics we haven't had to deal with before.

[A]

Okay. And then I think kind of like hovering over this whole conversation is the idea of eugenics.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Is there a concern about removing certain types of, like, just real human experience? Yeah. Removing human experience from the equation, I think.

[B]

Absolutely. I think, you know, this is sort of like the extension of a problem that already exists, you know, in terms of, let's say, conditions like down syndrome, which are screened for so commonly now. And, you know, that's really ethically questionable because even if we come to a place where we feel confident that for you as an individual, polygenic screening is going to lead to a better outcome for your individual kid, we still have to look at, on the population level, what does this mean for society if more and more people start using this technology? You start to get questions about removing entire swaths of human experience from the world. And I don't know. I think that when you have conditions that are very compatible with a happy life that are just like, you know, okay, someone has anxiety, someone has this, someone has that, there's pros and cons to it. That. That is much more of an open question, I would say.

[A]

So clearly there are arguments against this. At the same time, I don't want to make it seem like this is an obvious decision. You clearly don't think this is an obvious decision, or what are the arguments in favor of selecting for babies?

[B]

I think the argument in favor pulls a lot from this intuition that probably a lot of us have, which is like, look, it's your kid. Like, surely you want to do the best you can for your kid. Right. Like, of course you want them to have the best possible life they can possibly have. And you have some philosophers, like Julian Sevulescu, for example, who argue that parents have a moral obligation to create children with the best chance of the best life. And you see this argument echoed in the founders of some of these polygenic testing companies. So, for example, Noor Siddiqui, who heads up the company orcid, one of the polygenic testing companies, she talks a lot about, like, protecting your kids from various health conditions, talking about some kind of health problem down the line. She'll say, what if you could have stopped it but chose not to.

[A]

I do find myself compelled by some of this as someone who's about to be a parent. You know, I'm an Ashkenazi Jew. When Ashkenazi Jews have kids with Other Ashkenazi Jews. It's kind of like default to go get tested for Tay Sachs, which is this, you know, debilitating fatal disease. And it just makes me think that, okay, there is a universe where it feels very simple. But how do you weigh the potential benefits of protecting your child, of trying to give them the best life against the potential downsides of commodifying our relationship to our kids, of causing an unknown reaction that we're not aware of?

[B]

I go back to Herbert Simon, who is a Nobel laureate in economics and in a way the granddaddy of a lot of our kind of maximizing, optimizing talk. And he came up with this term that I absolutely love, which is satisficing. That's a portmanteau of satisfying and sufficing. And that is meant to describe opting for the good enough choice.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

He said that look, like many problems in life just contain way more variables and way too much uncertainty for maximizing along any one access to be a feasible or even desirable thing. So often it just makes sense to go with an option that is good enough, you know, to satisfice. And to me, satisficing in the context of like thinking about the genetic lottery for your child means, yeah, let's prevent them from having debilitating things like Tay Sachs, because that doesn't feel good enough for your child. But like, maybe we don't need to try to make them like the tall blue eyed Adonis, right? Like that doesn't feel like satisficing anymore.

[A]

So what did you tell the person who wrote in?

[B]

I told them, look, I am not going to tell you, like, you shouldn't do this kind of screening ever, right? I think it depends on the situation. It depends what you're screening for, what's your story? But what I would say is do not let yourself be bullied or shamed by others, especially if they have a profit incentive to push you to do a certain test. Right. I think that when someone who runs a company says, what if you could have stopped it but you chose not.

[A]

To give us money?

[B]

Yeah, that's preying on your worst fears and insecurities as a prospective parent. And it's kind of holding parents hostage to a moral logic that pretends to be giving them more autonomy, but actually it's robbing you of autonomy because it's saying you must do this kind of testing on your child. And I just want prospective parents to feel like, look, you are nobody's hostage. You, you can look at the many different relevant factors in your family's life, weigh all of them in the balance and then make the choice that works good enough for your family.

[A]

Hmm. What did people think about the advice you gave? Did you hear from any readers?

[B]

So there are a lot of people in my Twitter orbit who are very like into polygenic testing, so they have argued with me a bunch. But I also got a really touching email from a mother of a child with down syndrome and she said, look, like I made the choice years ago to go ahead and have this child. A lot of other people are just not going forward with pregnancies when they found out the kid will have down syndrome. I went ahead and had this kid and I'm so happy. I love my kid. We have a great life. Yeah, not everything is peaches and roses all the time, but I think it's totally compatible with a happy life. And I see that in my child's life and in my life as a parent. And so thank you for pointing out that these conditions that we've societally come to think are like, oh, just screen out and nix them from the get go. Thank you for being willing to consider that. Actually, a lot of conditions are like, in this zone where, yeah, there's some hard stuff about it, but there can also be some beautiful stuff about it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Maybe we don't need to be so quick to get rid of all possible swaths of human experience that look a little bit different.

[A]

I mean, it just makes me think of trying to have a goal of humility when you want to say, let's give my child the best chance at the best life. Maybe being humble about what we think of as the best life.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And if we're overconfident in what we think of as best, I don't know. Life surprises you in a lot of ways.

[B]

I think that's really, really true. I think, like, we are deeply confused as a species about what is the good. Like, the whole history of philosophy is like one long lesson in, like, we don't know what the good is and we're like deeply confused about it. So I don't want to necessarily presume to know for my kid what's going to be the most beautiful kind of life.

[A]

Foreign.

[D]

If you want more advice from Seagal, the your Mileage May Vary advice column comes out twice a month, and you can find it on vox.com or get it in your email inbox by signing up for the Future Perfect newsletter. This episode was produced and hosted by Noam Hassenfeld, who also wrote the music he is out for now because in the time since the we taped this episode he has become a parent. Congrats to Noam and the whole family. This episode was edited by Joanna Solotarov with help from Meredith Hottenot, Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala fact checking from Melissa Hirsch, Julia Longoria and Jorge Just are our editorial directors. Amy Padula gives great advice. I'm Sally Helm and I jump in to record the credits when necessary. Bird Pinkerton was confused. Can't you just get any guitar? Platy shook her head. You think it's easy to be a platypus playing a guitar? You think I can just buy a platypus guitar at Guitar Center? If you are ever going to put this guitar back together, you'll need to find the man who made it. Thanks to Brian Resnik for co creating the show with Bird and Noem. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We are@ unexplainableox.com you can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen, which really helps us out. And if you are into supporting the show and all of VOX in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.commembers to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we'll see you next time.