29: Jamie Metzl - The Bio-Hacker will see you now, Ready or Not
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Hello, this is Eric with the housekeeping section of this week's release before we introduce the main section of the episode. But first things first, we now finally have a website and a mailing list. So please pause the audio and go to ericweinstein.org, all one word, ericweinstein.org, and sign up so that we can make sure that you're the first to learn about all things related to the portal. We'll wait. You did it? Fantastic.

Okay, so now you're signed up, and that's great. But what did you just sign up for? Well, many shows can brag about having a large audience, and while ours may have grown rapidly, it certainly has zero claim on being the biggest or even having the most regular release schedule. Sorry about that one, guys. We are, however, growing nicely as well as it being early days here at the portal, so that's kind of a sweet spot. But I don't think that's really the main offering to you. What we do have that is very unique is that we have an actual thriving 24-7 community based equally around projects and discussion.

Now, in a world where everyone is talking about community, why is this unique or even important? Well, to begin with, community is one of those perfectly fine English words that gets ruined by corporate usage, like content, brand, message, social, distribution. I'm sure you know the list. So when I say this podcast has a community, I don't mean that at all. I mean a group of people I increasingly think of as my colleagues and friends who are trying to actually build the resources to find the real portals for which the podcast is in fact named.

These are, quite frankly, people with whom I choose to spend my time and people I respect and admire. So, how did this come about? Well, in part, it is responsive to the unique difficulties presented by the program. For example, when I have a physicist like the great Sir Roger Penrose on the show, I know that I am supposed to make sure that the audience can follow along. Yet, I'm convinced that if I do all the hand-holding required in the mythical podcaster's handbook, we will never get to what makes Roger Penrose unique or interesting. And that's quite a conundrum.

Well, Portal Nation, or whatever you want to call it, is unusually project-focused and has come together to help solve this problem. What the community is now doing is reversing the logic of the old line, if you build it, they will come. Instead, in our reversed community, if episodes come, then they will build it. In other words, portalers, not totally sure of the nomenclature here, portallians, portalloids,

are doing whatever they have to in order to help each other understand what is happening without burdening the show. They will transcribe, annotate, make animated shorts, produce graphics, launch websites, organize reading clubs, make artwork, you name it. Whatever is needed to support the episodes and the show, people are actually building it as we speak.

To better see this, check out the portal.wiki or forum.theportal.dev. Now, if you go to the Penrose episode on the wiki, for example, you will see the beginnings of an effort to create episode aids to help the general public following the program understand what is being said about our discussion and Roger's work in physics. There is a thriving 24-7 voice chat discussion around the portal as well on Discord and a separate Discord server for portal listeners and viewers dedicated to reading Roger's book together.

You can join us at ericweinstein.org, forum.theportal.dev, or theportal.wiki. Unfortunately, the Discord server where I visit frequently, and for which I give out the invite link periodically on Twitter, is a little trickier to join, as it already has around 7,000 members, and it takes a little while for the residents to help new people understand that it has a rare internet culture, which actually allows us to have up to, let's say, 100 people in an open voice chat room at 4 a.m., but without chaos. It's bizarre.

It's really quite a thing to be able to do that as a community with minimal moderation. So we're trying to figure out how to onboard people more rapidly, but it naturally takes some time to communicate culture to others.

And to this end, let me give a huge shout out to even a few of the folks that made this culture happen. People with screen names like Phil, Tim the mirthless swag man, Miss Joe, JT, Emmy, Tyler, Cam, Beef Sandwich, Boku, Winter Flags, Field Theorist, Jacob, Jontrepreneur, JD, Josh, and too many more to name. These are the people who are actually making this community really meaningful to me and what keeps me coming back day after day.

But beyond that, I want our people to know that while I have felt beyond lucky to be able to build a large-ish platform in this new space, I know that it's very difficult to get heard, and I have always intended to use the portal to introduce lesser-known folks who might have been looked over. And I now fully intend to showcase our main contributors and their best work to a worldwide audience.

In short, community is too often a buzzword. But if you are a regular listener to this program, please come join your world of fellow seekers. The podcast is fast becoming just the first layer of a much larger community of like-minded individuals who are finding each other through the greater portal ecosystem. Okay, the other topic that I at least wanted to touch on here is this. I have started to talk about a few different things that are quite important to me, but which I have never discussed openly on audio or video before.

In particular, I recently put up a video of my first ever talk at Oxford University from May of 2013 on geometric unity, a theory which I started thinking about around 1984 or perhaps just before. It is a bit odd having something which occupies a huge space in your very private life go from private to public with the press of a single button, and the interested response has been very strong.

It is still too new for me to comment on how I'm reacting to having it out in the outside world or how I'm feeling, so I won't say much more now. But I at least wanted to thank you all for your many messages of support, and I look forward to discussing this with you all in the future. Thanks again, and stay tuned. Up next, the introduction to this week's interview after some words from our sponsors. ♪

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but a secret and unadvertised feature of ExpressVPN is it allows you to look as if your IP address is anywhere in the world you want. That means that you can unlock streaming services that might have prohibitions where you happen to sit. So if you want to watch anime, you can use ExpressVPN in Japan. Or for example, if you want to watch Doctor Who,

Set your ExpressVPN to make it look as if you're currently in the United Kingdom. No matter where you are, ExpressVPN will allow you to position yourself to watch everything you want to see if it's allowed and permission somewhere in the world. So if you visit our special link right now at expressvpn.com/portal, you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. Expressvpn.com/portal. You'll be supporting the show and watching what you want to watch no matter where you are in the world.

At the same time, you'll be protecting yourself and your data with ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash portal. This week's interview with Jamie Metzl, the author of Hacking Darwin, was recorded in July of 2019, just after the portal was launched. I was unsure when I wanted to release the episode for a variety of reasons, and so I held on to it for a while. One of those reasons, frankly, surrounds U.S. sensitivity towards China.

When Jamie and I start talking about variation in general cultural attitudes towards biohacking, China comes up as the outlier that it is. Now, the reason that that is such a problem is that the institutions of U.S. science have become thoroughly dependent on the People's Republic of China beginning in the time of Deng Xiaoping.

And with such dependence, as you might expect, came a vigorous U.S. culture attempting to defend this unusually high degree of intertwining between two countries with vastly different national cultures and strategic objectives. For both better and worse, I have been involved off and on in U.S. science policy circles for around 30 years with the peak of activity probably in the mid to late 1990s.

In those circles, at least, I am well known to have become very concerned about the security implications of the United States' scientific and technological relationship with China, starting in the early to mid-1980s when I first became aware of it. At that time, the People's Republic became eager to supply ever-increasing amounts of inexpensive and pliant scientific labor to newly cash-strapped advanced U.S. STEM research and laboratory programs.

As the potential for conflict with our U.S. scientific mandarins is always great over this issue, I generally try to discuss my deep concerns about differing Chinese and U.S. attitudes towards STEM research as sparingly as possible as, until recently anyway, I felt that this seemed to be a niche issue to the common man rather than the top security threat as I perceive it to be. In light of the COVID epidemic, however, I am now newly emboldened and in fact eager to fight the self-censorship within myself, so I've decided to release the episode.

Let me put this in starker terms. I believe that social justice is a killer ideology, and by that I don't mean that it's frickin' awesome. Instead, I mean that supposedly progressive people who worry endlessly about the delicate feelings and sensibilities of the Chinese Communist Party are now endangering our lives.

Those who had already paid the steep social tax for questioning our elite's love affair with China were far earlier to warn about the coronavirus than those who were fretting openly about anyone linking the virus to China where the outbreak appears to have first become severe. I myself do not love the term Chinese virus as many viruses originate in China and it seems politically charged and also offensive to many people.

I cannot, however, imagine why we are worrying about calling it the Wuhan virus or Wuhan virus one, given that it may well turn out to be the first accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology's biosafety level four laboratory, a first of its kind Chinese facility which opened only five years ago.

In the event that it simply spontaneously originated in a seafood market down the road a piece, the Roman numeral I never needs to be increased, and the name of the virus will do as little harm to Wuhan as the Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu, and Lyme disease did to those fine places in 1918, 1968, and 1975, respectively. So I will leave you with this final thought.

Our discussions of social justice and the scientific discussion of biology have to be kept separate. After COVID and the slow response due in part to fastidious concerns about racism and xenophobia, which were prioritized well above public safety, there can now be no two ways about it among reasonable people.

Biology, more than any other subject, humiliates shallow theories of human beings as apes, such as so-called critical theory. And it does so by revealing those theories to be the incoherent scribblings of fools by comparison with Darwinian theory. And with lives and national security at stake, I'm done playing nice. Our scientists, and particularly our biologists, need to be immunized and protected from concerns about social justice or people will die, full stop.

As I have put it starkly before, the response from biology to social justice should not be indifference, but wholesale intolerance. In a phrase, get the hell out of my lab with that social engineering or I'm calling security. And if that seems a little harsh, we can make it a little bit nicer. We can add, and while you're at it, kid, do yourself a favor and learn something about the theory of natural and sexual selection. If you're open to it, it could just change your life for the better and spare you a lifetime of confusion.

After a few messages from our sponsors, we'll be right back with an uninterrupted interview with Jamie Metzl, author of Hacking Darwin. Okay, you're stuck at home and you're probably thinking, I'm either going to eat something or make a crazy impulse purchase. But what if there were a third way? Well, that's where returning sponsor Bolan Branch comes into the equation.

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Hello, this is Eric Weinstein and you found the portal. Today on the show, I'm talking to Jamie Metzl, who is going to describe for us some of his thoughts that come out of his book, Hacking Darwin, about the pursuit of molecular engineering and other biological hacking techniques to unlock the promise of the cell and potentially human potential at a greater scale. Jamie, welcome to the program. Thanks, Eric.

So Jamie, tell me a little bit about how you came to this topic so that we can kind of bring the people at home up to speed on your trajectory and how you came to write this book. Sure. So more than 20 years ago, I was working on the National Security Council and my then boss and now very close friend, Richard Clark, was the guy who essentially predicted 9-11. And on

Unfortunately, he was like all Cassandras, he had a sense of what was going to happen, but because he was ahead of his time, nobody would listen to him. And when 9/11 happened, Dick's memo, prescient memo was on George Bush's desk. And Dick always used to say if everyone in Washington was focusing on one thing, you could be sure there was something much more important that was being missed. And so 20 plus years ago, I saw all these little data points that told me this story that the biotech and genetic revolutions were going to

fundamentally transform life and our lives. And nobody was talking about it. So I started reading, taking these little data points and putting them together. I hadn't taken a science class since high school, started just grabbing every book I could find, every person who I wanted to talk to and just educating myself.

And then when I was ready, I started writing articles about the national security implications of the genetics revolution. And a congressman from where we are now, LA, Brad Sherman, called me up one day a long time ago and said, "Hey, this is really important. I read your article. No one's talking about this. I want to organize hearings around your article. Will you be the lead witness and help organize the hearings?" Which I did.

And then I was speaking and talking a lot and I just was frustrated because I felt like this is the story of the future of our species and we all need to be educated, we all need to be part of the conversation about what's next, but it wasn't happening. So then I wrote two near-term sci-fi novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata, telling the story of the genetics revolution and life extension, but as a story, because that's how we're humans, that's how we learn.

But when I was doing book tours for those books and I described the science the way someone who was self-taught, like nobody had given me the lingo for how to talk about science. I had to figure it out myself. And I...

I could just see in people's eyes that they were suddenly, they'd heard these little pieces of the story. They knew about a little bit about DNA. They knew a little bit about IVF and they'd heard these words, but they didn't have a story for how the pieces fit together or where they themselves fit into that story. And that was when I realized that I needed to write a book for everyone, the story of the genetics revolution.

Are you familiar by any chance with the remarkable book by Horace Judson called the eighth day of creation? No. So this is a very odd book where I think somebody pointed out that the story of molecular biology is,

could be uniquely told in the present only because all of the major players were still alive. And so Horace Judson wrote this book about the birth of molecular biology effectively. And I think he more or less got to all of the top people and wrote the story in a very compelling fashion. And I guess I was thinking about how profound the role of storytelling is in catalyzing the

human interest and imagination that somehow you could compare the data that we have to the sheet music of science. But if nobody actually performs it in the form of a symphony, it really leaves most of us cold. Do you feel that there's some aspect of storytelling which is essential to this? Essential.

because every specialized field and certainly science, you have your specialists and they speak a coded language of specialists and that's great. It's a shorthand in a way because you don't have to explain something, you have common terminology and that's what you use. But we're talking about here

about technologies that are going to change our lives and life itself. And that has to be the interest of everybody. And if the scientists aren't able to communicate that,

to the regular people, that's gonna cause a huge problem. So we are humans, the way we learn is through stories. And our ancestors, they didn't have these specialized stories that everybody was around a fire. And if somebody had something they wanted to tell,

They had to find a way to tell it in the language of everybody. And that's what I feel like we've lost a little bit in our age of super specialization that we're able to make more progress because we have pioneers heading out in every direction.

But if those pioneers don't bring the stories back, or we don't have a way of weaving everybody into these transformational stories, then the pioneers are isolated and society is isolated from the pioneers. Well, we frequently tell this tale about storytelling as something that the non-specialists need and that the specialists can communicate in their highly professional lingo. Right.

But I wonder, just from what you've been talking about, whether or not there's a sort of back reaction and that the storytelling actually feeds back into the expert community so that when you're talking about this stuff, do you see your gift for storytelling having an effect back on the experts or is it really all one way? Absolutely. It's two way and it has to be two way because storytelling

Like I said, a lot of the scientists have a hard time communicating. It's not what they do best for most of them. But when you find the small number of scientists who are able to communicate, it's like opening up this, this magic world. And, um,

On one hand, I certainly am a translator. I read just massive amounts of scientific studies and they're all very technical and I kind of take them in and then translate that into language that hopefully everybody, and certainly I have high school, like getting lots of messages from high schoolers and others who are reading the book and getting these principles. But it's also going the other way. I do a lot of speaking alongside George Church, who's kind of the living Charles Darwin.

And what George always says is that he reads science fiction novels like mine and imagines, "Well, that's really cool. How could we do that?" And what I always say is I look at papers coming out of labs like George's and say, "Well, that's really cool. What does it mean? What are the big picture implications?" Right now I'm part of the World Health Organization International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing. And we have people like Robin Lovell Badge, who are the top geneticists in the world.

But we also need people who are saying, "Well, this is how we're going to connect this message to the rest of the world." Because if the science is dissociated from the public discourse around the science, it kills the science. That's what we saw with GMOs, what we used to call recombinant DNA. The scientists thought, "Oh, we understand the science, we understand its promise and we understand its peril,

We're going to be really responsible. We're going to go to Asilomar and we're going to establish principles. And then those which happened in the 1970s and those principles were realized. But because there wasn't a public engagement from the start, the science hasn't realized its potential because there's so much fear. So it's not that there's science and the context of the science. Science exists within the context. Well-

I guess I'm of two minds about this. I think for my read of this, that there are plenty of terrific reasons to be very, very afraid. What concerns me is whether or not the storytelling leads us when we're talking about how we manipulate our own genetics, epigenetics, the cells and our body plans. Are we actually being led to adaptive fears, which would,

cause us to come up with the right restrictions on how we do the science and how we do our engineering or do we spend our time worrying about nothing where in fact um let's say some sort of genetic modification which is almost certainly benign uh because of the way in which it's phrased catches the public's imagination and suddenly you've got a panic where right um

where there shouldn't be one. Is there a way of figuring out which fears are adaptive, which fears are maladaptive in getting the storytelling to help aid our intuition? - Yeah, it's really an important question because both the science and the storytelling are themselves agnostic. I mean, you could have,

Science doesn't come with a value system. Storytelling is a mechanism and storytelling can be used to scare people, it can be used to excite people, it can be used for all sorts of reasons. There's nothing inherent to the storytelling. But then there's the question of what types of stories do we tell? And I think about this a lot because right now a big chunk of my life is dedicated to trying to spark what I'm calling a species-wide dialogue on the future of human genetic engineering.

And there are some people who say, "Well, why are you putting this stick in the hornet's nest?" Because in the near term, the real meaningful applications of genetic technologies aren't going to be designer babies, it's going to be curing terrible genetic diseases and helping people. If designer "designer babies" ever happens, that's potentially long in the future, even though we've begun that process.

But what I say to that is, like, let's just say that we're having this conversation and the kind of the people who are behind the barricades on one side or another on the abortion issue will say, hey, here's another barricade. I better get behind the no manipulation of human sex cells. Like, that's a new barricade that I can build and defend.

And so there's a real danger of that. There is a strong argument to be made like let's just keep this under the radar. We actually, scientists are by and large really responsible. Let them do their work and let this issue emerge when it's ready. And that's what happened with IVF. I mean, with IVF, it just kind of happened before there was a moral, really a big moral debate about IVF.

And so when it got to the point when the pro-life people would say, could have said, hey, wait a second, your life begins at conception, you're killing embryos in these IVF clinics, those people were already talking about the miracle of life, these people in their churches who now had babies. Right.

I believe that these genetic technologies are so powerful. They're so transformative. We can't afford to make the same mistake as was made in the beginning of the era of GMOs. Like what we're talking about is our future. It's everybody's business. And we have to respect each other enough to try to tell the story.

but we have to do it in a responsible way. Because I know with this book, and I've been out on my book tour, and there are lots of people say, just do scaremongering. I mean, that's the way to get attention. And we always say, well, wait a second, what's the goal? And if you do it responsibly, you get a little less attention, but I'd rather do it in the right way. Well-

Since you're a storyteller and since you know far more about the subject than I do, I want to ask you for three separate stories. I want a responsible story that scares the bejesus out of me. I want a story that excites me. And I want a story that...

tells me about what would happen if we really started to block progress out of a misplaced fear and very little happened. Could I ask for that as a bundle so that I'm not being told one thing or the other? Yeah, yeah. No, it's great. And that's the only way to think about it. We're just, it's, we're beginning a journey and there are so many different places that this journey can take us. And we may go to all of them in one version or another. So certainly, yeah,

a story that is, in all these stories, there's the exciting and there's the terrifying and they are connected. So here's an exciting story is that we have all of these terrible bugs in humanity and that's why little kids are dying from deadly genetic diseases and no one says, oh, that's just wonderful nature. I mean, to hell with that. Let's fight it. That's why we have healthcare. Here's another terrible story. 90-year-old people. Let's just pick one disease that you think might be

easily put into the crosshairs of our technology in the short term. - Let me pick 5,000 diseases. It's a classification of these single gene mutation disorders. I mean, there's tens of thousands of them, but there are about 10,000 that have been identified, 5,000 really well characterized.

And so most of our traits are complex, genetically complex, meaning that many genes have something to say, often for a very little amount, but we have a number of diseases and disorders that are what are called Mendelian disorders, single gene mutation disorders, like one letter that's off. So sickle cell disease and Tay-Sachs are Huntington's disease and many, many others.

And so we are now, because we're able to identify those diseases, many of them can be and will increasingly be identifiable in IVF and embryo selection. So with IVF, you extract the eggs from the mother, fertilize them with the father's sperm, grow them in the lab in vitro,

And then at around day five you extract a few cells that otherwise would have grown into the placenta and you sequence them. And the cost of sequencing has gone down from about a billion dollars in 2003 to about 600 now and it's going toward negligibility.

And so you have 10 fertilized eggs and now you know that one of them is going to be a child who if taken to term is going to die of Tay-Sachs. So almost everybody will not choose to implant a child who they know is going to die of a genetic disease.

And so that's what I see as a very positive story because right now in parts of Europe where the government pays for non-invasive prenatal screening, NPT, 97% of people who get the diagnosis after three months of pregnancy for Down syndrome are aborting. So you have to assume that pretty much everybody who's choosing from among one in 10 is going to...

isn't going to choose to not implant the future potential kid who is going to die of a genetic disease. But there's the dangerous side about that, is when we get into the business of selecting which of these, let's call them 10 fertilized eggs, early stage embryos to implant. And as we know more and more about genetics, we are going to have a lot more information when making those choices. So the health...

choices are going to be relatively straightforward. I want a kid who's going to not have terrible diseases, who's going to have a good chance of a long and healthy life. But after that, we're going to have a lot of information about things like personality style and IQ. And we talk about what are the dangers. You brought up Tay-Sachs, but you also brought up sickle cell. And what

What's fascinating about that is that to me, and admittedly, this is not necessarily widely shared as an opinion in the public, but I wouldn't consider sickle cell as an allele, as a trait necessarily.

It's an adaptation that is a disease in an American context, given that we rid ourselves of malaria. But it was in fact a desperate response of evolutionary adaptation in order to modify hemoglobin so as to make it resistant to

- It's a great point and I write about that specifically in the book. And so I'll have the broad principle and then the specific application. The broad principle is there is no good and bad in evolution. We may think, oh, it's better to have a higher IQ. It's better to be taller. It's better to be extroverted. It's better to not be a recessive carrier of sickle cell disease.

And in this world, as you created this world that we live in here, that may be true, but in a different environment, even the things that we value most could be our greatest vulnerability. So you're exactly right. So sickle cell, if you have sickle cell disease, you're going to die. Well, if you have two alleles for sickle cell trait. Right, but if you are recessive cancer,

carrier, you have increased resistance to malaria, which is why that mutation has survived. Because it is a small cost in terms of oxygen carrying. Yes. But that wasn't where I was going with it. Right. But let me just circle back if you don't mind, because the danger of this story, because when I, when I talked about a good story with a fear, right. So the danger is you could say, wow, we could select our embryos and

People say, well, geez, I'd like to have certain things. I want health, which is like just the simplest one. And that's what people are going to want first.

But let's just say that it's not single cell disease. We have no idea what recessive, sorry, what recessive mutations we are carrying that could be useful to face some threat that we've never faced as a species. Or haven't faced it recently. Yes. And so it's been driven to a very low frequency. Yes. Which is what I was trying to... Yeah, sure. The thing that I'm trying to address here

I was actually trying to riff on top of your... Yeah, please, yeah. The point would be that just the way somebody with eyeglasses has a misshapen eye and then they have a second distortion in the form of a lens, but the coupling of the two distortions is less distortive as a system. It would seem to me that what you're in some sense saying is the reason that sickle cell trait...

up in a U.S. context is that we've added something novel, that we were bringing people, let's say, from Africa where falciparum malaria is very deadly to a place where it's absent. And what we're doing here is in some sense saying the trait that you have may have been adaptive, although at great cost, but because

of some aspect of modernity, we actually have to double down on modernity. The first part of it was something like air travel. And the second part of it is editing and that the two of those distortions in some sense is less distortative than anything else in the system. And that, that was sort of the feeling that, well, that's the thing is like, once we start changing things, we can't stop. I mean, this, that when you just think of, of just Columbus arriving in the new world in 1492, it's,

and just this chain reaction that is still going. And so I think that that's right. And that's why we can't imagine that there's just this fixed thing. There's the world, there's nature, and then we're changing. We're screwing with nature. Nature is us. Nature is always changing. And that's why you talk about this genetic diversity. It's been baked into our biology for four billion years. So it's natural to hack.

- You know, we are hackers. - We are hackers. - Tool use. - That's our comparative advantage. - Yes. - I love that. All right, so that was the single mutation diseases was a great example of something that's positive that might be right around the corner because it's simple enough that you might be able to do it through editing or checking or whatever. - We had it already in China. The world's first gene-edited babies were born last year in October. - Do you wanna say a little bit more about that?

Yeah, yeah. So last November, it was announced at the World Summit on Human Genome Editing by a Chinese biophysicist named He Zhonghui, announced that the prior month, in October 2018, the world's first gene-edited babies had been born in China, two little girls.

And he was first in China, the government was then the People's Daily said, this is incredible. This is a, it shows Chinese scientific triumph. And then there was this international condemnation, myself included. And then they said, all right, then there was a buckling down.

And there's been a huge debate. My World Health Organization Committee was created in the aftermath of that because people would have always said, this is coming. And actually my book was already in production then. And I'd already said, we're going to see the world's first gene edited babies. It's going to happen in China. And then I called the publisher, we have to pull out of production. I just need to add three little sentences saying this thing that I had predicted has already happened. But even I would have said it wasn't gonna happen in 2018. I would have guessed,

So that already happened. And it was very controversial for a number of reasons. One, because he was incredibly sloppy. He didn't get approval from the hospital in which he was operating. The consent of the parents was totally uninformed and misinformed.

But on top of that, the target mutation was a gene called CCR5. It wasn't so in these kids, their father had HIV and their mother didn't. And so forgetting genetics, in a case in China or here, if a father has HIV and the mother doesn't, there are plenty of ways for them to have a child who's not going to have HIV.

But what Ho-Jung Kuei did was try to edit the CCR5 gene in a way that is similar to what a number of Northern Europeans have, where they have two disrupted copies, which gives them increased resistance to HIV. Maybe more susceptibility to West Nile virus, but increased resistance to HIV. And that's what he was trying to do. He wasn't trying to fix an existing problem. He was trying to create in many ways an enhancement.

And then a few months later, a report came out that mice who had this same CCR5 mutation were doing better in mazes than mice without it. So then there were all of these stories coming back to storytelling, like, wow, maybe these kids are engineered to be smarter.

And then there were scientists a few months later who did an analysis based on the UK Biobank, which is probably the world's most useful genetic database. And they found a correlation between this disrupted CCR5 and lifespan. People were living shorter lives. So it was premature. And certainly I've publicly called Ho-Jung Kuei a villain, which I think he is.

But this is a harbinger of where we're going, where the age of human genetic engineering has begun. We have two gene-edited babies that we know of. The third Chinese baby has probably already been born. There's a Russian scientist, Denis Rebrikov, who's announced that he has five parents lined up. And it's going to go one, two, five. And within a decade, we will have

thousands of genetically engineered babies. - So I was going to ask you, remember I was gonna ask you for a positive story, a negative story and a story about stagnation. In some sense, maybe you've just given me a negative story, which is that somebody starts editing children in a way that they're looking for one trait that's positive, but they don't understand that some thing is mediating a trade-off. - And evolution is a trade-off and that's why it's so complicated.

Right. I mean, there is the issue that you could be, to borrow from finance, at an interior point, so not on an efficient frontier. And you might be able to take two things that are involved in a trade-off and optimize both of them because you weren't already at the point where the trade-off starts to bind. It's true. But in finance, everyone in finance, and I live in New York, is saying, well, we understand some of the variables. We don't understand all of them.

all of the variables and the same is true in genetics that in the old days people used to say there's a gene for that, the tall gene, the short gene, the smart gene. And now there's a polygenic hypothesis, meaning lots of genes. And there's even an omnigenic hypothesis, which is even more complicated

And so to understand those trade-offs, we would need a much greater knowledge of genetics than we now have, which is why for me when I think about-- I write about genetic engineering, which I think is a much bigger category than gene editing. And the mechanism of genetic engineering I think is primarily going to be first embryo selection, IVF and embryo selection, which is why I think we're moving toward the end of procreative sex.

and then it's going to be using stem cells to create virtually unlimited number of eggs. It's called in vitro gametogenesis. And so if we do that and you're selecting from 15 pre-implanted embryos in traditional IVF and PGD, you don't have that many options because it's just you're starting with 15. But when you're starting with 10,000 or a million,

then you have real options. And that's why I think everyone's focusing on gene editing and CRISPR. But as I see it for human genetic engineering, the real story is embryo selection. Do you want to say what CRISPR is for those who don't know? So CRISPR is a gene editing tool. I mean, the shorthand that everybody uses, it's like a word processing. So you think of the genome as a string of letters, which is how we understand it. You would

you put your cursor, so putting your cursor you have a guide RNA that goes to a certain point in the genome and you use a cutting enzyme and there's many different cutting enzymes, the most popular is called Cas9 but there are many others, and traditionally you make a double-stranded cut.

And so it's not just very much like word processing. You cut something and then you can just leave it deleted or you can add something. Now this is this incredible age where pretty much every day there's another story, not just about a new application of CRISPR,

but new types of gene editing tools. So we are moving very, very rapidly toward a world where we are going to be able to edit all genomes, including our own, increasingly at will. And so that's a world where we are able not just to read genetics, that's sequencing, but to write and hack genetics. And that introduces this concept

of induced biological variability, which is very-- - Biological variability. - Like we're gonna be able to screw with nature and that people recognize that their information technology is variable. That's why you think your new phone is gonna be better than your old phone. But we somehow feel like we're kind of,

that this biology is our biology. I'm a homo sapien, my parents are homo sapiens, my kids are homo sapiens. And so this idea that we can rewrite life, it's counterintuitive, even though intellectually people get that somehow we got from single cell organism state to this over almost 4 billion years. And so that's this big change. And that's the kind of the core message. We've been over, I guess this is a little bit confusing to me. I often...

shock people by telling them to Google glow-in-the-dark rabbits. And these transgenic rabbits that have this GFP, green fluorescent protein, expressed in them that I guess originally came from jellyfish. I think it's the Turks who manufactured a whole bunch of bunnies that you can read by. Now, we could, of course, create transgenic humans that lit up at night, almost certainly. And...

Is this something that we should be kind of more playful with, more excited by? It's hard. How do you think? Yeah, yeah. So the basic thing is we've been able to do

gene editing for a while, but the new tools are faster, cheaper and more precise by a long shot. And so we have this ability to make big, big changes. And we were making in the old days, we made genetic changes to crops, not just by selective breeding, but we just would bombard crops with radiation and then just see what happened. There'd be a kind of a gazillion different options. And then you'd say, oh, these grapes don't have seeds.

Let's make more of them. And now we're able in a much more precise and targeted way to do that. So then your question of playfulness,

And in some ways, I mean, science, people think about science as something that's rigid and dry, but there's a lot of creativity. I mentioned George Church. People like George Church, these are dreamers and they're dreamers who are saying, well, now we're dreaming. How do we turn these dreams into reality?

But when we talk about the future of human life, we need to be really careful. As I said to you before, Eric, my father came to the United States, say father and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. If you had asked the Nazis what they were doing, they would have said they were implementing Darwinism. That's the essence of Nazism. And we have all of these Nuremberg trials about human experimentation.

And so if we are, and I personally think that we will engineer our future children and that we must, I mean, we wanna survive. Our planet is going away. We can't stay on this planet forever, but we have to do it carefully and thoughtfully and methodically and responsibly. And so we can't just be playing around with life. Well, but-

I want to be both the devil's advocate and the angel's advocate. Yes. I'm not actually convinced that this sobriety makes sense or is possible. I mean, your point is that

this is getting cheaper and more powerful. And what that usually means to me is, is that it's moving towards a garage that sooner or later already there's this DIY bio movement, bio hackers, and it's already happening. So my point is, is that once things become cheap and powerful, they can be done quietly, even if they're criminalized, even if we have panels on ethics. Um,

I think in some weird way we haven't been honest. And the only thing that's been allowing us to be so dishonest about biology has been in some sense, the cost, the lack of power and our clumsiness. So to get back to this most dangerous question. So you and I both come from Jewish backgrounds and we were on the losing end of a eugenics experiment writ large gone mad. Right. Yet,

the problem that I see is that we are uncomfortable with the fact that eugenics doesn't really almost mean anything. In other words, mate selection is a form of genetic selection. And if you decide that dinner in a movie is eugenics, then you've, you've drawn a line at a super early stage. You got sex for dinner in a movie. That's a good deal. Moving right along. Um, on the other hand, um,

If we just decide, Hey, it's a free for all and you should be able to do anything. But the word eugenics, for example, has worked in some sense before.

Because it's not really properly defined, it's not clear where good selection begins and ends and bad selection. I would say, and tell me if I'm wrong, that we've been lying, that there is no way, in fact, of drawing a line much the way we have in the pro-life, pro-choice where both of these camps make no sense. I would say that the...

pro-editing, pro-hacking position and the anti-hacking position make no sense at all and that we're really left with a permanent struggle. Am I way off? No, I agree completely that if we say we can never do it...

That's the wrong answer. We're going to have to do it and we're going to want to do it. Who wants to have a kid that's going to die of a terrible genetic disease when we have the technology to change that? Who's going to want to have their parents get dementia

we can prevent that. I mean, it would, I just think it will be nuts for us to say we have these powerful tools that can do unimaginable good and we're not going to do it because these tools also have a dangerous side effect. And that like we wouldn't be in cars, we wouldn't be using plows, we wouldn't use any technology if that was the case. - Well, this is, I mean, in some sense, this is the position

of let's say the Amish that at some level there's a slippery slope and you're suggesting that we move midway onto it. You've called the Chinese guy who's doing this a villain. We've both talked about the dangers of Nazi Germany and yet we're both kind of excited about the idea of freeing people from risk of breast cancer or maybe even enhancing cognitive capacity.

maybe I don't even have a point or position. I'm just agreeing with you. I mean, people use this slippery slope. Like it's a bad thing. Like, you know, first we started with, you know, curing this disease and then we cured that disease. Like some slippery slopes are great slippery slopes. You talked about your dinner in the movie. That was a slippery slope toward love and marriage and great for us. So there's certainly the people say never do it or wrong. And the people who say just never,

no restraints, no holes barred, let's just let a hundred flowers bloom. That also is wrong. And so what we need to do is to find someplace in the middle, which brings me to your point about eugenics. And again, with my background, it's very sensitive to talk about this, but right now the term eugenics is used as a cudgel. Like somebody is doing say, oh, that's eugenics. And people say, oh, I'm not in for eugenics.

And in some ways that's appropriate because there's so many horrible things were done in the name of eugenics that maybe they've just re-examined

So let's just imagine some other word to describe this selection. And again, even using the word selection, and again, I write about this in the book, you say selection, you think, oh, Mengele. Mengele is selection of who's going to live and who's going to die. But I talked about these 10 embryos in a dish, in a lab, and you're going to have to pick one.

And what are the criteria that you're going to use to determine which of those embryos get implanted? And if we say, well, I want one that can have a child that's not going to die of a terrible genetic disease, that's a normative choice that it's not just in some abstract objective world, it's set within the context of us because you can just move one little step closer. I talked about Down syndrome.

I do a lot of speaking and the parents of down babies and others saying like, wait a second, are you making a normative statement saying that a child with Down syndrome has less of a right to exist than someone who doesn't? I always say, no, that's not what I'm saying. But I am saying that if it's a choice and we already know the answer to this because of the abortion, if it's a choice, people aren't going to select to implant in most cases babies

that have Down syndrome. - Right, I guess what, this goes back to a very dangerous conversation that I had with Jim Watson. Now you and I both encountered Jim Watson, and I find that he somehow went down a bad path where he,

got so tired of being told what he could say and what he couldn't say that he decided that he would start saying the most offensive things possible. And, you know, I'm on record as saying that the legacy of Jim Watson is way too important to be left to Jim Watson. I agree. Now with that said, what I learned is,

in part was that when Jim and his friends between 53 when the double helix structure was elucidated and I guess 63 when the genetic code was, was figured out by somebody else, Marshall Nirenberg, that group was shocked that we pretended to care about our identity in the form of these letters, this computer code in ourselves, if you will. And,

but we never really accepted what they found. And as a result, whenever they started to talk to us about identity or different characteristics, they found that we were so attached to our pre genetic understanding of ourselves still that we actually won't give it up. And we will fight any one tooth and nail who tries to tell us, you know, this is really a consequence of information. Technology is developed by natural and sexual selection.

Are we stuck in a culture where we can't actually update to realize what we figured out 70 years ago? - It's so hard for people because in some ways our ability to look under the hood of what it means to be a human being is challenging some of our most ancient mythologies, our understanding of who and what we are.

And so we love to have this idea of, I can be anything that I want if I put my heart to it. And it's this mystery of life is unfolding. And even things like parenting is really important that some people are now challenging.

And it's really, really difficult. I mean, it's just to give a very narrow example. I talk about this a lot to say like, I'm a runner and I run marathons and there is nothing that I could do to be,

pretty much nothing to be a world champion, like the top world champion marathoner. Because when you look at the fastest marathon times in history, a like freakishly disproportionate number are people from the same valley in Kenya and Ethiopia.

and then one tribe, the Kalenjans in Kenya, about 4 million people. And then one sub-tribe, the Nandi sub-tribe, 1 million people. It's genetics. And yes, it's great for people to try really hard and we all have a genetic range of possibility and we should aspire to be at the top end, whatever that means in a given context of our potential.

But if I don't have the genetics to be the world's fastest marathoner or sprinter or abstract mathematician, I'm not going to get there. And that's really hard because we tell ourselves different stories. Well, so let's focus on this as a practice, as a warm-up and watch where it goes.

So my belief is that between 1897, where we started keeping records of the Boston Marathon, and 1987, there were no winners of the Boston Marathon. I think not one from either Kenya or Ethiopia. After 1987, it is not exactly total domination. I think there's a Japanese, there's a Korean winner.

maybe there's an Italian I've forgotten, but it is almost 100% with a few exceptions that may happen in years where the weather is a little bit different, that it's won by this very small group of people in Kenya and Ethiopia. How do we go from a point where this was a very diverse and it was up for grabs. It was really athleticism in some sense that,

to a point where it just is genetics and we found the special people who are wildly well-adapted. - Because the world wasn't connected enough and so people in Kenya and Ethiopia weren't competing and there wasn't prize money and all these infrastructure things that have brought us together.

- Would you say that that would have a negative effect on the sport that now we don't even feel motivated to enter or we just wanna watch? - People ask that question a lot, just in the sense of what happens if we have genetically optimized people fulfilling certain roles in sports? Are we going to care because there's this kind of unknown mystery?

but that's what's already happening. It's just that we didn't know. I mean, if we just were to go back and sequence people who've been our greatest athletes, especially in the sports where you can really isolate specific functions. - Like swimming. - Well, swimming, you have to have access to a pool, you have to have great coaching, but I think like running the hundred meters, this is kind of this standard human thing, all kids run.

And we're going to find out that people are genetically optimized for certain functions and we can't lie to ourselves about that. And yes, there's this fear, nobody wants to live in kind of this Plato's Republic society, but you also don't want to live in a society where the people who are doing mission critical functions

aren't the people best suited to do those things? I mean, there's like the joke about the German chef and the Italian policeman. If you kind of have the wrong person for the wrong job, that could also hurt a society. Well, I have to admit that I don't have the same clarity that you do. So for example, if I go to the next...

example. So I believe that it has to do in part with the ability to radiate heat in terms of marathon running, that that's really the limiting factor. What happens when you look at something freakish like the number of female chess players in the top hundred chess players in the world and you find that it's

one in a hundred is female and you've got a single protein S R Y that determines whether or not some sort of template, the proto human being goes male or goes female. Are you prepared to say that we should just accept if we find out that there's a genetic component for spatial reasoning, for example, or,

you know, that there are, I believe three grandmasters of African origin. I'm not comfortable with that conclusion. It may be that that conclusion somehow comes out of the genetics, the way your Boston marathon example comes out of the genetics. But I don't know what kind of a society I would be living in if I were comfortable saying, wow, there are really huge disparities. And I'll give you the most dangerous one for you and me is,

Ashkenazi Jews represent one quarter of 1% of the world's population, about 25% of the physics Nobel prizes. I was shocked when I spit into a tube for 23andMe that

it knew my religion. Now I hadn't thought about the idea that, that Judaism is among many other things, a breeding protocol. Yeah. Um, of having the smartest people like the rabbis for hundreds of years, have as many kids as possible versus the Catholic. Well, that's one story. That's one story. Another story would be that previously unimportant, uh,

like mathematical ability for money lending might have been fetishized by a group that was allowed to do that and little else. And lo and behold, that turned out to be very important in a world dominated by computer program. I'm not sure which story we're telling. I'm not sure what's true, but I'm trying to get at a different point. If I accept the idea that this particular Valley sub tribe in Kenya and Ethiopia actually has a genetic advantage at marathon running, then,

I'm not terribly disturbed. And as soon as I kick that over into things like chess and physics,

it doesn't feel very good to even be thinking about these things. - Yeah, this is really uncomfortable stuff. - Yeah. - And it exists in the realm of our most taboo, difficult topics. So let me take your three examples, the women chess players, the Africans and the Jews. So for women chess players,

It is just a fact that when you just look at the top grandmasters in the world, it is almost entirely men.

that is not because there aren't enough women who are playing chess. That is because of the brain structure that allows a person to be great at chess, the male brain on average, and certainly at the level of these grandmasters, is better suited for that. There could be another game that could be just like chess with a different rule set

where the structure of women's brains could be better suited. And I would not be at all surprised if in whatever game that was, that all of the grandmasters were women. And I just, so many people have looked at this. - But what if such a game doesn't helpfully materialize? In other words, what you said, which again, I'm not blaming you and I'm struggling with this issue,

I don't know whether I want these things investigated, not investigated. I don't know whether I want to tell a sort of a soft story around something that I suspect is true. I mean, you can't actually back out exactly that this is brain structure because it could easily be that,

in order to be at the very top of the chess pile, you have to be completely obsessive about chess. And it may be that it's an obsessional trait rather than an ability trait that discriminates against females. Or it could be, for example, that Africans dominate speed chess, which would be a different variant of another game. In all of these circumstances, my claim is that

There is no good place to stand. And this is the thing that I don't know how to communicate to the world, which is we now have so much information and we have so many social needs that the information we have and the social needs that we have are at least important.

at risk temporarily of clashing in a profound and destructive way before we figure this out. Would you agree? - 100% agree. And so there, we talked before we went live about this kind of knife podcast, knife fight between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein. And it was painful for me. I enjoy both of their podcasts, but it was painful

Do you want to set up a little bit for people who don't know? Yeah. So Sam Harris and Ezra Klein are both very successful podcasters, among other things. And so there was Sam Harris did a podcast interview with Charles Murray, who wrote a book called The Bell Curve in a long, long time ago.

And The Bell Curve was a very challenging book, and it talked about differences between groups. And one of the ways it categorized group was between blacks and whites. And I, as someone who's read that book, and I write about it in my book,

there are some aspects of that book where they were just trying to present data and they were attacked for it. There were other aspects of the book I felt where it was wildly inappropriate and borderline racist. And so I think that part of the attack and I'm all for free speech and certainly when Charles Murray was physically harmed at Middlebury, I mean, that was an outrage. So, but there's a need for an important debate.

And so Sam Harris had Murray on his podcast and it was an excellent podcast interview. And then he came out and he wrote some things and basically his view was, let us just be honest about the data.

And then Ezra Klein had the point, which I don't know if it's your view or you were just articulating it, that we have social norms and we have the goals of the kind of society that we want to live in. And if we're getting scientific data that is threatening those norms, we should think of that scientific data as itself threatening.

And so that was what was so frustrating. - Well, effectively the concept of hate data. - You know, in my view, there is data. - Well, no, no, I understand. - Yeah, yeah. But I think that's how- - Nobody uses the phrase hate data. - Yeah, but that's how, I think Ezra Klein, that was the essence of his argument.

And so the thing that I didn't like about that interview is I felt like they each pushed each other to become caricatures of their own position. So everybody just kept repeating their thing. Sam Harris kept saying, "Well, just follow the data." And Ezra Klein said, "Well, this data could lead us into an ugly place and we need to remember that science exists within the social context." And both of them were right in some ways.

And that brings me to your second group that you talked about. So on chess, and it's not like chess means, chess is not intelligence, chess is chess, but certainly all evidence that exists has shown that men and at this highest level, men out, the super chess playing men on average outperform the super chess playing women. And it could be motivation. There could be other factors that are woven in, but my guess,

My gut instinct is there's something about men and women are just physiologically different. And that just exists and there's certainly people who are on the... I also agree that men and women are physiologically different. But let me tell you the cautionary tale that has occupied me. I was a mathematics graduate student at Harvard and I believe that the department kind of informally always wanted more women

But there was no track record or not much of a track record of success. And so I think they would let in one a year. And then one year a woman deferred. And then there ended up being two women in the same year. And rather than dropping out, the two women formed a support group. And then there was a whole cohort that went through and had relatively successful careers in mathematics. So you could have told the tale that said, actually, there's an inability here.

to do math because we're talking about tails and at the highest level. Larry Summers got in trouble for making that exact argument. Well, that was the odd part about that. That was in a seminar that I actually founded with Richard Freeman at the National Bureau for Economic Research. And we can go to the details of that. I'm concerned that we are glibly...

Look, I don't think there's any way of staying away from the data. And I don't think that that's what happened between Ezra and Sam. I think that what happened is Sam was having an issue where he was being lambasted for all sorts of responsible things that he was saying. And then he said to himself, huh, I remember lambasting Charles Murray. I wonder if I committed the crime that I am accusing others of, I should go back. So he was doing some kind of internal penance. Yeah.

Ezra came from a completely different perspective, which is, Hey, you're not part of the whole policy wonky club that I'm part of. And let me tell you, Charles Murray is a very well-known player in this game and he comes with prejudices and he may in fact present real data and real stuff, but he has a well-known agenda and he is presenting the things that fit his agenda. And so that was sort of the weird subtext that they were in. But,

I think what it really does is it brings up this question that there are no dispassionate arbiters. And this is the thing that I don't like to talk about where this sort of social justice perspective has a point, which is we pretend very often that we are objective and that we can make these conclusions. And yet relatively minor alterations can reveal that,

Maybe intelligence is much more multivariate. For example, people talk about IQ where one of the components of IQ is processing. And lots of people who I think of as being very smart

have terrible processing scores if they have what are called learning differences. And so my concern has to do with the sort of humility and modesty with which we approach what may seem at first blush to be extremely disturbing interpretations of the data. So what I would put to you is

It seems to me that we both have to proceed in a scientific fashion and that we can't afford to always be thinking of the social consequences. And we also have to be thinking of the social consequences and we can't afford to proceed blithely with the science. And so this is the sort of, you know, when I asked you before about the three tails, the utopian, the dystopian and the impasse tail, this is where I see that we're blocked. And in terms of the theme of the show, uh,

Is there a portal whereby we can start using our extra power to

to find a really graceful exit from what seems to me to be a very powerful conundrum. - And we have that portal and we're losing it. - Well, tell me about it. - Because it's called conversation. It's called connection because there is no doubt, and I said it before, we can't imagine that our science just exists in some separate realm of pure objectivity. Our science, like we ourselves,

live in a world of context. And so it's because you're in a context, you see the world through your prism. That's how consciousness works. But at the same time, we can't just become postmodernists. We can't just be like, oh, this is your truth. This is my truth. This is your data. This is my data. We need to have high standards for data, but we can't just, I mean, we can't just

guide our interpretation of data based on our politics. So I would rather try to be recognizing that knowledge and scientific knowledge exists within a context and being aware of that.

but I would try to be as honest as we can about the data. And that was something where I felt where Ezra and Sam kind of got confused because when you're making a classification like Charles Murray did, like white people versus black people, what is a white person? What's a black person? There's more diversity in Africa than there is in the whole rest of the world.

So just that somebody just by appearance is black, it kind of doesn't tell you anything. - Well, but let me come, this is why this is so fun and so horrible. I wanna devise an experimental setup that I think would be highly educational, would elucidate a lot. I'm not sure if it's ethical, so let me propose it to you.

More or less, if I understand correctly, whether we are phenotypically male or phenotypically female comes down to this SRY complex on the Y, usually found on the Y chromosome unless it migrates somehow to the X. And some fish can change gender. Well, gender may have arisen multiple times. We have to get into that. But just let's stay with humans. Assume that I propose the following experiment.

I decide that I want identical twins, but for an SRY protein. And so I'm going to mangle the SRY protein in one and I'm going to preserve it in the other. And I'm going to, or maybe I'll swap out the Y chromosome for an X chromosome, what have you.

Now I've got an identical boy and girl, which is not usually something that you can... Not anymore because you made that change. No, no, no. Identical up to as identical as is humanly possible. Nobody has ever come up with anyone this identical. Yeah. Now I can start to run controlled trials. But I'm also sort of in Mengele territory. Yeah.

How is this in some sense different? Is there any way of maintaining this? You wouldn't do that on a human. So let's just say, I mean, that is an experiment. Let's say I do it on mice. I look at maze running. Yeah. No, no. So we don't have that ability yet, but because, which is my thesis, that biology is increasingly readable and writable and hackable, I have no doubt that,

that at some point in the not distant future, we will be able to try something like that on mice. So basically you have two identical twin embryos and then you use a gene editing tool and you're able to change gender, which again is not something that's possible now, but it's the kind of thing it should be possible just as a thought experiment.

And so you could do that with mice and I think that you could do comparisons and we could actually learn a lot and that's why we talked about Sidney Brenner who recently died, that was his great insight is that we're genetically related to all of these model organisms and so we're going to be able to increasingly understand that stuff.

And if we have a story that's our mythology as people that we've developed to our benefit in many cases over thousands of years,

And that increasingly runs counter to what we are learning from our science. That's going to create a lot of vulnerability because either you have to change the mythology or people are gonna say, "Hey, this is what the science is saying." And maybe it's going to be the racists who are saying that. And so that's why I think we have to accept

this idea of genetic difference. It's not in the category of race. Race is just a preposterous, ridiculous, stupid-- - It's a very not careful idea. - Yes, but if you're part of some highly isolated tribe on an island that you've been left alone for 50,000 years,

you are going to be genetically different from some other tribe that's been on another island for 50,000 years. And so we can't deny that. And so we can't say, well, we're just gonna close our eyes to the science to protect our politics. I think what we have to do is start from a sense of values and what are our core values. - Right, but look, one of our core values is hypocrisy. And let me make an argument.

You're familiar with the Ginger Rogers principle in male-female relations? No. Ginger Rogers principle says that Ginger Rogers could do everything that Fred Astaire could do except backwards and in high heels. Right? So that's a belief that in some sense women are as good or better than men. Which I believe. You do? Yeah. So I'm not saying there's... No, no, no. But let me continue. Yeah. And there's another principle that says that men and women are equal.

There's no way to get mathematical distributions to work out so that their means are equivalent, but one in some sense majorizes the other in every known trait. Why? Like, I disagree with that.

I mean mathematically I could... What I'm saying is that it depends on what we mean by equal. So let's just assume that we accept... We have a concept of equal in biology, which would be the equivalence of Fisher, which Fisher would say that... You beautifully pointed out that geographically separated populations can have extraordinarily different traits and there's nothing in biology that keeps those things together, including intelligence. However...

The males and the females in each of those populations at a mathematical level represent an expected value strategy that is equivalent by Fisher's reasoning. Now, that means that in a weird way, male-female relations are much better off than relations between separated groups.

There is something tying males and females in a breeding population to each other, and that is common expected value. The distributions don't have to be the same. I agree with that, but it's your use of the word equality. So yes. Expected return. So yes, like if you...

if you have a penis and the other person has a vagina, that's like that's chocolate and peanut butter and you're able to have a kid. And if your goal is to have a kid, that's like, that's a pretty fair trade. - I think that doesn't, I mean, the reason that I'm throwing it back is you're talking about the most interesting stuff in the world. Arguably what's happened, and this is an argument that I first heard actually from my wife,

where she said, you're not getting it, Eric. Fisherian equivalence works at the level of fitness. But what really happened was that cognitive work got wildly fulfilling recently. And we've been a long time since we've had, let's say, a war that required universal conscription in the U.S. Ergo, it's gotten much, much better to be male very recently because

And it has stayed about the same in many ways to be female, that if what you're doing is raising children for which women may be very much better adapted because maternity is certain and paternity is not, as you know.

Then you have a very strange situation in which many people may say, thank you very much, but I'm not interested in Fisherian equivalence. What I really want to know is who gets the corner offices. And then we have to have a different discussion. So the concern that I have is, is that I actually don't believe us. I think that we're actually up against an incredibly interesting conundrum where the science that must be,

that must continue and our social constructs, which we also feel must continue, have really reached a fork in the road and that very few of us are able to actually say, you know what? This is where something interesting happens because it's going to break and it's going to break hard. But I don't think it has to break because it's,

Like I said, there's who knows what equivalence means, who knows what equality means. These are things that happen in a context that's always changing. And all of the pieces are in many ways in conversation with each other. So just using what you said. So cognitive work, a certain type of cognitive work. And let's just...

Let's just assume that for the second half of the 21st century, let's just say that everybody, that the only way to make a lot of money was to play chess, just to connect. And so like that's the thing. And so the closer you got to being a grandmaster, the more wealth that you have. And so then in that model, you would say, well, men have an advantage if what I said earlier is true, which I believe it to be.

So then you would say, all right, so the value of men at this grandmaster level is actually going up because the world is now entirely organized around chess. And if my thesis is correct, men are more optimized. But in fact, the world isn't organized around chess. There are infinite number, massive number of different stories that are happening in our complex societies. And

And let's just say that we are moving and we haven't talked about AI and this fundamental transformation in the nature of work.

And let's just say we talked about this game of chess where there's like traditional chess and there's this other chess where women are better at it than men. And just as a hypothetical, just using a stereotype, which I, again, think would probably be true. Like if there was a chess, a form of chess that was more intuition-based and it was more interactive that you had to understand the other person's emotional state, maybe poker,

I could easily say, well, I could imagine where 99% of the grandmasters in that thing would be women.

And in this world of AI, where AI is, again, to use the example of chess, AI is going to play chess better than our grand masters. It could be that those very human traits that whoever has them is going to be rewarded. And so I just think that the model that you described, it requires a lot of factors being fixed that I see as variable. - I understand that. I think what's fascinating, of course, we do have occupations

which are wildly female tilted. So for example, fashion models, I believe at the top earn about the wage gap, I think is 90 cents in the top 10 male models versus the top 10 female models. This is an outrage. Well, but the key point is, is that many of us don't value that trait as men in ourselves. It's like,

Yeah, but that exists within the context of society with all of our dysfunction and superficiality and all of that. I think what I've been driving at is that I quite agree with you that we're getting to this hacking point. In fact, one of the theses behind the podcast is that in the early 50s, we unlocked two nuclei with fusion and with the cell. And that what's been remarkable is how little these cells

these events have affected our lives as opposed to how much they've affected our lives. We are still, we resemble our ancestors from thousands of years ago to a remarkable extent. Now, if I could get a pair of like dragon wings and spit fire and stuff, I would,

I'm not positive after watching Game of Thrones, I wouldn't go in for some modifications. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't, don't know. But I don't see anybody who's doing that yet. Now, what you're talking about is we are on the verge of certain very dramatic changes. And if I could just ask you to kind of, rather than just going through the morality of it,

what do you think the highest likelihood would be for the big changes over the next 10 to 20 years? Yeah.

So in the near term, certainly we're going to see a transition of our healthcare from our current model of generalized healthcare based on population averages to personalized or precision healthcare. And the way you're going to have treatments based on you is your doctors are going to need to know who you are and that will require access to your electronic health and life records, your biometric information, but most importantly,

importantly will be your genetic information. And with the cost of genome sequencing trending towards zero, everybody is going to be sequenced just as part of being in the healthcare system.

And so then, again, within this 10 to 20 year model, we are going to move toward this world of precision medicine and because of that we're going to have billions of people whose genotypic genetic information and phenotypic information, how those genes are expressed over the course of their lives, are going to be in these same massive big data pools.

We're going to use that to increasingly demystify biology. And that's going to very quickly move us to this world of predictive medicine, healthcare and life. And that's a really big and fundamental change. And we talk about our mythologies and our stories. You see a little baby and you say, oh, the world is open to you. But it's...

maybe part of the world is open to you. And maybe there are things that you could imagine that aren't open to you because you're not optimized for those things. I mean, people talk about Gattaca, this movie. I forgot. Yeah. No, so Ethan Hawke is this guy who was born the old fashioned way and he wants to get in the space program. And then at the end, he has to pull all these tricks and he gets into the space program. And the story, the thing is, isn't it so great that that guy was so determined?

But I think that guy should be arrested because you don't want non-genetically enhanced people in your space program who aren't going to be able to survive the radiation in space. And I think we may need to move in this direction. So there's just that our stories that we are telling ourselves

are going to be challenged. And this idea that we're going to have predictive life and that we're going to know not just our disease risks, but maybe there are going to be people who are in refugee camps now who are going to say, this person has a potential to be a Mozart. Let's make sure that we get resources to that

So that's one really big and fundamental change. Our lives are going to be, it'll never be 100% predictability, but it will be probabilistic and it'll be numerical. And we're going to have to learn to live with that uncertainty. That's going to be the nature of life.

Second, we're going to see the genetics revolution moving outside of the realm of healthcare. We don't have a disease genome or a healthcare genome, we have a human genome. And we're going to have just a lot of people giving us information about ourselves. Some of it will be reliable, some of it will not be, but it'll just be way beyond the realm of healthcare.

And then we're going to see this shift in how we make babies, a shift toward increasing numbers of percentage of babies born in IVF. In the US it's about 2%, Japan's 5%, Norway and Denmark are now 10% IVF. And then we're going to see that trend. And once we take conception outside of the human body, then we're going to be able to apply science in all kinds of incredible ways, but in ways that are going to scare a lot of people.

- Is there anything that you in particular are terrified of? - Yeah, oh my God. So I'm afraid that we're going to make decisions about the future of our species based on what feel like eternal truths, but in fact are transient fashions. - Say more. - So like right now you ask most people, people would say, well, I want a kind of a child with low disease risk,

optimized to live a long time, maybe high IQ, maybe tall. Like these are all perfectly fine things that people who have those traits now actually are thriving.

But diversity isn't just some kind of nice to have thing in our species. It's the sole survival strategy of our species or of any species. And so this thing, as I mentioned before, this diversity that's just happened to us for 4 billion years, we're going to have to choose it. We're going to have to identify what we mean by diversity and celebrate it. And I think that's...

Really, I mean, there are existential level risks. It's not just with if we make our species less diverse, but now individual actors. I mean, that was what I talked in the beginning about Dick Clark and terrorism and the kind of whole point of terrorism was that individuals now had the capacity to wreak a level of havoc that previously could only be wreaked by states. Now we're in the age of DIY bio and biohacking. I was...

speaking in New York at the World Science Festival about a month ago alongside Jennifer Doudna. And Jennifer is the co-inventor of the CRISPR-Cas9 system. And what I said, a little bit tongue in cheek, is that if you invent the CRISPR-Cas9 system like Jennifer, actually she's on my left, like Jennifer did, you will almost certainly win the Nobel Prize.

but if you apply CRISPR to edit a genome, you just get an A in your high school biology class. And afterwards, this woman came down and said, hey, didn't want to interrupt you in your talk, but I am a high school biology teacher. If you apply CRISPR in my class, you just get a B. And so this technology, it's not like nuclear weapons where only the state could do it. This stuff is out. But to that point, there's the story and I should chase it down. So I have it.

Exactly, about somebody scavenging radioactive material from 500 smoke alarms or something like that to build a functioning reactor. It's not clear that nuclear is going to stay the province of states. Yeah, I totally agree. I think all of technology is moving along this curve, but...

biology, it's just happened so quickly. And I totally agree with that. And so, you know, it was a year and a half ago, a group of Canadian researchers, mostly grad students, they use synthetic biology tools to create an active form of horsepox, which is a relative of smallpox, which can kill a gazillion animals.

people so that's a hundred thousand dollars and my guess is you could do that now for fifty thousand dollars and in five years five thousand dollars because we're just like this whole thing of biobricks that we're we are going to have the tools to remake life and it creates incredible potential with synthetic biology to do manufacturing differently to do life differently and

And just as we have these tools to do good, because like I said before, these tools are themselves agnostic, there are capabilities to do bad. Well, let's talk about the way in which this interacts with national culture. Which are the national cultures that are the most gung-ho to actually try to exploit these things in the here and now? And how do you feel about those national state-sponsored experiments? And do we have to worry about...

about geopolitical tensions and biology being the next battlefield where we won't even know if war has been declared. - Yeah, leading the witness, Your Honor. So yes, and I write about in the book what I call- - Well, I should say I'm not really leading the witness because I was given the book 10 minutes before we started the podcast. - No, no, no, and you were incredible. You absorbed the whole thing so quickly. So China is like the big,

and I would say it's like the big concern, but let me start with the positive story about China, because there's a lot to complain about China. I study China and do a lot of work in and around China, and I have a lot of very deep concerns. I feel like China is in many ways breaking the world through many of its actions.

And certainly there are privacy advocates in places like where we are now in California who feel that privacy is just an unadorned good. But China has very low levels of privacy on an individual level. And so what they are doing are they're building just these massive datasets

And these datasets can and are being used to oppress people, but they also can be used to do a lot of things that we think are good. Like to have a training set for autonomous insert, whatever it is, insert noun, autonomous vehicles or whatever, when those big datasets

or for precision personalized medicine, that having these big data sets is going to allow whomever, the Chinese or others, to develop actionable insights about how cancers form, about predisposition to certain diseases or responses to certain treatments. And that's very powerful and that is something that's going to help China and could potentially help us.

At the same time, China has a lot of things. It has a lot of money. It has incredibly talented people. It has this gung-ho scientific culture and it has very few limits. And it has this national culture that we got screwed by the colonialists, even though China wasn't officially colonized. And we got screwed by the unequal treaties. And the 21st century by 2050 is going to be the Chinese century. And we're gonna do what it takes to get there.

And that's translating into a lot of very, very aggressive applications of revolutionary science and genetics is at the forefront of that. And that's why for all of these kinds of right at the edge or beyond the edge experiments, they are mostly happening in China. The basic science in the United States is far superior to the basic science in China.

but there are more self-imposed and rational in my cases, in some cases, restrictions here in the United States than they tend to have in China.

And that's why Hu Junhui, who is this Chinese biophysicist who genetically engineered these babies last year, I mean, that's why it happened in China. That's why it could happen in China. And that's why he didn't even think that he was, he thought he was going to be this conquering hero and bring glory

to China. And what we're talking about here is the future of life and it's a big deal. And we should care what happens to life in China because we are all part of one species. And so, like you said earlier, there's a race because this technology is moving so quickly. But if China won't be restrained, then is it really prudent to hold back in a way in which

China lurches ahead because they don't have the same ethical concerns that we do. In other words, does it become ethical to compete because lack of competition means ceding the game to an actor you think is less ethical? Yeah. And so that's this whole arms race mentality. I think that's what we are entering. Do we win?

I believe that American values, just writ large, the values that America has pushed into the world, particularly over the last 70 plus years, with warts and all, I believe all in all is a net positive set of values that has laid the foundation for this greatest period of peace, prosperity, and stability in world history.

I also believe that the principles that the Chinese government is pushing out into the world are in many cases toxic and dangerous. That doesn't mean entirely, but in many cases. And undermining these principles that the greatest generation of Americans, people like Dean Acheson and George Marshall, pushed out into the world that

that helped everybody. And so I feel like it's really important for the United States to maintain its position in the world. And the foundation of that is economic competitiveness. And the foundation of that is that we need to be the world leaders in technology. Having said that though,

And you could talk about this across technologies and whether it's aggressive application of genetic technologies, but we could have the exact same argument about autonomous killer weapons. Because if you are a defense minister of a country and you're not, if you are developing autonomous killer weapons, you're laying a foundation for maybe humans being wiped out. But if you're not, you are empowering the other country that is making those investments. But I think that we can't sacrifice, we need to be competitive.

We can't sacrifice our very humanity in order to do it. And we need to recognize that this is a societal race.

And so it's not necessarily so, and I don't believe it's so, like the first country to have the first genetically engineered human wins the race, or the country with the least privacy wins the race. The country that figures out how to use the resources of the society as a whole to realize its objectives, whatever those are, that's the country that's going to win the race. And so that requires certain kinds of trade-offs.

But we should be, and that's certainly I'm doing this work in Geneva and elsewhere and trying to work with members of Congress on this. We should be saying we need to have international standards. And we've had international standards for things like chemical and biological weapons, for even nuclear weapons, even for climate change imperfectly. And we have to be working in that direction. Well, are we up for a biological non-proliferation treaty?

Yeah, I wrote, it's funny, I mentioned the article that I wrote many years ago that Brad Sherman read, and that was what I talked about. And I talked about using the model of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the thing that changed, has changed since then. I hadn't thought about it, but just a different nucleus.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. The thing that's changed since then is this technology has become so distributed that in the NPT, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, you get technology for restraint. That's kind of the trade-off for people in the world. And right now...

this technology is really accessible. But what I believe we need to do is to have every country needs to have a reasonable national regulations, which are in those countries interests. I mean, the United Kingdom is probably in my view, the best regulated country in the world in these areas.

it's also extremely advanced in its science and those things are connected. I mean, there's a level of confidence, there's a level of public support and public resource for these kinds of investments that come at that intersection.

But yes, we could have and maybe even will have a genetic arms race because we have differences within and between societies. People are willing to do all kinds of crazy things like these dumb people who paid the soccer coach at Yale when it would just been smarter just to pay to build a building for the same money. So it's just like I'm against this dumb corruption.

So people will do anything to advance their kids' interests. And if selecting embryos with higher IQs is one of those things, I think a lot of people are going to do it. But we are social animals and it's not that there are no examples of norms constraining our behaviors. We have lots of examples of that. Well, we do, but I don't know.

I mean, we could go for a Singaporean solution and decide that we should punish certain kinds of biohacking the way you punish being found with weed.

in the wrong country. Well, I'm not sure. What does Singapore and Malaysia do now? It could be. Yeah, no, and don't go, if you have your weed, go to Oakland. Don't go to Singapore. Well, and then the question, of course, is what, you know, I know biohackers in Oakland and they're pretty good too. Yeah. But my concern is, I mean, let me just be honest about this.

I am not averse to the conclusion that we are now watching an unstoppable force in an immovable object and that we have no idea whether this is going to be a disaster or the best thing that ever happened. Whether we're going to be able to, whether China's going to learn enough to scare the living crap out of themselves and

and they're going to be coming and say, look, this is much more profound. We have better data than you do. So you have to listen to us. That would be a great outcome. I don't hear something that

because I hear so much that is utopian and I'm excited about the utopian part of it and so much that's dystopian. - But it's unknown. I mean, there is lots that's potentially utopian. There's lots that's potentially dystopian. There's a middle and it hasn't played out yet. And so, but for me,

the way that we try to have some influence on whether we move the dial a little in the direction of utopian or a little in the direction of dystopian is values, is how can we infuse a conversation about values and norms into the development of these very powerful technology. And there are examples of,

doing it. And there's the international concept of international law, the concept of human rights. I mean, these aren't any kind of like inherent principles of the world. They were created and they became norms, imperfect norms. And so that's

But we will have, this story is going to play out in utopian ways, in dystopian ways and in everything in between. It's going to happen. That is it. That is the story. And it's going to increase forever. I mean, just we're on this J curve forever.

but the technology is going to get more and more and more powerful forever. And so the complexity of our biology has been roughly the same for millions of years. The sophistication of our tools is shooting up. So we just look at that graph, at that intersection, and we are going to be, we are increasingly understandable and hackable. Well, I mean, this is really the message for me is that

you can moralize all you want, but really what's going to happen is, is that this is going to play out relative ironically, of course, according to a system of selective pressures. And what we don't know is to whether this constitutes a sort of final paradigm shift, the likes of which, to be honest, we've never seen. It could, it could well be. And that's why I'm saying, you know, I,

we don't know the answer to that question. It's not knowable, but what we do know is that we are beginning a process and that we do know that we have principles that we've fought for. I mean, we, these ideas of equity and diversity, things that our ancestors probably didn't value. We value for good reasons because we've, we've lived through and our parents and grandparents have lived through these experiences. We talked about Nazism of,

of what happens when these terrible values are empowered. So I really think that like this is in some ways a conversation about science, but it's really a conversation about values. And so I think that we, either we have agency or we must believe we have agency until proven otherwise, because what's the alternative? Well, I think the one way of looking at it is through the lens of selection. And I've made this comment that-

They're really, selection is not really about human biology. It says that anything that has three properties is going to behave in a Darwinian fashion. And that is diversity, heritability, and differential success. Now, the social interpretation, which I think weirdly almost nobody seems to talk about or mention, is that variability constitutes the human value of diversity. Mm-hmm.

Heritability has to do with what we would call privilege and differential success has to do with inequality. And so the really maddening thing about biology and the reason that it ends up in the crosshairs of social justice is that you take this cherished value of diversity, you subject it to privilege, and you take it to privilege.

and it produces inequality. And then you take that as the feedback into the system and just loop it. Now, the one thing that you're talking about is destroying heritability. In effect, you're giving somebody who is not blessed with the genetics that they might want,

that might be borrowed from somewhere else. I wouldn't say destroying, it's morphing. That you have a certain kind of heritability, you're adding a new kind of, a new aspect of heritability. Or you could call it facultative heritability rather than obligate heritability. And so that is the design and designer, right? And so in that system...

you are effectively breaking something in a very strong way. Now, it was always the case that we learned how to breed, let's say canines and create very exotic breeds. But we are that. I mean, our whole species... Well, that was the point about dinner and a movie. Yes, emerges from that thing. That is how evolution works. And that's why the title of the book is Hacking Darwin. We're hacking that process. And it just has such...

- Profound implications. And that's, I started talking about Dick Clark as the Cassandra. Like I feel that it's like what I'm trying to do is say, look, and you get it. This is the biggest issue that we are ever going to, this is an existential issue for our species. Big decisions are being made and most people don't even know they're being made. They don't even know what's happening. - This is a great segue to one of the last two topics I really want to get to.

That is, if we are going to try to figure out how to guide and steer our own future, do you see any prospect for tackling these very complicated issues going from geopolitics to health to our own sense of our own identity, what have you, with the level of knowledge that our population currently has? Like if they had to pass a test, they probably couldn't pass a test to be minimally competent on some bill that might come up. And yet...

we have to vote on these things. What do we do here? - Yeah, so we have a big problem. And on issues like science and certainly foreign affairs, we used to have in this country a more representative democracy. And that's why when I started out in my early career working in government, I was in the White House, I had lots of friends who were Republicans and we all agreed

that America, that we had these responsibilities, which grew out of our experience of our understanding of what happened before the second world war and the world that was built after the second world war.

And now our decision-making process for foreign affairs, for all sorts of things, including highly technical trade agreements has become democratized. So a bunch of people are making decisions about complex trade agreements, but like, oh, I just have a feeling that this is bad or people in Britain, I have a feeling that the EU is making my toast, this is a real thing, is making my toast unevenly toasted. It's because somebody is regulating my toaster.

And so the regular people are making big decisions kind of like we're Switzerland, but unlike Switzerland that's actually educating its public really well, we're doing a terrible decision of that. So we have to, we're moving towards a more democratic process

we have to do a much better job of educating our public. The good news for me is, you know, I speak to a lot, to a lot of different groups and I speak to, I do keynote speaks to big groups of doctors and scientists. A friend of mine is chairman of the board of the Hebrew Academy and the Solomon Schecter in Bergen County, New Jersey. And I went and I spoke to their seventh and eighth graders. And when I got to the point, it was just kind of laying out the basic axioms of my argument.

50 hands went up because these kids, and granted they were mini Talmudic scholars, they were human and they understood what's at stake. So I think that there's a technical underpinning to this conversation. But once people understand the basics, what we're talking about is something that's not technical. It's personal. This is about what it means to be a human being. And I think that we have to

we have to bring people into the conversation. It's connected to the point that you made earlier, like wouldn't it be better just to fly under the radar and not agitate people? And I think people can take it. And even an example of this is the debate about abortion in states like Alabama. In most of these states, IVF is not being restricted. And so there's like,

And then that's that's a cause for optimism, because, you know, that's not you know, that's not life. That's just some stuff in a dish, because the people in the evangelical and other communities saying, well, we recognize there's this thing which they're calling the miracle of life.

And so we have to find a way to engage each other. We have to be better educated. I mean, this level of ignorance is dangerous for any democracy. And we see populism, uninformed populism is just a massive threat because it's just the use, you don't need much information and people can fly around to different views. So we have to engage people. - I quite agree, although I would come back at you in a way that you may not like, which is that having spent a lot of time with leading biologists,

I would say that I find that they suffer from a different problem, which is that this is so cool. This is so unbelievable, unbelievably exciting that the, the selective pressure there is let's just God damn try this. And I'm not positive. And then there's the geopolitical. I actually don't think there's a solution. I think this is going to develop somewhat haphazardly. And if we,

even if we think we can control it and come up with good protocols around it. My sense of it is that mostly it's been very hard to get to work at a deep level, but when it starts to really work, we're not gonna be able to control it. - We're not gonna be able to control it, but I think we have to start building the infrastructure that is better than it otherwise might be. I talked about the United Kingdom. There are models that every country can have. We have to start building an international framework, climate change,

You could say, well, it's a bad example because we haven't succeeded. It's a good example because we've at least built some infrastructure that if and when, probably when things get a lot worse, we'll at least have done that work. And we haven't even laid that foundation in this area. We need near-death experiences in order to animate us unless our storytellers, hint, hint, hint, hint,

And that's the essence of everything is if we wait till the near death experience, so many big decisions will have already been made that it's gonna be really impossible to go backwards. And so now when nobody's paying attention is when the hard work needs to be done. That's what I'm trying to- - I would love it if you would write two stories which had a fork and one of them went to some unbelievable place and the other went to some horrible place so that people could see that maybe how this would play out. Let me ask you my last set of questions.

Sometimes people call cancer a disease, and I'm very reluctant to call cancer a disease. And it has to do with the fact that cancer is strangely sort of a problem of immortality, where a cell line decides it wants to live forever. I know, that's the bad live forever. Yeah, it's the bad. Well, but there's sort of two ways to die as an organism. One way to die is through...

memory leak. That is a runaway process that keeps consuming more and more of the resources. And, you know, it's like somebody tells you to divide one by three, uh,

until you come to the end of the decimal. You'll take up all of the resources of the computer if you don't set a recursion limit. And if the recursion limit is the Hayflick limit, let's say, with the number of times a cell can divide, then you have a situation where do you wish to die from your recursion limit, which will introduce imprecision into a floating point calculation, or do you wish to die from trying to compute it perfectly and it's a fool's errand? In such a circumstance...

if these are fundamental trade-offs that nature has never been able to really figure out, we don't have truly immortal species that can live forever with any kind of state or structure, which is what our minds are. All of our memories are a buildup of state.

Is there any prospect in the story, no matter how positive, in which we really get to evade these fundamental trade-offs between the death from resource leaks versus the death from... How do I have it? A recursion limit. Yeah, so...

I'll start at the end and then I'll go backwards. We're all going to die of something. And even if let's just, even if it's just insult, well, even if let's just say we crack the code and you can live forever, then this, the law of probabilities are going to, is going to get you like some wayward pigeon is going to smash through your head. Just that's what I meant by insult. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so yeah,

And again, it's all about perspective. And because you talked about cancer cells being immortal, we have immortality. It's just the we is the cancer cells and we don't identify as the cancer cells. We identify as the host organism in which the cancer... Well, our lineage is immortal. Yes, yes.

- So the question of, I have a chapter in the book on the science of human life extension. I absolutely believe that we are going to continue to be able to push the limits of not just average health span, but extreme health span. The longest, you know, the longest lived person on record is not Methuselah, it's 122, Jean Calment in Arles in France.

And so I think we're going to be able to go beyond average healthspan, and that's in the blue zones that Dan Buettner and others talk about, and individual lifespan. And the reason why I believe that is just we look at the variability of biology. We have some closely related animals like mice and naked mole rats or hard clams and quahog clams, and there are lots of examples where one lives a short time and one lives a long time.

much longer time. And there are there we will find and are finding that there are these knobs that can in some ways be turned. And we're starting to explore that through either lifestyle, things like calorie restrictions or drugs like metformin and rapid rapamycin and the NAD plus boosters that are kind of mimicking that that experience. So I think that we will.

it's not gonna be one magic thing, but we're never going to get to immortality just because parts wear out. The only kind of, I was about two months ago, I was in Kyoto and I went to the visited Hiroshi Ishiguro, who's this incredible humanoid roboticist. And he was saying,

that he thought the future of humanity is non-biological. And you could say, well, if we have immortality, we'll just download our brains into some kind of immortal beings. - Silicon substrate. - Yeah. You know, I said, I don't believe that. 'Cause I think that when that happens, let's just say, which let's just hypothetically say, you could download your brain, your brain goes into this robot. Let's just say that at that moment where you're perfectly paired, that robot is you.

But the next second, because you aren't, you're just your brain, your brain is connected to everything. It's connected to your gut and your body. Like it's just, that's a different thing. It's like a, it's a derivative of,

So we're not going to live forever, but the science of human life extension is real. And it's coming back to this point of biohacks and whether it's these blood transfusions, the parabiosis, and there's something there, whether it's embryo selection, because we're going to understand that we are increasingly understand the genetics

of longer health span, whether it's mimicking the proteins that the people who have the genetics of health span, what their cells, what their genes would be doing. I mean, there are a lot of things. So we've been doing it for a long time. We're going to continue to push the bounds of our mortality. - Well, I've always found it funny that,

in our tradition, the Jewish tradition, that we ask that people should live to the age of Moses, which is 120. And it's more or less the hard stuff for human beings. You know, it's so funny. In the Bible, and again, I write about this in the book, they write about Methuselah, and he lives to like 969, and then he has a kid who's in the 900s, and all these guys live in the 900s.

And then it's like a few chapters later, it says, but then I decided that the longest that anyone can live is 120. Just don't get any ideas. Well, the funny part of that, I was going to bring this up, is that

I think Hydra have immortal and non-immortal. It's a model species with immortal and non-immortal. And I write in my last novel, Eternal Sonata, that's the secret of immortality. One of them is sexual and one of them is asexually reproducing. And the immortal one is the asexual. So I always go back to Gershwin's line, which is Methuselah lived 900 years, but who calls that living when no gal would give into no man what 900 years? In essence, an asexual life is not a life worth living.

You know, who knows? Like we are hacking life. Like we have this world that we have known and we just, it's hard for us to imagine our evolutionary journey because our personal experience is so stuck in this form.

But we have been asexual in our past, like when we were bacteria. Our sexual reproduction is only hundreds of millions. - Well, our mitochondria are effectively the part of us that's asexually reproducing for the most part. - Sexual reproduction is only about 600 million years old. So we've been around for 3.2 billion years. So we've been a lot of different things.

we could be a lot of different things. We are not at the end point of our evolutionary journey. And there are these quote unquote traditional evolutionary drivers. And now we're introducing a whole new set as we've been discussing of evolutionary drivers

We don't understand where it's heading. Do you think there's a portal to a Cambrian explosion of different successors to humans? Yes, it must be. Right. Yeah, but I mean, it has to be. Well, I just wanted you to tease it out. That's really what you're talking about. Yes. No, no. This is like, and you're getting me all agitated now. No, no, no.

This is like, it's a turning point. It's 3.8 billion years of evolving by random mutation and natural selection. We are turning a corner. This is like when cells went eukaryotic. It's a huge discontinuity. It's a huge thing. I mean, this is it. And so we cannot, I mean, I'm a science fiction writer. And so I spent a lot of my time trying to, but we cannot accurately imagine

where this is going over hundreds and thousands of years. But what we can say, and what I'm so committed to is saying,

We have over at least many thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, we've developed ethical codes and values that we have found help us live better lives, help us work together with each other. And at very least, we need to be fighting to make sure that our best values individually and collectively are woven into our decision-making process. Or you could also take a different perspective, which is that those values were actually protocols that allowed one group

to handily outcompete another that lacked such values and that in fact values which we've

we've forgotten this are a cudgel with which to beat rival groups. It could be, and it could be the values themselves are evolving. And yet we can't become so relativistic that even our most cherished principles, we just, we just jettison. I think we need to look at them. We need to look at them critically. We talked about that in the context of, of Sam Harris. Um, so we need to, we need to do that. Um,

But we can't just say, oh, now we're in, I mean, that's what the futurists did 100 years ago in Italy and it led to fascism. We're coming from somewhere. We're coming from a culture. We're coming from thousands of years of struggling for values and we need to think about them. We need to challenge them. We need to recognize that these technological challenges are new, but we've fought hard for these value systems and we need to fight for them.

Jamie, this is absolutely fascinating. I can't wait to dig into the book. And I hope that everybody out there in the Portal audience will take a look at this book, Hacking Darwin by Jamie Metzl. And Jamie, it's been a fantastic conversation. Thanks for coming through the Portal. Really my great pleasure. Thank you, Rick. Thank you.

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Thank you.