Jamie Metzl, JD, PhD: A real-life Buckaroo Banzai

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I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. I'm very excited today to have a

good friend who I haven't talked to

in a while, Jamie Metzl. Jamie, if you don't already know, because you've probably seen him in a variety of media outlets writing and blogging and presenting CNN, etc. He's a senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council.

He's a technology futurist, geopolitical expert, novelist, blogger, syndicated columnist, and media commentator. He previously served as Executive Vice President of the Asia Society, Deputy Staff Director of the U.S. senate on Foreign Relations, Senior Coordinator for International Public information at the U.S. state Department, Director for Multilateral affairs on the National Security Council, and as a Human Rights Officer for the United nations in Cambodia. He's a former partner of a New York based global investment firm. He's a faculty member for Singularity University's Exponential Medicine Conference. He was Chief Strategy Officer for a biotechnology company and he even ran for the US House of Representatives. Jamie served as an election monitor in Afghanistan and in the Philippines. He advised the government of North Korea on the establishment of special economic zones and is the Honorary Ambassador to North America of the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. Jamie appears regularly on national and international media, discussing Asian economic and political issues. His syndicated columns and other writing on Asian affairs, genetics, virtual reality, and other

topics are featured regularly in publications around the world.

He's testified before Congress, outlying emergency preparedness recommendations after 9 11, and on the national security implications of biotechnology and genomics revolutions. Jamie is the author of a history of the Cambodian Genocide, a historical novel, the Depths of the Sea, and the genetics thrillers Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. His nonfiction book, Homo sapiens 2.0, genetic enhancement and the Future of Humanity, will be published by SourceBooks in spring 2019,

all of which we'll be doing a deeper dive on.

He's a founder and co chair of the National Security Organization, Partnership for Secure America. Jamie has also served on a number of boards. He's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former White House Fellow and Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, and holds a PhD in Asian history from Oxford and a JD from Harvard Law. And he is Magna Cum laude Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown. And as if that wasn't enough, he's also completed at least 13 ironman triathlons, 29 marathons, and 12 ultras. So. So welcome to the show, Jamie.

It's great to have you on.

Thanks, Chris.

Happy to be here.

So, refresh my memory. I think it was we connected up at Exponential Medicine a couple years back.

Does that sound right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, it's great. Always such amazing people there.

And everybody, whoever we are, whatever we're

doing, has so much to learn. We're all behind the curve in learning because the world's changing so fast. I love going to events like that

and meeting great people like you and the others.

No, well, thanks. Yeah, I certainly gained so much from those kinds of things. I. I have to say, Jimmy, your accomplishments, I mean, they are as marked as they are varied. So I want to talk about your work and then I want to learn a little bit more about your background. So let's start off, I think a lot of the exposure, perhaps maybe I'm wrong, but at least a lot of the things that I see is with you on CNN and your interviews and you do a lot. I mean, ob. Obviously it's very topical. A lot of op ed pieces on

Asia and China and north and South

Korea and they're really. Honestly, this is not false flattery. They are amazingly well done. And I'm very envious because when you

are on camera, you have such great Poise and you have such spontaneous in depth perspectives.

How do you do that?

You know, I don't know.

Just different people's brains work in different ways. And so for me, I've always thought that my kind of big skill, if I have one in life, is the ability to see a bunch of different pieces and put them together to tell us a story. And so whether it's science or geopolitics, I mean, there are a lot of kind of little pieces, little data points floating around. And for me, I feel like my kind of core little skill that I have is to pull them together and then to communicate them in ways that people can understand. Because otherwise there's so much data swirling around us that telling stories just for me, for myself and for other people, I find is just, it's a way of making data digestible.

That's a good point. I think it's also probably a way around a lot of the fake news kinds of things that we're seeing today as well. I mean, when you get that level of granularity in story, what do you think?

Yeah, well, it's hard because on one hand, when you're on in longer form, in longer form formats like books or even editorials, you have a greater opportunity to say something. And on shorter form, in shorter form, and whether it's CNN or Twitter or whatever, you really don't have so much of an opportunity to fully make your case. And so what you're left with is to try to make the case as concisely as possible and maybe even as authoritatively as possible. But it's difficult because in so many areas people have less and less of a common frame of reference.

And so that's.

On one hand, I've tried to say things as honestly as I can when I'm on CNN or just in life. But it's hard when people's attention spans are so short to make a case based on what you believe is a factual argument. When people are bombarded with so many different opinions, some of which are supported by more evidence and some less.

Yeah, I think it's difficult because obviously people tend to feed on their news from the sources that they like and tend to perhaps have a bias towards what that source is and just look to support a perspective rather than debate their own perspective.

Yeah, I think that's the key point. And we all have our biases, but the key, the core skill of being a thoughtful person is constantly challenging our own biases, however firmly held they may be. So if something that you've believed for the last 20 years no longer feels true because you've been collecting and reviewing evidence, then just having the courage to. To say that we're wrong or to move on to something that feels more true. But as we retreat into our corners, I fear we'll all get. We have the danger of getting stuck inhabiting caricatures of ourselves.

Yeah, that's a good point. From your background, I think, in finance and also other guests that I've had on the show that are kind of in the financial markets and private equity and VC areas, that that's probably a key thing to keep people from going bankrupt. You know, to be able to say, hey, I was wrong. Hey, I need to change course. Hey, I need to pivot. So I think that scales to, you know, a variety of different kinds of levels. But I think it's, you know, perhaps with. With that background and other people's perspectives that can get beyond those biases. So, yeah, I read a piece that you wrote in the Hill, I think, fairly recently around trade policy and things, looking to the 21st century rather than the 19th, which I thought was a great title.

What.

What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions that per Americans have about Asia today? And pick whatever part of Asia you'd like to answer that.

Sure.

Well, I'll just start. In general, I think Americans, because we've been so technologically ahead for so long, I think most Americans just have this gut feeling that we must be technologically ahead of every other country on Earth. And collectively we still are. But the gap is shrinking. And the Asian countries like China, like Korea, even Japan, are getting closer to us, and they're advancing more quickly than we are.

And while China in particular has set its sights on being the lead country in the world in all multiple fields by 2025, 2030, which is the date that China has set for wanting to be the global leader in artificial intelligence.

They have very clear goals and are working diligently to reach them. We are having these debates about how do we bring back coal and when we're negotiating with the Chinese and if we. We just want you to buy more of our stuff, we want you to shrink the trade deficit. Like, it's relatively easy for them to do because they can buy things like coal or like Wilbur Ross, commerce Secretary, has said, they can buy more liquefied natural gas from us versus from some other suppliers, and that's fine. So we'll shrink our trade deficits, but we won't be doing anything to build the technologies through those Policies, at least to build the technologies that are going to define our success in the future. Those are building the fields of biotech, nanotech, AI, all of these super converging technologies that will define whether we are a leading country in the world or not. And so it used to be that you could just live in this very big island of America and not really worry what was happening elsewhere in the world and not think that, that China or Japan or Korea or other countries are our competitors. But that is no longer the case. And if we don't recognize that, we are going to be in big, big trouble. And certainly the geopolitical issues are important, and certainly the US China rivalry is going to be a defining element of the 21st century. But if we don't frame the question right here at home, if we don't recognize that we are in a struggle to build the technologies of the future, to build the economy of the future, that's going to really harm us down the line. And then looking at Asia is essential to being able to understand how this world is changing.

That's, I think you're spot on with that. So the complexities of that as well with, you know, the economic, the political, the social. And it just really does seem like it's, you know, not necessarily at a tipping point, but at a point where, you know, there's a variety of different ways the story could play out depending upon certain little variables going a good way or not so good way.

So, yeah, and there's no natural floor. I think people have gut feeling that there's some kind of natural floor. Things could get a little better or things could get a little worse. But historically that's really not the case. And if you are Mongol in the middle of the 14th century, you're saying, well, you know, things were really, you know, just a few years ago, we were really at our heights, but we still have the largest land empire in the history of the world. We're still the Mongols. And then things don't go well century after century after century. And now I personally love Mongolia, but. But the Mongolian people are not in the same position that they were under Genghis Khan and his immediate successors. And so there's no natural reason that the United States needs to have its current level of wealth or power. And the only reason we have it is because successive generations have invested in making us as competitive as we can be. And if we stop doing that, then there's, there's no natural bottom for how low we can think. Yeah, I have a lot of faith in this country, but it's. It's not a foregone conclusion that we will succeed.

Yeah, that's really a good point. I think we need to keep that in mind with, you know, just even the little iterative steps of what directions things go in. So. Yeah, so I'm going to take a little Asia shift here. One of the things in doing research on you, I saw you. Just a wonderful shot of you and the Dalai Lama. We'll put it in some of our materials. Tell us about that. What was that experience like?

Well, so I've met the Dalai Lama multiple times, and I'm just. I mean, it's such a cliche to say I'm a huge fan of the Dalai Lama, but really, how could you say otherwise if you're like the Chinese government?

Right.

But the thing that I really love. I mean, everybody loves the Dalai Lama, but having met him multiple times, he's just. It's. He's like just such a pure presence of joy. And it's just like you're with him, and you just kind of just feel happy, like, and just he's, like, giggling all the time. And then you start, this one time, I was with him in his office in Dharamshala, and he put his hand on my shoulder. He started laughing for really an unknown reason. And I just looked at him, and I was laughing, and I was thinking, I don't really know why you're laughing. I don't know why I'm laughing. And yet I feel this strange happiness about the whole thing. And, you know, and especially, I mean, the Tibetan people have just been just brutally screwed over, and their culture has been suppressed. And there are lots of. Of people who've had this kind of experience who have responded, in many cases justifiably with calls to arms, with violence, with really turning to some very difficult and dark options. And the Tibetans, in spite of all the brutal suppression, in spite of the incredible attack on their people and their culture, that within all of that, that they, under the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Prime Minister's leadership, have maintained this devotion to the peaceful path and the nonviolent path to conflict resolution, and have really not only maintained their own identity in this very positive way, but inspired others around the world to look more deeply at themselves and to be more compassionate inhabitants of the world, is really just remarkable. So I really have enjoyed the. Multiple times I've met with His Holiness. The first time I met with him. So when you meet with the Dalai Lama, generally he gives you a traditional white Tibetan Scarf. So I was thinking, he's giving me something. My mother taught me, if someone gives you a gift, you should give them a gift. And I was trying to think, well, what do you get the Dalai Lama? What do you get the man who has everything?

Right.

What do you get the man who has everything that needs nothing? And so I thought about it, and so I decided I needed to get him something that had some sentimental significance for me. So I gave him a Kansas City Chiefs baseball cap. And so I have a picture of. He gave me this white scarf and I gave him the Chiefs baseball cap. And, and he put on the cap and I put on the scarf and we took our picture together. But even the Dalai Lama's blessing, unfortunately hasn't helped my hometown.

Well, you know, there are limits, you know, Jamie. Yeah.

Well, maybe it was compassion for the other teams like that. Maybe the teams are showing compassion for other teams by losing so repeatedly.

That's right. They're being benevolent that way.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, that's great. Well, I know south by has just recently passed, and I know that you were speaking in Austin there, and I have to say, whoever posted it, I'm so glad they did because I very much enjoyed it. It was really, you know, traditional TED talks are like 15 to, you know, 20 minutes, but yours was honestly like a 50 minute TED talk. And you, you know, you had such diverse areas and you blended them so well into the points that you made.

I'm curious for our listeners, can you

talk about, and we'll put this in the link to this so people can watch it and enjoy it themselves. But can you talk about not just how about the focus of your presentation, but how did you go about stitching together all these diverse things to make the points and stuff that you did? What was that process like?

Sure. Well, that process is just the process of how my brain works. As I was saying in the beginning of our, our conversation, like, kind of the way I go through life, it's

like, you know, like medicine man picking

up little berries in the forest.

Like, I'm always kind of like taking little pieces of information or little things that I learn and kind of mulling them around and trying to think, well, how can I mix these with other ingredients that I've picked up along the way to tell a story. And so with this, this talk I gave this year at south by, it was called Hacking the Science and Science Fiction of Immortality. So really about life extension and life extension, on one hand it's a story of science, but on the other hand, this idea to become immortal has been an animating feature of our species since the beginning of recorded time. All of our earliest epics, from Gilgamesh to the Bible, talk about it. Every, most traditions have some kind of magic herb or magic plant that traditionally allows people to live longer or even become immortal. And, and curiously, every culture seems to have lost it, which I guess you need to do to explain why people are dying now. So for me, kind of telling that story in my way, as I'm not a trained scientist and I call myself a self taught citizen scientist, and it requires me to pull these pieces together to tell this story in a way that is different from how a scientist who's working on one particular piece of the aging story would often be able to do. And so that's kind of, yes. The talk that I gave though, it went through all of the historic aspirations of our species for living longer and what they mean. And then I talked about, well, if we wanted, if we were thinking about how do we understand whether it will be possible to live longer, where might we look? And I talk about some of the

human examples and some of the animal examples and the latest science and then kind of go through what are all of the steps that we can take in the short, medium and long terms to make living longer and healthier possible. And at the very end, talk about whether this idea of immortality that futurists like Ray Kurzweil have talked about is possible. And just a spoiler alert, but is that I don't think immortality in this

bodily form is possible, but the things that we do in life are certainly immortal. I don't know how long this podcast is going to last, but anyone who's listening to this a thousand years into the future, thank you, thank you for finding this. But also, I think that we will have some form. It won't be us, but some form of downloaded version, some version of our brain that won't be us, but will be connected to us. Probably at some point we'll be able to live and live on. And that's. It's a form of, of immortality. And, and that's maybe good enough.

Yeah, I, you know, the whole, it brings up the, you know, it could be five more podcasts on transhumanism and things like that. I, I wrote a piece. I'll see if we can find the link. It was a. Gosh, it was in the 90s, which I guess maybe is a good thing because that was like a long time ago to think about such stuff. But I wrote a piece called immortality and talking about not necessarily anything that's so transhuman, but in the concept of, you know, having an AI that has sort of machine learned a person and then being able to kind of virtually reproduce that person. So, you know, when my great grandchildren want to hear what Grandpa Chris has to say about blah, blah, blah, they could, you know, ask. Ask something or punch it in. So I think, you know, yeah, I think I.

Sorry, but I think, I think that's likely to happen. I think the reason is because we're all going to have these personal service robots accompanying our lives. Right now we have. I wouldn't even call it version 1.0. It's version 0.001, which are our Alexas and our iPhones and our, okay, Googles. But over time, these are going to get a lot more sophisticated. We're going to have some kind of personal AI with us constantly for the entirety of our lives. And eventually that AI may or may not take some kind of corporeal form, whether it's a robot or something else. And so it'll be very easy when you say, hey, show Me Grandpa Chris's

60th birthday party, or remind me of this, or play me this person's. Play me my mother's voice singing a lullaby. And just like all of that will be embedded in this, in this AI entity. And then there's something that's for some people, kind of scary, but there's also something kind of wonderful about that.

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think you're right. And I think I maybe will have to research this and stick it properly in the show notes. But I seem to recall some years ago, three plus years ago, didn't. I don't know if you've heard this, like Gordon Moore was like tracking his daily activities and things like that. Does that ring a bell or. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. But

we'll look it up in the show notes because it seems this kind of crazy experiment. Yeah, we'll get this posted. But if memory serves, I think it was Gordon Moore, because Moore's Law famous guy was doing something along those lines in a very just, basic, fundamental kind of way. But we'll pull out of the rabbit

hole and half of every kid on Snapchat doing. When I was in south by last year, there were these kids all in their early 20s who were Snapchat stars. And so I kind of was with them for a little while after I met one of them at a dinner. And it was Just incredible because they were going and all these kids were making hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars and all they were doing is like, they'd be having dinner, they'd film like, hey, Snapchat, I'm about to have a bite of this burger. I'm biting the burger now.

Oh, it's a good burger.

And I was there. It's like, does anybody care that like all of these people are eating a burger? And apparently they do. So I think that there's going to be like, now you have to take an action. If you're recording some part of your life, you have to press a button or do something.

But I think in the, not that

distant future, it'll just all be naturally recorded and will want to be recorded. And even now, like I'm speaking to you, if I say ok, Google, ok, Google lights up. She says she's unable to process America. If I say Alexa, Alexa lights up. So already this is happening, but it will become much more significant with time.

Yeah, I think we'll have a lot of interesting episodes of Black Mirror and stuff in the future.

Yes.

Yeah.

So I know one of the things you've also talked about is like the future of reproduction. And I'd like you to kind of just opine a bit about how you think, what do you think about that as it relates to like the future of medicine? You talked about like being able to select more desirable embryos and I'd like to talk about the pros and cons of that. It sounds kind of Gattaca esque to me. So what are your thoughts around that?

Hold on one sec. Because I said her name. Alexa has started speaking. Alexa, stop. That's really funny.

That was the point.

Yeah.

This will be one of those quaint things a thousand years from now when people are listening.

Exactly.

It's like, remember, remember that? It's like, you know, it used to be the, the dog was barking right now. Now it's. I can't, I can't even say their names. It's ok. G, O, O, G, L, E and A L, E, X A. Just. Actually just as you would do if you had a little kid and you didn't want them to know you. Right.

To spell out.

Yep. And yeah, so. So the future of reproduction, in my mind, it's the key to everything else because we are learning so much about, about what our genes do and not just what our genes do, about how the, the ecosystem of our genes are embedded in the more complex ecosystems of our body that is set in the complex ecosystem of the world around us. And all these systems are constantly interacting with and responding to each other. So it's very complicated. But the more that we learn about how our body works, the more we're going to be able to make choices and interventions. And while a lot of people, myself included, are thinking and writing about this future of human genetic engineering and imagining how we're going to use tools like CRISPR and other gene editing tools that will surely come in the future to rewrite our code, the first step, and the easiest step will be to understand what genes do at least well enough to make educated guesses in the process of reproduction. And so the way that those educated guesses will play out will be in phase one. We'll use IVF and embryo screening, a pre implantation genetic diagnosis or genetic selection to not just screen out simple genetic diseases, which is primarily the case today, but to select probabilities of outcomes for multiple complex traits. Some of them having something to do with healthcare, and some of them, like height or IQ or personality style, having very little to do, having maybe nothing to do with healthcare. So increasingly we're going to be able, we're going to be making those kinds of choices about which embryos to implant. And then using stem cell technologies, we're going to increase the number of eggs the average woman produces. So right now, during IVF, average woman produces around 15 eggs. But using induced pluripotent stem cells, we'll be able to take for example, a skin cell and induce the skin cell into a stem cell, into an egg cell and into an egg. And then instead of 15 eggs, there could be 100 or 1,000 or a million, or a billion, whatever you want to pay for, and then fertilize all of those eggs with sperm, which is far more abundant. And then because, because the cost of gene sequencing is moving towards negligibility to sequence, let's say 100, 100 pre implanted embryos and then choose based on probable outcomes for the traits that are of interest. And then the next phase would conceivably be that once you've done that, you've picked your first optimal unimplanted pre implanted embryo, rather than implanting it with the mother. You could then from the cells of that embryo, create sperm cells and, or egg cells, and then mate one embryo, one six day old embryo, with another six day old embryo. Now, rather than having to wait 30 years for a generational shift among humans, you could have it because for technical reasons, let's say it takes six months so instead of one generation happening 30 years, it's a little shorter. You'd have 60 generations in 30 years. And think of what that would do.

Think of what we've done to just by selective breeding to make chickens wild chickens go from laying one egg a month to domestic chickens one egg a day. What will be possible in pushing genetic changes and all of this, everything I've said up to this point is about we're not editing any embryos. So this is just the natural, quote unquote, human, unadulterated human DNA. So that's all just supercharging selective breeding. And then on top of that, then there's all of the CRISPR and gene editing. And where again we'll move from the single gene mutation diseases and traits. And there's a lot of progress already happening for eliminating diseases like sickle cell disease. And there's some other really terrible deadly single genutation diseases will move up from lesser to greater genetic complexity. And so while there's a lot of applications in healthcare of genetic technologies, and we'll certainly do a far better job of treat diseases through gene therapies and the like, I think the real change of the genetics revolution is going to happen through the combination of assisted reproduction technologies, art and big data analytics that'll help us understand what the, what the genes are saying.

That is so fascinating. It makes me think of kind of the human version of a hybrid vigor, you know, really sort of building and conditioning for that. That is just mind boggling. So yeah, in addition, so with genomics and biotech and also with speaking to the devices that you have in your home, what do you see on the horizon for integration of AI? I just recently read a piece for example in mit, Sloan Management Review and they were talking about susceptibility of machine learning technology to unintended biases. And we actually just had a thing in Chicago here at a, at the Contemporary Museum of Art, looking at sort of like a lot of how data are scraped to be able to do facial recognitions. And a lot of that tends to be white men. And one of the times that someone did an initial scrape, it was George Bush senior, so most or junior I think, and it was because he was the president of the time time and a lot of the images are predicated off, you know, variations on those things, which seems kind of crazy and obviously biased. But do you have thoughts about AI and machine learning? And we started talking about bias with news, but what are. I'd be interested to hear your synthetic view on that.

Yeah. So I'll talk about bias and then AI more broadly. So in bias, it's absolutely the case that our AI, that the structure of the algorithms reflect us and our values, and the data sets in many ways reflect us and our values. Because we are humans and because we are biased, it is by definition that our biases will show up in our AI systems.

That's inevitable. But that means that we can't fetishize AI as somehow being perfect or somehow, if the algorithm says something, it must be true. And we all have that instinct. I know for me, if I want to know it's raining, I'll look on my phone and I'll see if it's raining or not. Even if I look out the window and I see everybody carrying umbrellas, I'll say, well, it must not be raining because my phone says it's not raining, because we have this kind of learned helplessness. And so I think that we just. The bias is inevitable, but we need to be extremely mindful of seeing it and understanding its implications, because if not, we're going to let our machines reflect, in some cases, the worst parts of ourselves. And you didn't mention this, but I'm sure in your talk in Chicago, people were talking about the AI facial recognition and some of the, what we would interpret as very racist interpretations of the African Americans who went and had there and where there was facial recognition. And so we just really need to be. To be mindful. But AI more generally, I mean, AI and the biotech and genetics revolution, as I see, are just these two, just fundamental transformations of our species that will change so much of the way that we live, who we are, what we do, how we function. And lots of people have criticisms of Ray Kurzweil, but I think it is right

that at some point our AI systems are going to be able to write their own code or write code. And that is going to be just this incredible breakout moment in all sorts of great ways potentially. But there are also just huge dangers. And in terms of biotech, the way I write about this is that our complexity as a species has pretty much been constant for millions of years, but the sophistication of our tools is increasing at an exponential rate on a J curve. So. So there will be a time when our tools will be more sophisticated than ourselves. And it's going to be very difficult at that time to even understand what our tools are doing. And because of that, as with all of these subjects, what it means is not that we should not have these tools, not that we shouldn't move forward, but that we need to be having important conversations now about what are the norms and values that can guide us as we make a bunch of decisions, big and small, some of which don't even seem like decisions that will potentially have huge implications going forward.

Gotcha. So I think it is really a brave new world to look at those things. And it makes me, I get, I guess, some comfort that, you know, you and your colleagues think about these things and, and in some way write kind of some of these what if stories.

I hope so.

But the key is for everybody to think about them because I think that these issues are so big and they're so deep with such implications for everybody that everybody needs to understand what's happening. Ideally, everybody needs to think of themselves as a part of the conversation where their opinion matters. It's too important to be left to the experts.

That's good. So I know that was maybe a little bit of a prelude to some of your writing and your books. I want to shift gears and talk a little bit more about your writing and books. I know your first one was a nonfiction work on the history of the Cambodian genocide. And was that through the work with the United nations or how did that book come about?

So it's a longer story. But when I was in college, I met a classmate who was a survivor of the Cambodian genocide named Arnchorn Pon. And I was just 18. But his story had such an impact on me that I in part because my father, my father's family were in Austria and most of them were killed during the Holocaust. Wow. And so that had such a orange story had such an impact on me. I went to the library at Brown. I checked out every book they had on Cambodia and read them all. And in that summer quit my job in Kansas City, had a garage sale of all the junk in my parents house, used the money to buy a ticket to go to Thailand and went to a refugee camp and said, hey, I'm here to volunteer. And remarkably, they took me. And so I started out as a teacher in the refugee camp and then I realized that the curriculum wasn't any good. So I rewrote the curriculum which became the curriculum for the school. And then I. They put me in charge of training all the other teachers. And so this all happened very quickly. Advancement happens quickly when you're 18 in a refugee camp.

Yeah, typical 18 year old summer job.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I got more, I got very, very involved. Went back to Brown, did a lot of volunteering in the Southeast Asian Community and then went to Oxford to do my PhD on this question of what did. Why did the world fail in responding to the Cambodian genocide? So I did one year of research or one year of work at Oxford, and then left for two years to go and live in Cambodia, where I was working as a human rights officer for the un.

Wow.

And then came back and finished that. My dissertation, which became. Which became my first book, which was that history of the Cambodia genocide.

What a story. Golly. Were you in Phnom Penh or all over?

I will. When I. Yes, I was based in Phnom Penh, but we were setting up a nationwide human rights investigation and monitoring system and so traveled to all of the provinces of Cambodia.

And we saw some horrific things because there was. The war was winding down, but there was then, even as today, but a lot more then just a lot of killing and repression. And our job was to figure out what had happened and what the un, if any, could do about it, if anything.

I visited that. I guess it was. Was it a high school that's in Phnom Penh?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can't think of the name of it, but it was. So. Yes. We'll put it in the show notes, too. It was so moving of, you know.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

It's just.

It's really incredible what humans can do to each other. And if we're not mindful of who we are and what we stand for, people, unfortunately, can be so easily led by to do horrible things.

And even to this day, they're still taking out landmines and things. I mean, it's unbelievable. The legacy. So your next book was then your first novel, and it wasn't really techy, but more historical. Depths of the Sea.

Why a novel and why historical?

Yeah, well, so I told you about my first book, but when you do a revision of your Oxford doctoral dissertation as a book, it makes for some dense reading. And so I felt like there's this real. This story that needs to be told, but I've written it in a format that makes it very difficult to share.

And then I went and lived my

two years in Cambodia, and I came back, and when I was finishing that first book and the dissertation, I just felt there was so much on a personal level of kind of, what does it mean to be in a place where a genocide has happened, forgetting all the geopolitical reasons and the political reasons, just personally.

And I just felt like I wasn't

capturing that in that first nonfiction book. And so what I realized, I kind of had to do was to write a novel that told the story of the Cambodia genocide, but through the experience of different types of characters who were, who were connected to it. And so that was where the depths of the sea came from.

So then a lot of that was informed by true real world kinds of things.

Yeah, very much so. The characters were all made up and

the kind of emotional side of it was just what I imagined. But the context was real.

Wow.

Not even the storyline wasn't real. The storyline wasn't real, but the context was real.

Gotcha. So you then followed up with two genetics based thrillers, the Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. The switch to that because of your then interest, budding interest in these areas.

Well, so what happened was I was working after I finished at Oxford, I was at Harvard Law School and I was thinking and writing a lot about international human rights, international law. And then I was in the White House on the National Security Council working for a great mentor and to this day, great friend named Richard Clark. And Dick was the guy who at that time, he was telling everyone who would listen like, we've got these two big problems we need to focus on. One is terrorism and one is cyber. And this was long before 9 11. And people said like, oh, you're crazy. Why are you bothering us with this? And when 911 happened, actually Dick's memo saying we have this threat of Al Qaeda and bin Laden and here's what we need to do. It was just sitting on President Bush's desk.

Isn't this an episode of Looming Tower?

Yeah, very much so, yeah. And Dick's book Against All Enemies. But yeah. And so this was in the 90s and Dick always would say if there's something that everyone in Washington is focusing on, you can be sure there's something much more important that's being missed. And I took that to heart. And I kept thinking that that thing was the genetics and biotech revolutions, which that was more than 20 years ago. And so it was still in the early stages, but I felt like, just like we were saying in the beginning, I felt like I saw these little pieces and when I put these pieces together to tell a story, it was a really big story. And So I started 20 years ago educating myself, reading everything I could find, starting interviewing people just to kind of get a handle on this issue. And when I was ready, I started writing articles like Foreign Policy, National Security, articles on the national security implications of this. Then I was asked to be a lead witness in a congressional testimony on the topic. And again, I was trying to get this message out that this is really important. We need to focus on it. And again, I felt like I needed to find a way to reach people where they were not in the way that I kind of wanted to reach them, that not everybody reads articles in foreign affairs. Lots of people I know do. And I had that same instinct as I had going from my first book to the depths of the sea, to say, well, I want to tell this through a story. And so my first book, my first of this series, Genesis Code, talked about the future of human genetic engineering in the context of a US China rivalry. And the actual story is that a reporter for the Kansas City Star, investigating

the murder of one woman starts realizing that other women who were like her in their early stages of pregnancy are being murdered around the country. And in piecing together this story, he stumbles upon a much bigger plot involving US Intelligence and China and different evangelical groups. So that was Genesis Code. And then Eternal Sonata, which is the sequel, deals with issues of human life extension. And in this case, there's a scientist, this brilliant scientist whose wife dies of cancer. And so he commits himself to finding a cure for cancer. And in so doing, he, while trying to find a way to revert cancer cells to their precancerous states, he stumbles upon a way of reverting all cells to their earlier states, which is this biological key to immortality. And realizing what he's done and how dangerous that has been, he divides up this, his data and findings in different places, different encrypted sites. And then, of course, because it's a thriller, he's murdered, which unleashes this global race to find the secrets of. Of immortality and all of the wealth and power that come with it.

I love it, man.

So then I'll jump ahead to maybe your next question. And then I've been on my book tours for those books, and I would find that I would speak 90% of the time about the actual science of genetic engineering and life extension. And then at the end, I'd say, and, oh, yeah, I wrote a novel about it. It's available in the lobby. I'll be signing copies. And I realized it. But the story of the real science was so exciting to people. Like the look on people's faces, the wideness of their eyes, said that, like, people that it wasn't that the stories that I told were great, but that the science, when it was made digestible, people got it.

People at all levels. The seventh graders got it. They got the implications. And the problem was that the scientific community, by And Large isn't able to communicate the implications of the work that they're doing. And the scientific community is kind of a stakeholder in playing down the significance of the work. Meaning that if you are a cancer researcher and you are finding ways to use CRISPR to gene, edit cancer cells, like if you're talking to people, you say what this is about is curing cancer. You're not going to say, we're going to make super babies and if you thought Einstein was smart, we're going to make somebody who's 50 times smarter than Einstein because people will run for the hills. And so in some ways, it kind of takes science fiction writers and futurists and kind of futurist scientists like, like George Church to really think about where is all of this going and what are the implications?

Wow.

Well, I. It's neat to hear, like, the interest that people would have in, you know,

sort of a sci fi ish, futuristic

kind of novel, but then, you know, saying, well, yeah, but what's real and what's not and what's fiction and what's fiction today and real tomorrow? So I think, you know, the Homo sapiens 2.0 or as you had mentioned in our prelude to the, our conversation today, that it may get retitled. So at whatever point it comes out, we'll make sure that there's links to that in, in the show notes. So I want to.

Yeah, and I would, I would, I would say your readers should vote, but I feel like by the time the show comes out, we'll already have a title.

Oh, okay.

Well, it'll just be like that awesome title that we referenced, whatever it is

that we'll, we'll help crowdsource that then.

So.

Okay.

Yes, good.

Well, and I also know from just before we started, you were kind of talking about your, you know, getting. You're under deadline and things for it. Do you, do you have like a routine for writing? I mean, you've. You've written a variety of different kinds of things. You know, historical science fiction, dissertations, nonfiction.

Yeah.

Do you have. What. Do you have a routine? If so, what's, what's that routine like?

You know, I'm more of a binger on writing because I feel like it's this thing where you have to kind of keep your head in the game. Like in my. When I was writing Genesis Code, I was. That's when I was working in finance and it was really difficult because I'd have to kind of come back to it. And there was so much back and forth and then when I was doing my first revision, I realized that every, like, on every five pages someone would say like, hey, Jimmy, how are you? And then Jimmy would say, well, let me tell you how my day was. This happened and that happened. That happened. And the reason was like I was trying to remind myself. And so now I feel like I like to binge because like once when I'm in writing mode, when I'm not in writing mode, like you sit down and you write for three minutes and you know, you know, I haven't cut my nails in a while. Maybe I used to.

Right.

Once I get it in writing mode, it's kind of hard to peel me away from the, from the screen because I just like when I'm in it, I'd rather just stay. And that's kind of where I am now. I mean, I take breaks for important things like this interview, but so pushing toward that deadline. And that's the thing, because all of writing, it's like a puzzle. And especially for longer form works like books, it's kind of easy to kind of keep your head to think about how all of the different, the different pieces together. And with this one with formerly known as Homo sapiens 2.0 TBD, because I'm writing it, it's nonfiction, but with a voice. It's like the voice of fiction with the voice of a story that's being told that a person who doesn't know anything about the science could say, oh, I get that. That makes sense. Intuitive sense. I understand where this is going. That's like maintaining that voice really requires kind of for me, keeping my head in the game.

Gotcha. I think it's, it's sort of that balance. I mean, I've never written a novel, but I know that in the non fiction things that I've written, it's sort of like, you know, I feel like I need to kind of get in that zone and there's like just certain days or certain topics or whatever. It's. It's the CSIKSITMI high flow kind of thing. And other times it's like, wow, I need to go polish my shoes.

Yeah, exactly. Even the most mundane task that you hated yesterday, it's like, wow, I really like that.

That's awesome. Well, speaking. Speaking of balance and things like that, I have to know because I think maybe even the first time that we kind of even quasi met was probably at the, the hotel gym. And so how did you get into ultras and triaths?

Yes, I've always exercised and I definitely Believe philosophically that we humans have so many different potentials and if we don't maintain or invest in our potentials, they will atrophy. And I also believe that there's. That our physical being and our other aspects of our being are all one thing. And so for me, maintaining my own physical person is as important as maintaining my intellectual and what some would call spiritual. I have other thoughts on that. So that's one. And then. But doing the extreme sports, you know, the marathons, the Ironman, the ultra marathons, as a matter of fact, my legs are a little sore right now. I did an ultramarathon on Saturday, this past Saturday, which was great. But it's like, it's a way for me of saying, you know, I'm gonna push it, I'm gonna explore what I'm capable of. And it's just, it's just a lot of fun. And I'm sure like all these things, they start benign in that way and then they become kind of freaky, weird addiction. But, but it just. I like this. Marathons that I do, I do mountain trail runs.

Wow.

And it's like if you like going on a seven day hiking trip, like, wouldn't it be great to do that whole trip in one day and have other people carry your food and water?

Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, it's, it's. I, I'm, I'm a quite the amateur, you know, ultra guy. But just there is, yeah, there is just something about being, you know, out in the woods, out in nature. I mean, it's so different than pounding, you know, an asphalt urban marathon, which is fun and cool too. But I mean, it's just, it's really, it's almost like a different thing, you know?

Yeah. And the dirty little secret and I tell everybody who will listen is that at least the ultra marathons that I do, which are 50 kilometer mountain trail runs, they're actually 32 miles. They're actually easier than marathons, which I truly believe because you can't run the whole way because sometimes you're on these kind of steep inclines, you're on little rock faces or whatever. But it's kind of great because the more I tell people that they're easier than marathons and they're not that hard, the more they think that I'm being humble and they. And then, you know,

so anyway, it's true.

Ultra's. I just, they're just so wonderful and every. You called yourself an amateur. Everybody's an amateur. Like, what could you win A belt buckle.

So.

And just a quick little aside, you're both. You have two brothers, and they're both three brothers. Three brothers. Okay. And are all of you guys, like, triathletes? And two of us are.

There are three of us. Everybody has some physical stuff. Three of us do the road races and biking and marathons. And one is a very avid softball and basketball player, although he's getting a little older. And I keep telling him that you shouldn't do sports with other people in them because you can't predict what those other people. I'm encouraging him to become a yogi, but we'll see. But he's very, very active in soft. My oldest brother is very active in softball and basketball.

That's great. And I know what you've got a physician. At least one of your brothers is a physician that writes.

Yeah, everybody. Everybody is a doctor. So everybody. The oldest one is who I just mentioned. He's a. An MD, PhD. He's a professor at Vanderbilt. The second brother is an MD who is a sports medicine doctor here in New York. And actually, very likely he'll be speaking at Exponential Medicine.

Oh, good.

That's my brother Jordan.

Jordan?

Me? Yeah. And then my little brother Josh. It's all Jays, which is very. But he's an orthopedic surgeon in Denver.

Oh, perfect.

Perfect.

Well, we'll get those links in the show notes, too. So I want to be good. I want to be mindful of your time. You've been very generous to take a little writing break, but I just have a few last few questions, and part of it, I guess, is predicated upon just, you know, all the things again, the width and depth and breadth of the work and skill sets that you have, be it athletic, intellectual, you name it. What's next on your agenda? Do you. Do you have a bucket list? Or is everything already checked off? Or what's. What's.

No, no, no. Oh, my gosh. So that's the thing. I mean, the reason why anybody has this kind of erratic history like I have is you kind of do something, and then the second you finished it, you think, well, what do I care about that? That's already done. Who cares? What's the next thing? And so certainly I'm very mindful of things that I. That I want to do going forward. So when I finish this book, I'm already starting to think about my next book, which will most likely be another novel. So I'm excited about that. With some other friends, we're starting a process of building kind of building a company. That will be what our goal is, whether it happens or not. We will see, but is to be just like Airbnb found rooms laying around and Uber found cars laying around. Our contention is that there's a huge amount of expertise laying around that every adjunct professor making $15,000 and all these great experts who kind of have a way of monetizing this very valuable knowledge that they have just don't have a place. And so what we're trying to do is to create marketplace for commercializing valuable expertise that a lot of people have.

How exciting. That sounds great.

Yeah.

Great.

Well, to last couple of questions.

What?

For people that have been inspired by your work, maybe they've read your books, they've seen you on cnn, they've read your blogs. Do you have advice for anyone, whatever level of career, be it looking to college, looking to grad school, looking to career of doing the kinds of things that you do, what advice would you have? Where would you point them?

Yeah, sure. So just a few kind of general principles. One is, I think it's always good to have a plan, even if you're in high school or college, whatever, have a plan. You don't need to stick to your plan, but have a plan, have a reason why you're doing it, and then constantly evaluate, is this the right path? And if it turns out it's not the right path, then swap it for another plan. But I find kind of a lot of people, especially people kind of like me, who, for whom kind of school and a lot of things, and even awards come relatively easy. And so there's a tendency for people who really have to work hard. Somebody says, I want to be a dentist, and that's like a huge mountain to climb. And that's great. Like, those kinds of people can be more settled in just, I'm a dentist, but for people, and I know many people like this, I went to college with a lot of them for whom a lot of this stuff comes very naturally. It's harder to kind of imagine ourselves in one thing because so many of us are trying to kind of grab the whole world. And I mean, it's something I write about in my novel. If you try to grab the whole universe, you kind of have nothing in your arms. So the other thing is that we all need to kind of pick one or two and, you know, I probably overdo us here, the kind of areas that we are really kind of focusing on, but then to think expansively about what those areas are, because whatever field you're in Your field is going to be disrupted by technology and by particularly what's coming out of China. And so if you aren't not just thinking about what you're doing, but thinking about all of the concentric circles around that, you're going to be blindsided because you have competitors that you didn't realize were your competitors because they're right now in a totally different field from, from what you do. And then finally what I would say is just, it's always been important to, for everyone to keep learning, but it's never been more important than now. I mean we should just be learning everything we can because, because the world is changing so rapidly. There's so much to learn. And so every hour that you are watching Real House Housewives of Insert City or CSI Insert City, like you are wasting an hour where you could learn something really important and relevant. And if you feel like you need to decompress with that hour, make yourself the greatest decompressor in the world by becoming like a yogi or a meditator or whatever. But like just zoning out in front of kind of mindless, mind numbing television or whatever. I just think there's so much to learn. It's so exciting. It's such an exciting moment that just everybody, we all, myself included, need to kind of jump into that stream and swim.

That's great. I think that's, that's sage advice, my friend. Jamie. So in closing, I just, I want to thank you for your time again. It's very precious and you have so many demands and so many things on your agendas and schedules. So I really appreciate the carving out the time for this and just fun for me to catch up. And for our listeners who want to learn more about you, follow your work, what are the best ways to do. So I, I presume you're represented by a speaker's bureau, things like that,

multiple things. So the easiest thing is to go to my website, jamiemetzle.com I'm represented by Harry Walker Speakers Bureau and there's a link to that on my website. Thank you. And I also have just occasionally, probably once or twice a month, Chris, you're on my list. I have, I send out emails. So if you'd like to be on my distribution list in the contact section of my website, you can sign up to be on that, on that list. And I apologize in advance for all the self serving propaganda that will come.

Oh, it's good stuff. No, I get, you know.

Okay, thank you.

I know what you're talking about in the sense of stuff that seems that way and I can guarantee listeners that they, they will not be disappointed. It's, it's good, good content and fun stuff. So we will put, we will put all that in the show notes too, for people that might not be able to jot those things down right now. So just come take a look at it. So again, Jamie, I just want to thank you for your time, your generosity, and tip my hat to you for the great work that you do and look forward to seeing what comes next and seeing your new book come out.

Awesome. Chris. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation. I appreciate it.

Alrighty.

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