THIS Is How We Will Live Longer & Healthier (Jamie Metzl Interview) — The Rubin Report

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Welcome to The Rubin Report.

I'm Dave Rubin.

And before I do anything else, make sure that you're still subscribed to our channel and be sure to click the solid bell so that you actually get notified when we post new videos. All right, now that that's out of the way, joining me on The Rubin Report today is a futurist, a geopolitical expert, and author of several books including Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. Jamie Metzl, welcome to The Rubin Report.

Thrilled to be here, Dave.

I am glad to have you here, sir, because I watched you on Joe Rogan and I was like, I've got to talk to this guy about all of this crazy futuristic stuff.

It's crazy, our world is changing and it's gonna change whether we like it or not, and better for people to understand what's happening. And be part of the process of change rather than just sit back and let it happen to us.

All right, so I'm pretty sure we're gonna have a dense hour of exactly that. But before we get into the new book and really the meat of all of this, how does one become a futurist?

You know, it's a funny question, or there's a funny answer. So for my whole life, I've really been thinking about, well, what's coming next? When I was in law school, there were a group of us who were thinking about what is the information technology revolution going to mean. And this is the very early days of the internet, then the World Wide Web. And we were thinking, we were writing about it. And so I have a lot of articles from those early days that were imagining the world that we exist in. Then more than 20 years ago, I started thinking and writing a lot about the genetics revolution. I never called myself a futurist. I was just a guy who was thinking about the future. And I was going around, I do a lot of speaking at various events, and there are all these people who were calling themselves futurists. And I thought, huh, that's kind of interesting. How did they become futurists? I write about the future, I talk about the future.

Right, I assume they were wearing silver monochrome outfits. Exactly, yeah, like in the Devo hat.

And so one day I thought, maybe I'm a futurist. And so I was being introduced, when you're speaking they say, hey, will you give us a short blurb about yourself? And I put Jamie Metzl is a leading futurist. And then somebody gave this little card like that and said, Jamie Metzl is a leading futurist. And I became a leading futurist. I declared myself leading. I hope I can live it. So it's like one of these things where I come from a family of doctors. Like there's a day when you become a doctor. You kind of walk there, they give you the thing, you shake your hand, you take a picture. These are kind of self-declared titles. And so for me, I hope, that every day I am being judged by the things that I'm writing and the things that I'm saying. All right, this guy says he's a futurist. Other people are saying that he's a futurist even though they're reading words that he himself has written. Is he saying things that make sense? Is he inspiring us to think differently about the future?

I guess we'll find out in about 55 minutes.

Exactly.

So let's go back a little bit further though to sort of where that sparked within you because my audience knows I'm a huge sci-fi guy. There are so many of the things that I think about, and I think believe to some extent, that I've learned through stories of science fiction. As a sci-fi writer, and as someone that is a futurist, or at least on your business card, what were some of the stories that excited you when you were a kid?

So it was just all of these stories. I mean, these stories of exploring space, exploring humans. I mean, we are, because of the way our brains function, We learn through stories. I mean, that's been probably the greatest mechanism for the success of our species is our ability to transfer information to each other. And we do it through this medium of stories. So just from when I was a little kid, I was a voracious reader. I read all the things that normal kids read. I loved Narnia. I didn't realize it was a whole Christian thing until it was much, much later. I just read everything and I've always gravitated to the world of stories. And even in the, I have a big part of my life that's nonfiction, even in the national security world, even then it's about stories because what is the Cold War? What is anything? It's a story that we tell ourselves and then we organize around those stories.

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Yeah, I'm always fascinated when people watch, see something, or listen to something that that just blows their mind and just puts them on a different track. And one of the things for me, 1997, I ate some Pop Brownies and I was going to see Air Force One with a bunch of friends, but it was sold out, so we ended up walking into a movie called Contact, which none of us had ever heard of. We had no idea what we were walking into, and I'm sure you've seen the movie Contact, and it was written, of course, by Carl Sagan. And that opening scene, the panorama of the universe, and maybe it was the Pop Brownies and I was just right time of life, I was 21, But my mind was blown, and from there I read almost all, I think, of Carl Sagan's books, and it just opened my mind to that sort of thing. And that's sort of what you need in the world.

That's what you need. From a cosmic perspective, we are so small. I mean, there are so many solar systems, and so many stars, and so many galaxies. Just if you try to think from the perspective of the whole, and then you think we're just this one little tiny planet— pale blue dot— exactly, revolving around one star, one sun. But from each of our perspectives, we are the center of our own universe. And there's this thing, if you just were totally just seeing yourself from this cosmic perspective, you would lose your identity. But if we get so caught up in our own little thing and we're not able to see ourselves in this greater context, that also I think can be dangerous, or at least it can make us less than we otherwise could be. That's the role of stories. I mean, stories help situate ourselves within ourselves, within our communities, and within our world, and our world broadly defined.

Which part of what you do, between talking about geopolitics and dealing with the future stuff and writing sci-fi and all these things, which one sort of excites you the most, or is it just all?

It's all of a piece, so definitely, My big passion in life is to translate big, scary, sometimes complex ideas into language that can be shared. And so when I write novels, I mean, that's the whole point of my novels, is to have people enter into a world. And that's what novelists do. But in the world, what I'd like is people entering into a world and maybe think a little bit differently about themselves, about what it means to be a human, about how we're interacting with our technology now, with With Hacking Darwin, I'm doing the same thing, is that there is all of this incredible complexity of the genetics revolution, and there's like really hard science that not everybody is able to dig into. But what I wanna do is to take all of that and present it to people in ways that they can see themselves in the story. And once we see ourselves in a story, then we can be part of it, we can feel empowered to have conversations, to have opinions, because I think that's this crazy thing of this moment, is that radical technology, whether it's AI or genetics or nanotechnology, quantum computing, they're going to change our lives in deep and fundamental ways. But people are scared of the science. And so there's this, in some ways it's like a helplessness that these trends are coming and they're bigger, people feel that they're bigger than they are. And my message is not just that that's not the case, and that's a failure of the scientists. I mean, the scientists need to be translating the science so to bring other people along. But science isn't its own thing. It doesn't exist in some kind of imaginary objective realm. Science exists within the context of our societies. and if we don't recognize that dynamic interaction, which means that everybody has a role to play, then we are going to have really warped outcomes that are going to be bad for society, and they're also going to be bad for science.

All right, so then let's jump into some of those big scary ideas, and let's just sort of do 101 on a couple things, because I think that's really what you're trying to do here in a lot of ways, is just take a wider group of people and get them to understand some of this stuff so it isn't so big and scary. Let's just talk about the world of genetics in general right now. So when someone says genetics, for the person that has no idea what we're talking about, great, what are you talking about?

And that person is my ideal audience.

And I think that's most people, and they're sort of afraid to admit it. People hear things, they—

And frankly, that was why I loved my interview with Joe Rogan. Actually, I think that's why Joe Rogan is so successful, in addition to being a great guy, because he just is this very confident as a person But he's just asking common sense questions that the average person probably would want to ask. But when the average person, quote unquote average person, whoever that is, is faced with someone who's a quote unquote expert, even a self-declared futurist like me, they're kind of afraid of asking just some basic questions. They're like, well, what if it's a bad question? We all have that kind of insecurity. So, genetics. So everybody, I think, I think understands that genes are part of the blueprint for life. And so, to put it on a human level, your mother has an egg, your father has a sperm. When that sperm fertilizes the egg, you have a fertilized egg. It's the early stage embryo. It's one cell, an egg and a sperm that come together. And in that cell, there is a blueprint for what everything that you will become. And so that blueprint is written in a code, and that code is your genome. And your genome is made up of genes. So it's the blueprint for life.

Let me pause you there for a second. So would you say at that moment then, once that coding is there, is that the beginning of what you would say is life? This is, of course, where ethicists and geneticists and scientists and religious people have to debate all these things.

Yes, so this is a, there's a political question, which makes it very difficult for us to, it's very difficult to think about that question and to say, well, there's a scientific question and there's a political question. Because the whole thing is life. Like, is an egg cell alive? Yes. Are our cells alive? Yes. Is sperm alive? Yes. But it's not on their own. They're not able to replicate, which is one of the hallmarks of life. And so you could say that that is the kernel of life because life exists on a continuum. It's one microscopic cell. But that cell, if it grows in the quote-unquote normal way, it will become life. So I think that, like, I would never say that the people who believe that life begins at conception are wrong. I mean, I think that it's because it's a judgment call, it's all on a continuum, I think that we can't say that. But what I would say is that there's a difference between a single fertilized egg, maybe it's a single fertilized egg in a, woman, or maybe it's in a lab. We'll get to that. And there's a difference between that and like a baby who's actually born and a 20-year-old person. I mean, there are all the politics of that, but it's certainly, there's no doubt that a single fertilized egg is the beginning of life.

Okay, so we now live in a time when we can start manipulating these genes. Talk to me about that. Crazy stuff.

That's the crazy moment that we are in now. So we have evolved for about 3.8 billion years. So life, most scientists believe, began from these thermal vents in the bottom of the ocean, this first spark of life. And so all of life on Earth is related. It comes from that same spark of life, and all of life our cells, plants, everything else uses the same building blocks because we have that same origin. And for almost 4 billion years, we've evolved by the Darwinian principles of random mutation. Random mutation means just we're all different, and that's really important because if, from when we were single-cell organisms or anything, if everybody is the same, it may be good now, but if the environment changes and you're still the same, then you're going to die. And so this kind of diversity is really important. So it's random mutation and natural selection. Natural selection just means we are in these competitive environments and some formulations do better than others. I mean, there are like a million podcasts. Yours does a lot better than others. And that is a form of natural selection. There's a marketplace and a certain set of attributes And if the world changes, like maybe that we have no more electricity, or maybe there's no voice and the people doing pantomime, those are the best podcasters, 'cause no one can hear anything.

So that's basically just the nature of reality, sort of, that as things change, we modify along the road to survive.

So the core principle is 3.8 billion years driven by random mutation and natural selection. And now we are recognizing for the first time, one, that all of biology, based on genetics, is a form of information technology. And like our traditional IT, it is increasingly readable, and that's what genome sequencing is, and writable and hackable. And hackable meaning that we now have these tools to edit the genome, kind of like a word process. We can eliminate genes, we can add genes, and so we are able to hack life. And so we are beginning, after 4 billion years, this phase of our lives and our evolution where we, this one little group of essentially monkeys that climbed down from the trees in Africa, that we have the tools to recreate all of life on Earth. And it's this awesome power, and to quote Spider-Man, it comes with a tremendous responsibility.

Technically, that was Uncle Ben. Yeah, that's exactly right.

That's exactly right.

I do it myself all the time. That is important. Okay, so we have this idea now that we can edit the genome, we can read it, we can edit it, and all of those things. So before I get to the sci-fi part of my brain, which is where all the scary stuff comes in, what are some of the good things that we can be doing?

I'm so glad you asked that, because I, I speak about this stuff all the time, and I could speak for an hour, 58 minutes they'd like, "Here are all these miraculous things, it's so exciting." And then for the last 2 minutes, there's just some potential downsides we need to be mindful of. And then it's like at the end, people say like, "Oh my God, I'm so depressed, we're all gonna die." So we should be incredibly excited about this revolution because it's going to help us a ton. So the first, the most immediate impact is going to be how it changes our experience of healthcare. Right now we live in a world of generalized healthcare based on population averages. So you go to a doctor and you get treated based on being a human. If you have a headache, maybe you get a Tylenol. But you find out if you're one of the people who dies from Tylenol by taking a Tylenol because everything is based on on the odds of most people will respond to a certain treatment. The same is true for about 88% of cancer treatments. We're now moving to a world of precision medicine. And so precision medicine means that you're treated not just based on your being a human, but based on your being you. So any intervention is going to be based on your individual biology.

So they literally are gonna be able to look at your genome, is that the right word?

Well, so there's the genome, so there'll be a sequence set of information. So it'll be your personal history, your family history, your biometric information, other measurements, and your genetic information. But your genetic information will be the most significant foundation of your electronic health record. And that information will be provided mostly at birth. So we're all going to be sequenced, just like when you get a— when a kid is born, they do a blood test with a heel prick. Everybody in the not distant future will have their whole genome sequenced, and that'll just be part of their electronic health record. And so the exciting thing is, one, everyone's going to get this personalized medicine, and it will be better medicine because it'll be tailored for all of our biology. But even more significant, we're going to have billions of people whose genetic and life information are in these massive databases. Datasets. And then we're going to be able to use big data analytics to increasingly unlock the secrets of genetic information and systems biology, meaning that we have systems of systems inside of our biology. And what that is going to mean is we're going to have a lot of information, not just about why you may be sick now, but about how your life is likely to play out from the moment of birth. You're going to know that I have a greater than average risk of this genetic disease, for example. And that's going to be very actionable, because if you're a woman and you know that you have a, let's say, a 70% greater than average chance of getting breast cancer, you're gonna wanna start your screenings much earlier than somebody who doesn't have that predisposition. But we're also going to have a lot of information that it's not deterministic, but is probabilistically predictable about certain things that have nothing to do with health, like IQ, the genetic component of IQ, personality style, maybe that we have a great potential to be a fantastic sprinter or mathematician. And we're going to have to think very, very differently about parenting and about life and a lot A lot of this stuff can be scary, but it's also exciting. Like, imagine, right now we have these terrible refugee camps all over the world, but we have Einsteins in every one of those camps, and we just don't know who they are. In Los Angeles, where we are now, there are these inner cities, and the crime of inner cities, I mean, there's all kinds of problems, but it's just like we're throwing human potential down the toilet. People are worried about genetic profiling, and they should be worried. But what about all these people who we're throwing away? If we knew that some kid who's growing up in terrible conditions has this incredible potential, and who knows whether any potential will be realized, but to be a genius musician or mathematician, we would at least think twice about not providing resources resources to help people realize their potential.

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It's so interesting because as you're saying all this, and I can think of all of the roads that we can do good things that you just laid out there, and then there's this other part of me, and maybe that just is the, The sci-fi dystopian part where you think of all the ways that there could be evil manipulation and population control and eugenics and all of these things that seem wrong or just in the wrong hands could go just completely haywire. So do you view that sort of choice? Yes, absolutely. Do you view that as different than with any other technology now, or is this sort of unique?

Different in that every technology has their utopian and dystopian potential uses. What's unique here is that this technology is so powerful and it's coming at us so quickly that we don't have the same time that we've had to figure it out, like with steam. I mean, steam and electricity and even using gasoline, I mean, all these things, they were revolutionary. But we had a little bit of time to transition. And this is the problem, is that the science is moving so quickly that the transitions can't happen in the kind of methodical ways, and as disruptive as they've been in the past, but that will be much more methodical than what's coming. And that's why there's a race. And so every one of these technologies, every good outcome, has a parallel story that's a bad outcome. And so, for me, I tend to be all in all net optimistic. But the technology itself is agnostic, and what's at play now is the question of what are the values that we are going to use to guide this technology? And I think that's the game, and that's what I'm trying to bring people into the conversation to say that if you are worried about a potential dystopian outcome, how can we fight together to make sure that that doesn't happen? How can we bring people into the conversation to say, well, here's what I want to see. I want to have these technologies used in ways that are making our communities stronger, that are enhancing human potential in positive ways. But to do it, we all need to have a voice, and to have a voice, we need to be educated.

Are there people that just focus on the speech speed portion of this? 'Cause for some reason that really fascinates me. Like this whole thing does, but something, this idea that people all over the globe now because of the internet and all the other ways we're connected can all be working on these things all at the same time, all be sort of jumping in front of each other in faster and faster ways, and for all we know there's all sorts of technologies happening in China now that we have no idea about, and I wanna relate this also of course to the geopolitical part, which is some countries are gonna have more restrictions on these technologies and some won't and all these things. So the speed part to me is just really fascinating.

It's an essential piece of the story. Just think about this, that 100 years ago, 500 years ago, there were the same distribution of geniuses that we have now. But if you're a genius 500 years ago somewhere in Africa or somewhere in Asia, you're kind of on your own. Ramanujan, this kind of genius mathematician in India, he had like one book. From that one book, he kind of figured out this incredible system of math. But now, if you're a genius most anywhere in the world, you have access to the global library. You don't have to, in the Bronze Age, the Copper Age, we had all these people all around the world who are having the same discoveries, basically in the same pattern, without being connected to each other at all. It was kind of a waste of energy. One said, "Hey, copper, got it." I'm just sending out the email.

Right, right, so Thomas Edison figures something out and some guy halfway across the world doesn't realize, "Oh, you know, 3 months ago that was done." Exactly, but what a waste of energy.

So now, nobody, we're all interconnected, so everybody, you don't see start at the bottom of the mountain. You start kind of two-thirds of the way up the mountain, and you don't have to take a step that has been taken by somebody else. You don't have to solve a problem that has been taken— that has been solved by somebody else. And so with Beta Ranch, everybody in the world increasingly being brought into this process, we are unleashing this imaginative, creative tidal wave that I just think that people don't appreciate the significance of that. And that's why, in this field of biotech and genetics, pretty much every day there's another paper that comes out that nobody notices. But if this same paper had come out 10 years ago, everyone is—

World changer.

Everyone would have gotten the Nobel Prize. There's a Nobel Prize, like every single Nobel Prize-worthy discovery In the context of 10 years ago, every single day.

Right, so okay, so I think most people understand the part that if we can map your genetics, that then we can watch out and know that you shouldn't take this medicine, or you should stay away from this food, or that sort of thing. So it's sort of a blueprint for sort of how you can live and how you can flourish most maximally.

And to identify, so right now, when you have a disease, you have a symptom. And you go to the doctor, and then the doctor tries to treat that symptom. But maybe this is a symptom of something that's been germinating in you for a decade. Maybe it's something that results from a genetic abnormality that you had since the moment when you were that single cell, that fertilized egg. And so it's going to change our model of healthcare, that from treatment of Symptoms to prevention. So I think that's, and that's, so doing all of those things, but in a way that's personalized for you, because I'm gonna know I have a risk of this certain outcome. I don't want that outcome to happen, and so here are the things that I'm going to do from the beginning.

[Speaker] So that then gets us to the editing portion of this, right? So okay, so now we know that you're predisposed to X, Y, and Z. Now we can start editing things, right, to make sure ensure that you are not going to get certain diseases.

[Speaker] Yeah, so what you're talking about is editing that happens after you're born. And so there's a big distinction between these two kinds of editing. There's germline editing, which I know we'll talk about, which is editing to sex cells. And so that's primarily embryos, but also it works on sperm and eggs. And the reason why it's called germline is that's when you edit the sex cells, the sperm cells, the sperm, eggs, or embryo, then that gets passed on to future generations. But if I edit you or an adult, not in the sex cells, then that's just for that person over the course of their life. And that's why it's less controver— it's controversial, but it's less controversial. So there's a whole class of interventions called gene therapies that are used to do exactly that. And right now, For example, cancer is probably the best example. So there are a lot of people who have cancer. We have these natural antibodies that fight cancers. But sometimes people, their antibodies aren't working well enough, and sometimes they have a cancer that just is overpowering their antibodies. So there's a treatment called CAR-T therapy where you take out somebody's blood cells and you genetically engineer them to give, to boost to their natural cancer-fighting superpowers. Then you put those cells back into the person's body, and that person becomes a genetic superhero.

[Speaker] So this is sort of like platelet-rich therapy, right?

[Speaker] Well, yes, so PRP, yes. I mean, PRP is a much narrower, much less systemic intervention. So yes, but this is that kind of quote-unquote on steroids. [Speaker] On steroids, yeah. [Speaker] And so we are going to be, and so there's a delivery issue. When the delivery is happening, happening through blood, that makes it a little bit easier. But then we have all kinds of what are called specialized cells. So you stop, when you're that single-cell organism, or single-cell preimplanted embryo, you can have the potential to become everything. But your cells differentiate over time, and that's why you can have skin cells and liver cells and heart cells. And so when we're doing these kinds of interventions, for gene therapies, we're wanting to edit a specific kind of cell. Let's call it a heart cell or something like that. And so there need to be delivery mechanisms to do it. And so when it's blood, you can easily take it out and put it back. But now there's this whole other area of research of using basically retrofitted viruses, 'cause viruses for billions of years have developed a machinery to kind of infiltrate our bodies and replicate. So we take advantage of that to deliver certain kinds of gene edits to specific parts of the body to treat specific types of problems. And that's not fully ready for prime time with humans. There are some very early clinical trials. A huge amount of work though is happening in this area.

I don't know if this is exactly the right point to mention this.

So where does CRISPR fall into all of this?

So CRISPR is the, among the best forms of gene editing. So if you have the genome and you're making the changes to the genome, there needs to be a mechanism for doing that. And so there have been prior tools for gene editing that were much slower and more expensive than this tool of CRISPR. And it's called CRISPR-Cas9 is the most prominent, but there are many. So basically there are these repeating sequences repeating patterns in the genome, and with the CRISPR systems, they can identify, use a guide RNA to find a specific place on the genome, and then with the Cas9, it's a cutting enzyme, so you think that it's the double helix, you go to a place, and then you have this little knife, molecular scissors, and you cut out what you don't want. And then, the genome will either reconnect with that missing piece gone, Or you can introduce an additional piece of DNA designed to fit in that little space, and it'll be like, oh, we're missing a piece of this bridge. Oh, here it is, and the cell will just naturally put it there.

[Speaker] So I sense we're getting into one of those places where the average person is suddenly going, whoa, whoa, I'm losing it a little bit here. So to unwind this a little bit though, 'cause I think we've got the right pieces here, that doing all of that, then would allow people to be, again, inoculated from certain diseases, to be able to maximize health, and also for generations then after to be able to not have to deal with these things, right?

Let me make it very real and concrete. So I'm a member of the World Health Organization, has an international advisory committee on human genome editing. We were created at the end of the 1990s last year, 2018, after a Chinese scientist announced in November that the world's first gene-edited babies had been secretly born in China in October 2018. So these tools of using these CRISPR system to change, basically they edited these pre-implanted embryos of these two little girls, and what they did went in and they basically disrupted this one gene, which is called CCR5. No one needs to remember CCR5, but just the genes just all have different names. And what the CCR5 gene, when it's disrupted, people have disrupted copies of CCR5, mostly Northern Europeans, have an increased resistance to HIV because the HIV virus can't penetrate into the cell. And so this was way before people thought, myself included, thought it was safe. It felt like human experimentation. But these kids were born, and so the world's first gene-edited babies are born. And people go straight from that, and it's a huge deal. I think it was highly unethical of this guy to do. And then they say, all right, well then the next step in people's mind is, It's like the Build-A-Bear Workshop. It's like, "I'll take one of these, one of these, one of these." And it's not going to be that. Biology is too complex for that. But we are increasingly going to have the capacity, and it's still, it's very, very early days, but it's going to be more and more and more, to begin making a small number of gene edits to potential future humans. And that's a really big deal.

So what was the ethical conundrum there? Just because this is still too untested?

Yeah, so a few things. One, it was just way premature. I mean, a lot of people are doing experiments on animals like mice, but to do these experiments on real live humans, I mean, we know what, I mean, that to me, it felt like we have the Nuremberg Conventions about what is and is not okay, and this felt experimental.

So, and we know for a fact that this has been done, this has been verified in other places, or could this possibly just be a situation where—

I, you know, I'm, if there's a 1% chance that this is a fraud, in my view, there's a 99% chance that it is not a fraud, and I know a lot of people, and I work with people who know this guy, He Jiankui is his name, so I think it's, I'm, I'm not entirely convinced that it's real. But it was unethical because it was premature, because it was totally untransparent, because the work was sloppy, because the parents didn't give their proper consent, and because the target was a wrong one in the sense that these kids, the father had HIV, the mother didn't. But the kids would not have been born with HIV had this not happened. So he was not, he wasn't treating something that they had. He was trying to give them an enhancement.

Wait, how do we know that they wouldn't have been born with HIV? Is that just not how it transmits?

Yeah, yeah, so we have all kinds of technologies like washing sperm that make it so that if you are a man with HIV in the United States and you want to have a baby with a woman doesn't have HIV. There are lots and lots of ways that you will have a baby, if you get proper care, that doesn't have HIV. So it's not like these kids were going to have HIV. They weren't. And so one is, although there's not a clear line between therapy and enhancement, this was clearly an enhancement. And my thought is, we will be enhancing ourselves in the future. Probably in the future we should be enhancing, because it's just like we're buggy. We've evolved over billions of years. Evolution has made all kinds of trade-offs, and sometimes those trade-offs are bad for us individually. And so it's terrible when people die young of terrible genetic diseases. It's terrible when old people get dementia and lose their minds. I don't want that. If we can make little tweaks, that we figured out, I'd say like, all power to us. Like, why not? That's the history of our species. We need to be careful. But for here, for the first step on using this incredibly powerful technology on a human, it would have been more responsible if we had done it 5 years from now in a very responsible, very transparent way, addressing a target where there would have been a kid would have otherwise been born with a deadly genetic disease, and then we would have had, like in the beginning, you said let's talk about the good stuff and then let's talk about the scary stuff. It's better to start with the good stuff because people are primed to be terrified. And so it just would have been so much better had we done it that way.

Well, that's why I'm so fascinated with the speed part of this, because it's sort of like, well, somewhere, maybe in China, but somewhere there's gonna be an island of Dr. Moreau sort of thing where just some scientist who doesn't who just wants to do whatever he can and let the consequences be damned, will go ahead and do it. And for years that could exist and no one will know, and then the more responsible scientists will constantly be playing catch-up. And then that also sort of brings me to the law part of this, because we are starting sort of to discuss laws around this here a little bit. Barely, barely. I mean, I remember, when George W. Bush was sort of talking about some of this related to stem cells and that sort of thing. But how much of this do you think will come down to just what countries will sort of allow it more versus what scientists are just gonna do what they wanna do?

It's a great question, it's an essential question, and that's the race, because the science is moving forward exponentially. You're exactly right, it was not a surprise that the first, I write about this in the book, that the first application of using CRISPR gene editing on humans happened in China. I always said that's where it's going to happen. It's not a surprise that now it's in Russia, that there's a biologist there who's saying he has 5 people lined up to have more genetically engineered babies. And this happens, all of this technology exists within the context of our societies. And so there are some societies that are better regulated in these areas. I always hold up the United Kingdom as kind of the gold standard. A national healthcare system, which makes it much easier to just spread rationality in the system, where we in the US, we have this kind of chaotic system of systems.

Is the part of the problem, and my audience knows I'm not a big regulation guy, so is part of the problem though that even if you have regulation, well done, well-intentioned, all that, that in a way that will slow down certain advancements where then the bad guys, let's say, or the kooky scientists who don't have those ethical dilemmas will just keep making jumps in a faster and faster way.

[Speaker] They will just do, but we don't, it's not like regulation is good or bad. We need the right amount of regulation to incentivize the outcomes that we want, and especially in an area like this where we're talking about the future of human life. You talked about where does life begin at conception, which is a very legitimate issue, a lot of people feel emotional about it. And the people who are saying life begins at conception, they're not saying life begins at conception, but let's have no regulations and life begins at conception for me. They're saying, well, we need to have a regulatory system by law, so to determine what people can and can't do. And I may disagree with some of the goals that they're setting, but I think we're all agreeing that this needs to be, this is life and it has to be It has to be regulated. And we don't want scientists out there just experimenting on humans, which is what happened in China.

Right, well, that's what, so I'm saying I'm with you on that, but that we can't regulate all countries.

We know we, so for ourselves, what we need to do, like, if any society decides that, oh, we're just gonna opt out of this technology, like, opting out of the genetics revolution is opting out of national competitiveness in the 21st century. Like, if you do it, you can do it, but you are just going to be, like, you're not going to have a competitive economy because this is the future.

You're gonna be like when we find those random tribes somewhere.

Yeah, which is great, and they're probably happier than we are. They're working out, they're getting more steps a day.

That's a whole other topic, yeah.

So what we need to do is we need to find that balance within our societies, And it's good to have that balance because like with the United Kingdom, they're very well regulated. They have cutting-edge science, but the public is on board with the science. And so we in the United States, we have incredible science. We have the best basic science in the world, but there's this total mismatch between the science that's racing forward and the general public, which is kind of afraid and is cautious.

That's why we're doing this, right?

Exactly, no, I know. And so we need to find a way of bringing those people together. Now I'm going to do an interview on Newt Gingrich's radio show, and I'm so committed to engaging with religious communities, evangelical communities, conservative communities, because it's like, wouldn't it be terrible to say, oh no, this is my truth, that's your truth, we can't even talk to each other. That's the foundation of society. But you're absolutely right, there are some places that are going to be, that already are, less regulated, or maybe well regulated based on a different set of values. You can imagine a place like North Korea, they say, we wanna, we the leaders, we wanna stay in power forever. And so we'd like to engineer certain outcomes that will have a Plato's Republic model, where we'll have the leaders, and then we'll have the followers, and we'll select their embryos, or maybe even do some basic gene editing to determine certain outcomes. There's a race, and there's a race between societies, but there's also a race to see, can we build some kind of normative global system that can at least bring us all together with a process? And there's a lot of examples of failure, but there's some examples, whether it's nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, even climate change, where we've not succeeded But we've done certainly better than worse. And the entire— we talked about telling stories. I mean, international law is a story. The concept of human rights is a story. And we've sold those stories pretty well. And that's what we need to do. And that's why we need to work on the individual level. Everyone needs to be educated. On the national level, we need smart laws, and we need political leaders who are engaged on this issue, which is hardly the case now. And on an international system where we need to move towards having processes that can bring us together and over time develop norms and regulations and laws.

Okay, so we sorta understand the inequity, let's say, between the way certain nations are gonna deal with this and the way certain individual scientists are gonna deal with this. Let's jump into that religious portion of it for a moment. So I'm glad you're gonna go talk to Newt Gingrich. I've got him coming on in the fall. Oh, good. And he's a, look, it's interesting to talk to a Republican who I think, basically I think has a pretty decent understanding of science, but comes from a religious perspective as well, okay, that's fine.

It's essential. What are we gonna do, not talk to each other?

So when you talk to Newt, or even not to make it so specifically about Newt, but when you talk to people of faith, I think the first roadblock you're gonna come against is they're just gonna say you're playing playing God. I mean, I'm sure you hear this all the time. So how do you counter that, or how do you assuage their fears?

Yeah, yeah. So first, the first thing is acknowledging. It's like, I get that fear. I share that fear. I mean, whether it's playing God or messing with complex systems that we don't fully understand, I mean, this is a hubristic act. We are just one little species in a world of many millions of species. Like, who says that we are the ones who get to recreate life? And so I get it. But if you believe that it is okay for humans to apply technology to change our environments, the question isn't should we or shouldn't we, because that's what we do. That's why we're here. That's what medicine is. That's what agriculture is. I mean, we live in a world that we have transformed through our technology. The question is, what are the uses of that technology that we're comfortable with? And I get that this issue of abortion is very difficult. It's very painful for people. And I'm not a proponent of abortion. I just feel that a woman should have the right within limits to dictate what happens to her own body. I don't think this The state basically can enforce slavery on women to force them to carry children on behalf of the state, which is essentially what it would be. But even with the people who are the quote-unquote pro-life people, in the context of the debates that we just had in Alabama, there were people who were leading that, people in the state Senate in Alabama, they very consciously decided to leave IVF out of that legislation. So if you believe that life begins at conception, when that sperm fertilizes the egg, that is life, and that's inviolable, you would say, well, we should include IVF in this ban. They're not doing it because in every community, when you see these parents, whether they're high-risk parents or older parents or soon just normal parents who are having children through IVF. It's the miracle of life. And so the quote from one of the Alabama centers, well, we're not applying, this doesn't apply to those fertilized eggs in a dish. We're talking about embryos inside of a woman's body.

So that's a real disconnect there.

You could call it a disconnect. Disconnected, but I'm not calling it a disconnect. I'm saying it's a recognition that this stuff is really complicated. And if we just say, I have this absolute position, and I'm just gonna stick to it, I think that's going to, like, I wanna look for, to say, all right, well, you have recognized that because you are pro-life, you recognize that you want to protect embryos, and we may have political differences, but I respect yours. And you want to protect the miracle of life of these people in your communities who are having kids through IVF that they otherwise wouldn't have. And so I just think we have to work towards finding some kind of, are we ever going to completely agree? No, but no, that's not a standard in a democracy. It's not that you have to agree on everything. It's that how do we rebuild a place where we can at least communicate with each other and try to find as much common ground as possible.

So there's so many ways I could go with this, and I have a zillion sci-fi movies rattling in my head. Suddenly I had something about Star Wars in there related to basically a clone army. We'd start having this genetically modified group of humans versus, we haven't even got into robotics at all here, but AI and droids, and they're gonna sort of be rising. But let me hold that one for later. For just a sec, what about the economic portion of this, which is that once these technologies become more ubiquitous and more people can afford them, and then they're just sort of out there and somewhat mainstream, that obviously, like every other technology, like a flat-screen television, people that have the means will start using them, and that basically we're gonna sort of have two paths for humans. There'll be sort of these superhumans who will be able to deal with all of these things and take advantage of these technologies, And then you'll have the regular old suckers like us right now that can't do it. And what we're gonna do with that, how we're gonna sort of bridge that divide.

It's a really essential question. I have a few different ways of answering it. One is that's one possibility. And if we let that happen, shame on us. Because the technology isn't requiring that outcome. It's the way we have decided to organize ourselves So in a country like Israel, where IVF is included in the national health plan, you don't have these equity issues because everybody has access. And if you have a system where you're doing that, it actually would pay for itself because we're going to be able to prevent huge numbers of genetic diseases that are costing us many, many hundreds of billions of dollars. So that's an organizational issue. I always say that if people are worried about genetic inequality in the future, as we should be, we can wait until the future comes to say like, aha, this is what I was preaching. Or you can look at the world today and say, geez, there's so much inequality today. Average person, kid born in the Central African Republic is born essentially brain damaged because of maternal malnutrition in the context of the civil war. And so there's no difference in terms of outcome between a genetically enhanced person and me, or my kids, and my kids and a kid born in the Central African Republic. There's still that same differential. But if we're okay with that today, if we're not living those values today, how can we say, oh, but in the future we want to live those values, when we are the people in the Central African Republic? And then the second point I'll quickly make is we all have these superpowers that once seemed like magic. So we're all, hopefully, immunized, or most of us are immunized.

Not so much anymore.

But it's like a superpower. And it's a superpower that everybody has, so there's also a cost issue with this.

Okay, so let's, so basically, that's the political element to this. That's just sort of the, so what do you do? I mean, how do you get politicians to get on board things that are such big ideas that, Politicians, when they talk about anything now, we've been dumbed down to the point where it's like, yeah, you're gonna mention CRISPR, and it's gonna make sense to anybody. How do you actually get the political elite to be able to deal with this in an honest way?

The honest answer is I don't know. But I'm trying. So here are the things that at least I'm trying to do. One is I'm trying to help people get educated, and so with this book I've written, it's really at a level that anybody can understand, and I wanna just bring people into, once you have basic information, we're all equals, 'cause we're all humans and everyone has a say. Two, where I'm doing a lot of outreach to political leaders. We've offered copies of the ebook for free to any member of parliament of any country in the whole world. I'm talking with actually Brad Sherman, who's a congressman from Los Angeles, and others about congressional hearings, in the paperback version of Hacking Darwin, which is coming out in April, we're gonna have a short political guide in the end with some pointers about how to, questions to ask for your political leaders. And I'm doing this work in Geneva, but all of that amounts to nothing in the sense that what we need is we need an explosion. Like everybody, we need, on a popular level, people need to be seized with issues, kind of like it's happened with climate change. I mean, climate change 10 years ago was a non-issue. And now, you know, people are, whether it's not using plastic straws or marching, people get that this is an issue. People get that they want to have their voices heard. We need to have that happen with issues of genetics, and that will at least begin to put this on the radar of political leaders. But then we need to educate political leaders. Like, we need to have outreach, and I talk about this in the book, every movement has to start somewhere. It has to start from this little hopeless place where there's this huge problem and there's just a few people. But it's a political issue, and the challenge is 10 years from now, this is going to be the biggest issue in the world. Everyone's going to be talking about it. There are going to be people marching. I think there's a potential of violence because the people who are If you're worried about genetically modified crops now, how are you gonna feel about genetically modified humans? But why wait 10 years until this is like an exploding crisis to have a conversation about what are the things that we should be doing now? 'Cause big decisions are being made every day.

Yeah, so when you talk about genetically modified humans, I'll go to one of the sci-fi movies. Did you ever see The Island? I can't believe I'm gonna quote a Michael Bay movie.

No.

I think it was, maybe it was a Philip K. Dick story, but basically the idea being that these sort of rich elite people could clone themselves, and so that if at any point they got into a car accident or had a disease, that they basically had all the parts available, and then of course what happens is the clones believe that they're human, and that's what the debate comes about. But that's not that far from what could become reality, right?

As a science fiction writer, and recognize that we live in this world of exponential change where our sense of the speed of change is too conservative because we understand it just because the way our brains function by looking backwards. Whereas change is happening going forwards is going to be a lot faster. All kinds of crazy things, not everything, but all kinds of crazy things that we can imagine could or will happen will become real. And so that's— so there are a lot of different scenarios. Certainly human biology is extremely complex, and so it's going to take us a long time to understand more of this incredible complexity. But the complexity of our biology has been roughly consistent for millions of years, but the sophistication of our tools is on a J-curve. And so we are going to be using big data analytics and all of these other incredibly powerful tools to understand ourselves. And we're going to be able to look under the hood of what it means to be human. There will still be this wonderful mystery.

Yeah.

But we're going to know a lot more. We're going to have to figure out how to use that knowledge in ways that doesn't undermine our humanity but makes us individually and collectively better.

That could be the ending, but I want to go a little bit more.

Go, go, go, go.

So going back to what I mentioned before, this sort of somewhat silly Star Wars thing, but this idea of clones that we can genetically modify their conditions and all of these things, and now you have AI growing. Is there sort of a split within the futurist community of what people think is maybe one is more the future than the other or something like that?

There are some people who are that it's genetically engineered humans, and there's some it's going to be AI. And in my very, very strong view, it can't be one or the other. It's humans plus AI. Garry Kasparov writes about this. And that is the thing, because we are, humans are incredible. Our brain is so unbelievably, almost magically sophisticated. All the things that it can do are just so way way beyond the possibility even of our most advanced AIs. And so we need to find ways that we'll work together. The genetics revolution is the AI revolution. There would be no way that without our AI and big data analytics that we could even begin to decode the incredible complexity of our biology. So the two really need to work together. And that will be the story of the 21st century, figure out what do humans do that machines can't do? And what do machines do that humans can't do or just are better at than humans? And how do we pull those capabilities together? And then with these massively powerful capabilities, how do we try to build some guardrails to make sure that our technology is used to advance our best values rather than undermine them.

Okay, so we'll end on this. I'll give you the scariest question I possibly could, which is 20 years from now, if the 98% that you usually focus on, the good stuff at the talks, if that really works, paint me what that future looks like, and then we'll go to the other future.

Sure, so that one is we're going to be living longer, we're going to be living healthier, we're gonna have all kinds of information about future risks and potentials, and we're going to use that in a positive way to inform our lives. If we have risks down the line, we're going to be working to minimize those risks. We're going to change the way that we make babies. We're going to increasingly move from conception through sex to conception through IVF, followed by embryo screening. Right now in the US, we have about 2% of kids are born through IVF. In Japan, it's 5%. In Norway and Denmark, it's 10%.

100%.

Those numbers are always going to go up until we see procreation by sex as something that is not natural.

And then we're also gonna be, I can't believe I didn't even mention this this whole time, we're also gonna be then growing humans in labs too.

You know, that's a debate now. So there's this whole movement for artificial wombs. There's a lot that happens emotionally and biologically between a mother and a baby, but certainly it's working for sheep. Basically, the core point is that biology is at play. We have this sense that, "Oh, I know what biology is because I'm a human and my parents were humans." But a lot of these things are just at play. We were single-cell organisms and now we're this, and we're going to be something else. That something else will be impacted by our technology, just like our digestive system has been guided by fire. Allows us to digest things that otherwise we couldn't. And so we are, like, that is where we're going. And then just this 20-year story, so we're gonna be better healthcare, moving away from sex, from conception through sex. And we're going to begin selecting future children based on health outcomes and other information about traits.

Now give me the 2%. We screw this thing up, what are we looking at?

We are attacking each other. That there's a level of social cohesion that is required for this technology to advance in ways that benefit everybody. One of the reasons why we're having so many problems here in the United States is that we had this economic change. So we had this change in in basically the role of capital in society. So capital was overvalued and labor was undervalued. We allowed this small group of people to amass just a disproportionate and inappropriate amount of power. And then everybody else, maybe they couldn't articulate all the reasons, they just had this feeling, hey, I'm getting screwed over and I'm gonna fight back. And so if this powerful technology, if we don't handle it handle it in a responsible way, we're going to be at each other's throats. We're going to have elites who are saying, you know, screw this, like my mission in life is to create advantages and confer advantages to my children. I have more in common with people who are wanting to do that in other countries all around the world than I do with these other people in my country who are just causing— there's a pain in my ass and they're demanding things and they're— fighting against things that I want. So I'm just leaving.

So basically they're going to have to build Elysium or something like that.

Yeah, or something. Or just have an island, do it in the Caribbean, or whatever. So if we're not careful, these technologies could destroy our societies. And that's why, I mean, this is a conversation, it's teed up by science, but it's the core The core pillar is values. I mean, that's what this is all about.

I would love to continue this, but we gotta wrap, but as you may know, I go off the grid for August. So we're taping this right now at the end of July, and I'm disappearing. No technology, no phone, nothing electronic. So you've teed me up for so much good stuff to think about while I'm gone.

And where are you going?

I hope you— I'm not telling people, but I'm disappearing, and there will be nothing electronic.

It's so important, because we're talking about this technology, and technology, it does so many wonderful things, but at the core, if we lose the essence of what it just means to be a human, just to be out in the mountains, it's like, that's everything.

Yeah, I have thoroughly enjoyed this. I hope you'll come back to get you back in the prediction game.

I would love it. As a matter of fact, I'll come back. The paperback version of Hacking Darwin is coming out in April of next year, and so I'd love to come back when that happens.

Done and done. All right, thank you very much. And for more on Jamie, you can follow him on Twitter @jamemetzl. And if you enjoy conversations like these, don't forget to subscribe and click the bell so that you actually get notified of the videos.

Thanks for watching.