Former National Security analyst turned author Jamie Metzel has written a book called Hacking Darwin. The book attempts to use storytelling to explore where we are as the new era of rewriting our cells and ourselves gets into full swing. Here he sits down with Eric to explore the negatives and positives of our seemingly ineluctable future of God-like power to rewrite biology. Together they discuss the role of story telling and fiction in understanding cutting edge science, the limits of bio-hacking regulation and the rise of mainland China as the outlying superpower of state sponsored experimentation.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [Intro jingle] 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. [whistles] 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 twenty-four/seven 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 wanna 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, Portalians, Portaloids, 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 in the show, people are actually building it as we speak. To better see this, check out theportal.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 twenty-four/seven 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 seven thousand 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, a hundred people in an open voice chat room at four AM 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 Swagman, Miss Jo, JT, Emmy, Tyler, Cam, Beef Sandwich, Beaucoup, Winter Flags, Field Theorist, Jacob, Jentrepreneur, JD, Josh, and too many more to name. These are the people who are actually making this community really meaningful to me and which 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 am 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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So right now, you’ll get an extra twenty-five percent off your first order on Amazon, but only if you use our special discount code RAZORS25. So go to amazon.com/persona today and enter our code RAZORS25, all one word. That’s amazon.com/persona, P-E-R-S-O-N-N-A, and enter discount code RAZORS25 for twenty-five percent off your first order. With Persona, I always get a great shave every time. I’m delighted with the product. I love how edgy returning sponsor ExpressVPN has gotten. They’re one of our favorites because they make a great VPN service that shields your data from prying eyes on open networks. 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 permissioned 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/portal. This week’s interview with Jamie Metzl, the author of Hacking Darwin, was recorded in July of twenty nineteen 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US science policy circles for around thirty years with a peak of activity probably in the mid to late nineteen nineties. 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 nineteen eighties 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 US STEM research and laboratory programs. As the potential for conflict with our US scientific mandarins is always great over this issue, I generally try to discuss my deep concerns about differing Chinese and US 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 4 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 one 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 nineteen eighteen, nineteen sixty-eight, and nineteen seventy-five 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. [guitar music] 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 Boll & Branch comes into the equation. You see, if you make an impulse purchase, but it’s a sane and shrewd one, you’re in fact going to improve your stay indoors with the coronavirus. Now, why is that? Because Boll & Branch makes the most luxurious and comfortable bedding you’ve ever slept in. And that means that you’re going to wake up rested, and you’re going to feel differently about being stuck indoors. In fact, Boll & Branch has supplied sheets to three US presidents from both political parties. And they’re so confident of their product that they’re offering a 30-day guarantee. If you don’t love them, you can return the sheets for a full refund. How good is that? Remember, you’ll only find Boll & Branch sheets online, and it’s spelled B-O-L-L and branch.com. So if now’s the time to make such a purchase, use code PORTAL and get $50 off your first set of sheets. Again, shipping is both fast and free. But since restrictions may apply, you should see bollandbranch.com for details. Go to bollandbranch.com and use code PORTAL to get $50 off your first set of sheets. [whooshing] Okay, so you’re probably stuck at home and thinking, “Is there some kind of an impulse purchase I could make to avoid eating that tub of fudge ice cream in the freezer?” Well, if you’re going to do it intelligently, go to Lamps Plus, our continuing sponsor, who wants to ask you, is the lighting in your house absolutely spectacular, or is it merely adequate? If the latter, what I would advise is that you go to lampsplus.com and check out their videos, which give you tips and help for how to design a room so that it is actually composed rather than merely thrown together. Of course, Lamps Plus is the nation’s largest lighting retailer with over 55,000 designs all from top brands, including Minka, which is known for decorative pieces that blend function and style using innovative materials. And right now, if you’ll go to lampsplus.com/portal, they’re offering up to 50% off hundreds of lights, furniture, and decor from March 31st until April 13th. That’s up to 50% off during the Lamps Plus lighting fixture sale through April 13th at lampsplus, P-L-U-S, .com/portal. Start saving right now. Go to lampsplus.com/portal. Lamps Plus has all the tools to make sure that that impulse purchase will be a source of inspiration for years to come. [electronic music] Hello, this is Eric Weinstein, and you’ve found The Portal. Today on the show, I’m talking to Jamie Metzl, who is going to describe for us some of his thoughts, uh, that come out of his book, Hacking Darwin, about the pursuit of molecular engineering and other, uh, biological hacking techniques to unlock the promise of the cell and potentially, um, human potential at a greater scale. Jamie, welcome to the program.
00:15:30
Jamie Metzl: Thanks, Eric.
00:15:32
Eric Weinstein: 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, uh, you came to write this book.
00:15:44
Jamie Metzl: Sure. So, uh, more than 20 years ago, I was working on the National Security Council, and my then boss and now very close friend, Richard Clarke, was the guy who essentially predicted 9/11. And, uh, 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, I started reading, taking these little data points and putting them together. I hadn’t taken a science class since high school, started just taking, 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 on, about the national security implications of the genetics revolution. And a congressman from where we are now, LA, Brad Sherman, uh, 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, um, two near-term sci-fi novels, uh, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata, telling the story of the gen- 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, uh, 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 wh- 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, of the genetics revolution.
00:18:07
Eric Weinstein: Are you familiar by any chance with a remarkable book by Horace Judson called The Eighth Day of Creation?
00:18:14
Jamie Metzl: No.
00:18:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, this, so this is a very odd book where I think somebody pointed out that the story of molecular biology could be uniquely told in the present only because all of the major players were still alive.
00:18:29
Jamie Metzl: Hmm.
00:18:29
Eric Weinstein: 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, the, the top, um, people and wrote the story in a very compelling fashion.
00:18:44
Jamie Metzl: Hmm.
00:18:45
Eric Weinstein: And I, I guess I was thinking about how profound the role of storytelling is in catalyzing, uh, human interest and imagination, that somehow, um, you could compare the data that we have, uh, to the sheet music of science, but if nobody actually performs it in the-
00:19:05
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:19:05
Eric Weinstein: … 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?
00:19:12
Jamie Metzl: 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, 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’s, that has to be the interest of everybody. And if the scientists aren’t able, uh, and if th- uh, to communicate that to, to the regular people, that’s gonna cause a huge problem. So we are humans. The way we learn is through stories. And, and our ancestors, they didn’t have these specialized stories. They had 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, that’s what I feel like we’ve lost a little bit in our, in our age of super specialization, that we’re able to make more progress because we have pioneers heading out in ev- 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’s isolated from the pioneers.
00:20:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, we, we, we frequently tell this, um, this tale about storytelling as something that the non-specialists need and that the specialists can communicate in their, um, highly professional lingo.
00:20:47
Jamie Metzl: Right.
00:20:47
Eric Weinstein: But I wonder, uh, 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-
00:20:57
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:20:57
Eric Weinstein: … so that when you’re talking about-
00:20:58
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:20:58
Eric Weinstein: … this stuff, d- do you see your gift for storytelling having an effect back on the experts, or is it really all one way?
00:21:06
Jamie Metzl: No, absolutely. It’s two way, and it has to be, uh, two way because, 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’m a, I certainly am a translator. I read just massive amounts of, of scientific studies, and they’re all very technical, and I kind of take them in and then translate that into language that, that, that hopefully everybody, and, and certainly I’ve high sch- like getting lots of messages from high schoolers and others who are reading the book and, and getting these, uh, these principles. But it’s also going the other way. I do a lot of speaking, uh, alongside George Church, who’s kind of the living Charles Darwin. Um, 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, 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 these, the, 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 we have, if the science is dissociated from the public discourse around the science, it kills the science. That’s what we saw with genetically, 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 gonna be really responsible. We’re gonna go to Asilomar, and we’re gonna 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, you could… The, the, 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.
00:23:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, I guess I’m of two minds about this. I think, uh, from 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-
00:23:38
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
00:23:38
Eric Weinstein: … the cells and, and our body plans, uh, are we actually, uh, 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, uh, 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-
00:24:06
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:24:06
Eric Weinstein: … s- catches the public’s imagination, and suddenly you’ve got a panic where-
00:24:10
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:24:10
Eric Weinstein: … um, where, where there shouldn’t be one. Is there a way of figuring out which fears are adaptive, which fears-
00:24:17
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:24:18
Eric Weinstein: … are maladaptive in getting the storytelling to help aid our intuition?
00:24:21
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, it’s really an im- an important question because both the science And the storytelling are themselves agnostic.
00:24:29
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:24:29
Jamie Metzl: I mean, you could have science, like the science doesn’t come with a value system. Storytelling is a mechanism, and storyteller- storytelling can be used to scare people. It can be used to excite, excite people. It can be used for all, all, all sorts of reasons. There’s nothing inherent to the storytelling. But then there’s the question of what types of stories do we, 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, of human genetic engineering. And there are some people who say, “Well, why are you st- 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, quote-unquote, “designer babies” ever happens, that’s long into, in potentially long in, in the future even though we’ve begun that, that process. But what I say to, to that is, like let’s just say that we’re having this conversation and the, the kind of the people who are behind the barricades on one side or another on the abortion issue-
00:25:32
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm
00:25:32
Jamie Metzl: … will say, “Hey, here’s another, here’s another barricade. I better get behind the no genetic- no manipulation of human sex cells. Like, that’s a new barricade that I can build and, uh, and defend.” And so there’s a real danger of that. You could s- there is a strong argument to be made, like let’s just keep this under the radar. We actually, scientists are ex- 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, about IVF. And so when it got to the point when the pro-life people would say, could have said, “Hey, wait a second. Um, you’re, life begins at conception. You’re killing embryos in these IVF clinics,” those people were already talking about the miracle of life of these people in their churches who now had, had babies. But I v- I believe that these genetic technology 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, 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, uh, with this, with, with this book, and, um, I’ve been out on my, on my book tour, and there are lots of people say, “Oh, just do scaremongering. I mean, that’s, that’s the way to get attention.” And I always say, “Well, wait a second. What’s the goal?”
00:27:03
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:27:03
Jamie Metzl: And if you do it [laughs] responsibly you get a little less attention, but I, I’d rather do it in the right way.
00:27:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, what I’d… 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.
00:27:16
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:27:16
Eric Weinstein: 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, um, tells me about what would happen if we really started to block progress out of a misplaced fear and very little happened.
00:27:36
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:27:36
Eric Weinstein: Could I ask for that-
00:27:37
Jamie Metzl: Sure
00:27:37
Eric Weinstein: … as a bundle so that I’m not-
00:27:38
Jamie Metzl: Sure
00:27:38
Eric Weinstein: … being told one thing or the other?
00:27:40
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s great. And, 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, we may go to all of them in, in, in one version or, or another. So cer- certainly a story that is… I mean, all these stories. There, 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 what we, why we have healthcare. Here’s another terrible story, 90-year-old people-
00:28:19
Eric Weinstein: Let’s, let’s just pick-
00:28:20
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:28:20
Eric Weinstein: … one disease that you think might be, uh, easily, um, put into the crosshairs of our, of our technology-
00:28:28
Jamie Metzl: All right. Let me-
00:28:28
Eric Weinstein: … in the short term.
00:28:28
Jamie Metzl: Let me pick 5,000 diseases. It’s a classification of d-
00:28:32
Eric Weinstein: Wow
00:28:33
Jamie Metzl: … these single gene mutation disorders.
00:28:36
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
00:28:36
Jamie Metzl: I mean, there’s, there’s maybe, 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 for, so, um, most of our traits are complex, uh, genetic- uh, genetically complex, meaning, uh, 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 disor- single gene mutation disorders. Like one letter that’s off. So sickle cell disease and Tay-Sachs, or Huntington’s disease, and many, many, uh, many, many others. And so we are now, because we’re able to identify, um, those diseases, um, 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. Um, 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 most ev- I mean, not most, almost everybody will not choose to implant a child who they know is going to die of a, of a genetic disease. And so that, so that’s this, what I see as a very positive story because right now, uh, in, in parts of Europe where they have, where the government pays for, um, uh, a 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, um, is going to- … isn’t going to choose to not implant the future potential kid who ha- who’s going to die of a genetic disease. But there’s the n- there’s the dangerous side about that, um, is when we get into the business of selecting which of these, let’s call them 10, um, fertilized eggs, early stage embryos, to implant, and as we know more and more about genetics, um, we are going to have a lot more information when making those choices. So the, the health, uh, choices are gonna be relatively straightforward. I want a kid, uh, 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 gonna have a lot of information about things like personality style and IQ, and you, we talk about what are the dangers. Um-
00:31:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, y-
00:31:25
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:31:25
Eric Weinstein: … if I could just jump in.
00:31:26
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:31:27
Eric Weinstein: I mean, you brought up Tay-Sachs, but you also-
00:31:29
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:31:29
Eric Weinstein: … brought up sickle cell.
00:31:30
Jamie Metzl: Correct.
00:31:30
Eric Weinstein: And what’s fascinating about that is that to me, a- and a- admittedly-
00:31:36
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:31:36
Eric Weinstein: … um, th- this is not necessarily widely shared as a-
00:31:40
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:31:41
Eric Weinstein: … as a, an opinion in the public, but I wouldn’t consider, um, sickle cell as a, an allele, as a, as a, a- as a trait, to be a disease. It’s, it’s an adaptation that is a disease in an American context given that we rid ourselves of malaria.
00:31:59
Jamie Metzl: Yes.
00:31:59
Eric Weinstein: But it was, in fact, a desperate response-
00:32:02
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:32:02
Eric Weinstein: … um, of-
00:32:04
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:32:05
Eric Weinstein: … evolutionary adaptation in order-
00:32:07
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:32:07
Eric Weinstein: … to modify hemoglobin so as-
00:32:08
Jamie Metzl: Yes
00:32:08
Eric Weinstein: … to make it resistant, um-
00:32:11
Jamie Metzl: It’s a great point, a- and I write about that specifically in, uh, in the book. And so I’ll have the, the broad principle, and then the specific application. The broad princ- 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 vulnerabilities. So you’re, you’re exactly right. So sickle cell, if you have sickle cell disease, you’re going to die.
00:32:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, if you, if you have-
00:32:50
Jamie Metzl: But if you’re… Yes, exactly
00:32:51
Eric Weinstein: … two alleles-
00:32:51
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:32:51
Eric Weinstein: … sickle cell tr-
00:32:52
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:32:52
Eric Weinstein: … sickle trait.
00:32:52
Jamie Metzl: But if you are a recessive carrier, you have increased resistance to malaria, which is why that mutation has survived, because it is ac-
00:33:02
Eric Weinstein: And, and a small cost in terms of oxygen-
00:33:04
Jamie Metzl: Yes
00:33:04
Eric Weinstein: … carrying.
00:33:04
Jamie Metzl: Yes. Yeah.
00:33:05
Eric Weinstein: But, but that wasn’t where I was going with.
00:33:07
Jamie Metzl: Right.
00:33:07
Eric Weinstein: The, the, the point-
00:33:07
Jamie Metzl: No, but, but, but let me just circle back if you don’t mind.
00:33:10
Eric Weinstein: Sure.
00:33:10
Jamie Metzl: Because the, the, the danger of this story, ’cause when I, when I talked about a good story with a fear.
00:33:16
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:33:16
Jamie Metzl: 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 sickle cell disease. We have no idea what recessive, sorry, what, what recessive mutations we are carrying that could be useful to face some threat that we’ve never faced as a species. Or-
00:33:47
Eric Weinstein: Just haven’t, haven’t faced it recently.
00:33:49
Jamie Metzl: Yes. Yeah, yeah.
00:33:49
Eric Weinstein: And so it’s been driven to a very low frequency.
00:33:51
Jamie Metzl: Yes, and, and-
00:33:52
Eric Weinstein: Which is what I was trying to-
00:33:53
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
00:33:54
Eric Weinstein: The, the thing that I’m trying to address here was ac- I was actually trying to riff on top of your-
00:33:59
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:33:59
Eric Weinstein: … your, uh-
00:33:59
Jamie Metzl: Please, yeah.
00:34:01
Eric Weinstein: The, 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, uh-
00:34:15
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:34:16
Eric Weinstein: … as a system. It would seem to me that what you’re in some sense saying is the reason that sickle tr- uh, sickle cell trait crops up in a US 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 at, although at a great cost-
00:34:45
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes
00:34:45
Eric Weinstein: … but that because of some aspect of modernity, we actually have to double down on modernity. The first part of it was le- something like-
00:34:52
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:34:52
Eric Weinstein: … air travel.
00:34:53
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:34:53
Eric Weinstein: And the second part of it is editing, and that the two of those distortions in some sense is less distortive than anything else in the system, and that that was-
00:35:03
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:35:03
Eric Weinstein: … sort of the feeling that-
00:35:04
Jamie Metzl: Well, that, 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-
00:35:13
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:35:13
Jamie Metzl: … in 1492, and just the, this chain reaction that is still going. I mean, and so I think that that’s, that’s right, and that’s why, um, w- we, we can’t exi- we can’t imagine that there’s just this fixed thing. There’s the world. There’s nature.
00:35:30
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:35:30
Jamie Metzl: And then we’re changing. We’re screwing with nature. Nature is us. Nature is, is always changing, and that’s why you talk about this genetic diversity, it’s been baked into our biology for four billion years.
00:35:41
Eric Weinstein: So it’s natural to hack.
00:35:43
Jamie Metzl: You know, it, we-
00:35:43
Eric Weinstein: In a certain sense
00:35:44
Jamie Metzl: … we are hackers.
00:35:44
Eric Weinstein: We are.
00:35:45
Jamie Metzl: Like, we, we [laughs] are hackers.
00:35:46
Eric Weinstein: Tool use.
00:35:46
Jamie Metzl: It’s what we, that’s what, that’s what we… Yeah.
00:35:47
Eric Weinstein: That’s what, that’s our comparative advantage.
00:35:48
Jamie Metzl: Yes.
00:35:49
Eric Weinstein: Our… I love that. All right. So that was the, the single, um, mutation, uh, diseases was a great example-
00:35:56
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:35:56
Eric Weinstein: … of something that’s positive that might be right around the corner because it’s simple enough-
00:36:00
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:36:00
Eric Weinstein: … that you might be able to do it through editing or checking or what have you.
00:36:03
Jamie Metzl: We had it, uh, already in China. The world’s first gene-edited babies were born last year in October.
00:36:07
Eric Weinstein: Do you wanna say a little bit more about that?
00:36:08
Jamie Metzl: Sure. Yeah, yeah. So, so, uh, last, uh, November, uh, it was announced at, at the World Summit on Human, uh, Genome Editing, uh, by a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui, announced that the, the prior month in October, uh, 2018, the world’s first gene-edited babies had been born in China, two, uh, two little girls. And- He was ref- first in China, the government was, and the People’s Daily said, “This is incredible. This is a, it shows Chinese scientific triumph.” And then there was this r- international condemnation, myself included, and then they said, all right, this, the, then there was a, a, a buckling down. And there’s been a huge debate. My World Health Organization committee was created in the aftermath of that because I would have al- pe- w- 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. Um, it’s going to happen in China.” And then I called the publisher, say, “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 2022. So that already-
00:37:17
Eric Weinstein: Wow
00:37:17
Jamie Metzl: … happened. Um, and it was very controversial becau- for a number of reasons. One, because he was incredibly sloppy. He didn’t get approval from the hospital in which he was operating. Um, the consent of the parents was totally, um, uninformed and misinformed. Um, but on top of that, the target mutation was a gene called CCR5. Um, it wasn’t… So in these, 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 He Jiankui did was try to edit the CCR5 gene in a way that is similar to a number, what a number of Northern Europeans have, where they have two disrupted, disrupted copies, which gives them increased reli- uh, resistance to HIV, and maybe more susceptibility to West Nile virus, but increased, uh, resistance to, uh, 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, uh, came out that mice who had this, this same CCR5 mutation were doing better, uh, 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, uh, based on the UK Biobank, which is probably the, the world’s most useful, uh, genetic database, and they found a correlation between this disrupted CCR5 and lifespan. People were living shorter, shorter lives. So it was premature, and, and certainly I’ve, I’ve publicly called He Jiankui a villain, which I, I think he is. But this is a harbinger of where we’re going, the, 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 science, uh, scientist, uh, Denis, uh, Rebrikov, who’s announced that he has five parents, uh, lined up, and it’s gonna go one to five, and within a decade, we will have thousands of genetically engineered babies.
00:39:28
Eric Weinstein: So I was going to ask you, remember I was gonna ask you-
00:39:30
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:39:30
Eric Weinstein: … for a positive story-
00:39:31
Jamie Metzl: Please, yes
00:39:31
Eric Weinstein: … a negative story-
00:39:32
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:39:32
Eric Weinstein: … and a story about stagnation.
00:39:34
Jamie Metzl: Sure.
00:39:35
Eric Weinstein: In some sense, maybe you’ve just given me a negative story, which is that somebody starts editing-
00:39:40
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:39:40
Eric Weinstein: … children in a way that, um, they’re, they’re looking for one trait that’s positive, but they don’t understand that something is mediating-
00:39:48
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:39:48
Eric Weinstein: … a trade- tradeoff.
00:39:49
Jamie Metzl: And, and evolution is a tradeoff, and, and that’s, and that’s why it’s so, it- it’s so complicated.
00:39:55
Eric Weinstein: Right. Um, I mean, there, there is the issue that you could be, to, to borrow from finance, uh, at an interior point, so not on an efficient frontier, and you might be able to take two things that are involved in a tradeoff and optimize both of them because you weren’t already-
00:40:11
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:40:11
Eric Weinstein: … uh, at the point where the tradeoff starts to bind.
00:40:13
Jamie Metzl: 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 the variables.” And the same is true in, in, in genetics, that, 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, there’s a polygenic hypothesis-
00:40:32
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:40:32
Jamie Metzl: … meaning lots of genes, and there’s even an omnigenic hypothesis, which is even more complicated. And so to understand those tradeoffs, we would need a much greater knowledge of genetics than we now have, which is why, um, for me, when I think about, I write about genetic engineering, which I think is a much bigger category than gene editing, um, and the mechanism of genetic engineering, um, 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. Um, and then it’s going to be using stem cells to create a virtually unlimited number of eggs. It’s called in vitro gametogenesis. Um, and so if we do that, and you’re selecting, if you’re selecting from 15, um, pre-implanted embryos in traditional IVF and, and, and PGD, you don’t have that many options because it’s just you’re starting with 15. Um, but when you’re starting with 10,000 or a million, then you have real options. And that, and that’s why I think everyone’s focusing on gene editing and CRISPR.
00:41:40
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.
00:41:40
Jamie Metzl: But as I see it, for human genetic engineering, the real story is embryo selection.
00:41:44
Eric Weinstein: Do you want to say what CRISPR is for those who don’t know?
00:41:46
Jamie Metzl: Sure. So CRISPR, um, is a gene editing tool. I mean, the shorthand that everybody uses, it’s like a, like a word processing. So you think of, of the genome, um, as a string with, of letters, which is, is how we understand it. Um, you’d 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, uh, 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 just like, not just like, very much, um, like, like word processing. You cut something, and then you can just leave it deleted, or you can add something. Now we’re, this is this incredible age where pretty much every day there’s another story, not just about a new application of gene edit- of CRISPR, but new types of gene editing tools. So we are very, we’re 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 that, so that’s a world where we’re, we are able, uh, not just to read, uh, genetics, that’s sequencing, but to write and hack genetics. And that introduces this concept of biological, of induced biological variability, which is very-
00:43:05
Eric Weinstein: Induced biological variability
00:43:06
Jamie Metzl: Like we’re gonna be able to screw with nature, uh, and that, that, um, people recognize that they’re- Um, information technology is variable. That’s why you think your next, your new phone’s 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. Um, 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 four billion years. And so that’s, that’s this big change. I mean, that’s, that’s the kind of the core message.
00:43:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, we’ve been, we’ve been over… I guess this is a little bit confusing to me. I often, um, shock people by telling them to Google glow-in-the-dark rabbits.
00:43:54
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
00:43:55
Eric Weinstein: And these transgenic rabbits-
00:43:57
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:43:57
Eric Weinstein: … that have this GFP, green flu- fluorescent protein, uh, expressed in them-
00:44:01
Jamie Metzl: Sure
00:44:01
Eric Weinstein: … that I guess originally came from jellyfish.
00:44:03
Jamie Metzl: Fish, correct.
00:44:04
Eric Weinstein: You know, the, I think it’s the Turks who manufactured a whole bunch of-
00:44:07
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:44:07
Eric Weinstein: … uh, bunnies that you can read by.
00:44:09
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:44:10
Eric Weinstein: Um, now we could, of course, create transgenic humans that, uh, lit up at night, um, al- almost certainly, and is this something that we should be kind of more playful with, more excited by, or?
00:44:26
Jamie Metzl: It’s, you know, it’s hard. So, so-
00:44:28
Eric Weinstein: How, how do you think about it?
00:44:29
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, yeah. So, so the basic thing is we’ve been able to do gene editing for a while. Um, 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, uh, 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, these grapes don’t have seeds. You know, let’s make, let’s make more of them.” And now we’re able in a much more precise and targeted way to do that. So then y- your question of playfulness, and in some ways, I mean, science, people think about science as something that’s, that’s rigid and, uh, and dry, but there’s a lot of creativity. I mean, 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, to reality?” But when we talk about the future of human life-
00:45:35
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:45:35
Jamie Metzl: … we need to be really careful. As I said to you, um, before, Eric, I, I’m the, my father came to the United States, father and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. If you’d asked the Nazis what they were doing, they would’ve said they were implement- implementing Darwinism. That’s what they th- that, that’s the essence of, of Nazism. And, you know, we have all of these, these Nuremberg trials about human experimentation. And so if we are, and I, I personally think that we will engineer our future children-
00:46:05
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:46:05
Jamie Metzl: … and that we must. I mean, we want to survive. Our planet is going away. We, we can’t stay on this planet forever. But, um, we have to do it carefully and thoughtfully and methodically and responsibly. And so we, you can’t just be playing around with life.
00:46:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, uh, but I want to be both the devil’s advocate-
00:46:22
Jamie Metzl: Sure
00:46:22
Eric Weinstein: … and the angel’s advocate.
00:46:23
Jamie Metzl: Yes.
00:46:24
Eric Weinstein: Um, 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.
00:46:36
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:46:36
Eric Weinstein: And what that usually means to me is, is that it’s moving towards a garage, that sooner or later-
00:46:42
Jamie Metzl: Already there’s this DIY bio movement, biohackers-
00:46:45
Eric Weinstein: Right
00:46:46
Jamie Metzl: … and it, it’s already happening.
00:46:48
Eric Weinstein: So my point is, is that once things become cheap, uh, 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, a eugenics experiment writ large, gone mad.
00:47:26
Jamie Metzl: Right.
00:47:27
Eric Weinstein: Yet, the problem that I see is that we’re 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 and a movie is eugenics, then you’ve, you’ve drawn a line at a super early stage.
00:47:50
Jamie Metzl: Oh, you got sex for dinner and a movie? That’s a good deal.
00:47:53
Eric Weinstein: Moving right along.
00:47:56
Jamie Metzl: [laughs]
00:47:57
Eric Weinstein: Um, on the other hand, um, if we just decide, hey, it’s a free-for-all, and you should be able to-
00:48:04
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:48:04
Eric Weinstein: … to do anything. But the word eugenics-
00:48:07
Jamie Metzl: Yes
00:48:07
Eric Weinstein: … for example, has worked in some sense because it’s not really properly defined. It’s not clear where-
00:48:16
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:48:16
Eric Weinstein: … good selection begins and ends and bad selection.
00:48:19
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:48:19
Eric Weinstein: I would say, and tell me if I’m wrong-
00:48:21
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:48:22
Eric Weinstein: … 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-
00:48:29
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:48:30
Eric Weinstein: … 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-
00:48:39
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:48:40
Eric Weinstein: … and that we’re really left with a permanent struggle. Am I way off?
00:48:42
Jamie Metzl: 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 gonna want to do it. Who’s, 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 gonna want to have their parents get dementia if 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, have a dangerous side effect, and that, like, we would, we wouldn’t be in cars, we wouldn’t be using plows, we wouldn’t use any technology if that was the case.
00:49:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is, I mean, in some sense, this is the position of, um, let’s say the Amish, that, uh, you know, at some level, uh, there’s a slippery slope.
00:49:31
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:49:31
Eric Weinstein: And you’re, you’re suggesting that we move midway onto it. You’ve called the Chinese guy who’s doing this a villain.
00:49:37
Jamie Metzl: Yes.
00:49:38
Eric Weinstein: We’ve both talked-
00:49:39
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:49:39
Eric Weinstein: … about the dangers of, of Nazi Germany.
00:49:42
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:49:42
Eric Weinstein: And yet we’re both kind of excited about the idea of freeing people from-
00:49:47
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:49:47
Eric Weinstein: … risk of breast cancer or maybe even enhancing cognitive capacity.
00:49:51
Jamie Metzl: For sure.
00:49:52
Eric Weinstein: Or maybe I don’t even have a point or a position.
00:49:55
Jamie Metzl: No, no, I-
00:49:55
Eric Weinstein: I’m, I’m just, I’m just a hypocrite.
00:49:55
Jamie Metzl: I’m, no, 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 [laughs] that disease. Like, some slippery slopes are great slippery slopes. You talked about your dinner and the movie. That was a slippery slope toward love and marriage, and great for it. So just certainly the people say never do it are wrong, and the people who say just no restraints, no holds barred, let’s just let, you know, 100 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, this, but right now the term eugenics is used as a cudgel.
00:50:35
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.
00:50:35
Jamie Metzl: Like, somebody’s doing, say, “Oh, that’s eugenics,” and people say, “Oh, I’m not in for eugenics.” And in, in some ways that’s appropriate, ’cause there’s so many horrible things were done in the name of eugenics that maybe they’ve just s- ruined that word. So let’s just imagine some other word to describe this selection, and again, even using the word selection, and I w- uh, again, I write about this in the book. It, you, 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 i- 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. Lots, I do a lot of speaking, and the parents of Down babies and others are saying like, “Wait a second. Are you making a normative statement saying that a Down s- 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, um, if it’s a choice, people aren’t going to select to implant in most cases babies that have Down syndrome.
00:52:07
Eric Weinstein: Right. I guess what… You know, th- this goes back to a, a very dangerous conversation that I had with Jim Watson.
00:52:15
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
00:52:15
Eric Weinstein: Now, you and I both encountered Jim Watson.
00:52:17
Jamie Metzl: Right, right.
00:52:18
Eric Weinstein: And I find that he somehow went down a bad path-
00:52:21
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:52:21
Eric Weinstein: … where he, uh, got so tired of being told what he could say and what he couldn’t say-
00:52:26
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:52:26
Eric Weinstein: … that he decided that he would start saying the most offensive things-
00:52:29
Jamie Metzl: [laughs]
00:52:29
Eric Weinstein: … 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.
00:52:36
Jamie Metzl: I agree.
00:52:37
Eric Weinstein: Now, with that said, what I learned 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-
00:52:50
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:52:50
Eric Weinstein: … was figured out, um, 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 our cells-
00:53:07
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:53:07
Eric Weinstein: … if you will. But we never really accepted what they found, and as a result, whenever they started to talk to us about identity or different characteristics-
00:53:18
Jamie Metzl: Right
00:53:18
Eric Weinstein: … they found that we were so attached to our pre-genetic-
00:53:22
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:53:22
Eric Weinstein: … understanding of ourselves-
00:53:24
Jamie Metzl: Still
00:53:24
Eric Weinstein: … that we actually won’t give it up.
00:53:26
Jamie Metzl: It’s still the case.
00:53:26
Eric Weinstein: And w- we, we will fight anyone tooth and nail who tries to tell us, “You know, this is really a consequence of information technology as developed by natural and sexual selection.”
00:53:37
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
00:53:37
Eric Weinstein: Are we stuck in a culture where we can’t actually update to realize-
00:53:41
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:53:41
Eric Weinstein: … what we figured out, uh, you know, 70 years ago?
00:53:44
Jamie Metzl: 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, and-
00:54:00
Eric Weinstein: Blowing them away
00:54:01
Jamie Metzl: … what we are. And so we love to have this idea of, you know, I can be anything that I want if, if, if I put my heart to it, and it’s this mystery of life is unfolding. And even things like parenting is, is [laughs] really important that, that some people are now, are now challenging. And it’s really, really difficult. I mean, it just, just to give a very narrow example, um, uh, you know, I talk about this a lot to say, like I’m, I’m a runner, um, 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, uh, marathon times in history, a, like, freakishly disproportionate number are people from the same valley in Kenya and Ethiopia, and then one tribe, the Kalenjins in, in Kenya, about 4 million people, and then one sub-tribe, the Nandi sub-tribe, 1 million people. It’s genetics. And we, 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, at the top end, whatever that means in a, in a, in a, in a, in a given ti- 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 go- … gonna get there, and that’s really hard because we, we tell ourselves different, different stories.
00:55:39
Eric Weinstein: Well, so let, let, let’s focus on this as a practice, as a warmup, and watch where it goes. So my belief is that between 1897, where we started keeping records of the Boston Marathon-
00:55:54
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
00:55:54
Eric Weinstein: … and 1987, there were no winners of the Boston Marathon, I think not one from either Kenya or Ethiopia.
00:56:02
Jamie Metzl: Mm.
00:56:04
Eric Weinstein: After 1987-
00:56:05
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
00:56:05
Eric Weinstein: … it is not exactly total domination.
00:56:09
Jamie Metzl: Yep.
00:56:10
Eric Weinstein: I think there’s a Japanese, there’s a Korean.
00:56:12
Jamie Metzl: Mm.
00:56:13
Eric Weinstein: Maybe there’s an Italian, I’ve forgotten. But it is almost 100%, with a few exceptions, and it may happen in years where the weather is a little bit different-
00:56:21
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:56:21
Eric Weinstein: … that it’s won by this very-
00:56:24
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:56:24
Eric Weinstein: … small group of people in Kenya-
00:56:26
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
00:56:26
Eric Weinstein: … and Ethiopia. How do we go from a point where this was a very diverse e- and it was up for grabs, it was really athleticism-
00:56:37
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
00:56:38
Eric Weinstein: … in some sense, um, to a point where it just is genetics and we found the special people who are wildly well-adapted?
00:56:45
Jamie Metzl: Because w- the world wasn’t connected enough, and so people in Kenya a- and Ethiopia weren’t competing, and there wasn’t prize money, and there, and all th- these infrastructure things that have brought us together w- didn’t exist. And so-
00:56:59
Eric Weinstein: But that might… Would you, would you say that that would have a negative effect on the sport, that now we don’t even feel motivated to enter-
00:57:05
Jamie Metzl: Mm
00:57:05
Eric Weinstein: … or we just wanna watch?
00:57:05
Jamie Metzl: You know, people ask that, that question, um, a lot in, just in the sense, well, what happens if we have genetically optimized people fulfilling certain roles in sports? Are we going to care because there’s gonna, th- this kind of unknown mystery?
00:57:20
Eric Weinstein: Well-
00:57:20
Jamie Metzl: But that’s what’s already happening. It’s just that we didn’t know. I mean, I, if we just were to go back and, and sequence, you know, people who’ve been our greatest athletes, especially in the sports where you can really isolate specific functions and things like-
00:57:32
Eric Weinstein: Like swimming
00:57:33
Jamie Metzl: … like s- like, well, swimming you have to have access to a pool, you have to have great coaching. But I mean like running the 100 meters. There’s just kinda this standard human thing. You know, all kids run. Um, and, you know, we, we’re gonna find out that, 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.
00:57:59
Eric Weinstein: Right.
00:57:59
Jamie Metzl: But you also don’t wanna 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, uh, the, the German chef and the Italian policeman. If you kind of have [laughs] the wrong person for the wrong job, you know, that could also hurt a society.
00:58:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I have to admit that I don’t have the same clarity that you do. So for example, if I go to the next, um, example, uh, so I believe that it has to do, uh, in part with the ability to radiate heat, um, in terms of marathon running, that that’s really the limiting factor. Uh, what happens when you look at something freakish like, uh, the number of female chess players in the top 100 chess players-
00:58:55
Jamie Metzl: In the world
00:58:55
Eric Weinstein: … and you find that it’s one in 100 is female.
00:59:00
Jamie Metzl: Yep.
00:59:01
Eric Weinstein: And you’ve got a single protein, SRY, that determines whether or not, uh, some sort of template, the proto-human being goes male or goes female. Uh, 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-
00:59:37
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
00:59:37
Eric Weinstein: … comes out of the genetics.
00:59:39
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
00:59:39
Eric Weinstein: 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, the most dangerous one for you and me. Um, Ashkenazi Jews represent one quarter of 1% of the world’s population, about 25% of the physics Nobel Prizes.
00:59:59
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:00:00
Eric Weinstein: I was shocked when I spit into a tube for 23andMe that it knew my religion. Now, I ne- hadn’t thought about the idea that-
01:00:07
Jamie Metzl: Mm
01:00:07
Eric Weinstein: … that Judaism is, among many other things, a breeding protocol.
01:00:12
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. [laughs]
01:00:13
Eric Weinstein: Um…
01:00:13
Jamie Metzl: Of having the smartest people, like the rabbis for hundreds of years, have as many kids as possible versus the Catholic priests.
01:00:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, that’s one story.
01:00:21
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:00:21
Eric Weinstein: That’s one story. Another story would be that previously unimportant, uh, skills like, um, m- mathematical ability-
01:00:30
Jamie Metzl: Mm
01:00:30
Eric Weinstein: … for money lending might have been, uh, fetishized by a group that was allowed to do that and little else.
01:00:36
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:00:37
Eric Weinstein: And lo and behold, that, that turned out to be very important-
01:00:40
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:00:40
Eric Weinstein: … in a world dominated by computer program. I’m not sure which story we’re telling.
01:00:43
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:00:43
Eric Weinstein: I’m not sure what’s true. But I’m trying to get at a different point.
01:00:46
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:00:47
Eric Weinstein: If I accept the idea that this particular valley, sub-tribe in Kenya and Ethiopia actually has a genetic advantage at marathon running, 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.
01:01:07
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. This is really uncomfortable stuff.
01:01:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:01:11
Jamie Metzl: And it is, it exists in the realm of our most taboo, difficult topics. So let me, let me take your three examples, the women chess players, uh, the Africans, um, and, 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. Um, that is not because there aren’t enough women who are playing chess. That is because of the, the brain structure- That allows a person to be great at chess, the tr- 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, where the structure of women’s brains could be better suited, and, and I would not be at all surprised if in whatever game that was, that all of the grandmasters were, were women. And I, and I just… So many people have looked at this-
01:02:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but, uh, what if, what if such a game doesn’t helpfully materialize? In other words, what you said, which i- again, I’m not blaming you-
01:02:30
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:02:30
Eric Weinstein: … and I, I’m struggling with this issue. I don’t know whether I want these things investigated, not investigated. I don’t know whether I wanna 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-
01:02:46
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:02:46
Eric Weinstein: … brain structure, because it could easily be that, um, 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.
01:03:02
Jamie Metzl: Could, could be.
01:03:02
Eric Weinstein: Or it could be, for example, that, that, uh, Africans dominate speed chess, you know-
01:03:08
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:03:08
Eric Weinstein: … which would be a different variant of another game. In all of these circumstances, my claim is 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 s- 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 at risk temporarily of clashing-
01:03:39
Jamie Metzl: Yes
01:03:39
Eric Weinstein: … in a profound and destructive way before we figure this out. Would you agree?
01:03:44
Jamie Metzl: 100% agree. And so there… We talked before, before we went live about this kind of knife- podcast knife fight between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein.
01:03:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:03:55
Jamie Metzl: And it was painful for me. Um, I enjoy both of their podcasts, but it was painful to m- for me to-
01:04:00
Eric Weinstein: Do you wanna set up a little bit-
01:04:02
Jamie Metzl: … watch
01:04:02
Eric Weinstein: … for people who don’t know about it?
01:04:03
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, so, so Sam Harris and Ezra Klein are both, um, uh, very successful podcasters, among other things. And so, um, there was Sam Harris, um, did a, uh, a podcast, an interview with Charles Murray, who wrote a book called The Bell Curve in the, uh, long, long time ago. Um, and The Bell Curve was a very challenging book, and it talked about, uh, about differences between groups. And one of the ways it categorized group, um, was between Blacks and, and whites. Um, and I s- as someone who’s read that book, and I, and I write about it in, uh, 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 s- other aspects of the book, I felt, where it was wildly inappropriate and, and borderline racist. Uh, and so I think that, that part of the attack, and I’m all for free speech, and certainly when, when Charles Murray was physically harmed at Middlebury, I mean, that was, was an outrage. Um, so but there’s, there’s a, a need for an important debate. And so Sam Harris had, had, uh, Murray on his podcast and, and, and it was an excellent, um, podcast interview. Um, and then, uh, he came out and then he, 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 for me.
01:05:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, e- effectively the concept of hate data.
01:05:58
Jamie Metzl: You know, in my view, there is data.
01:06:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, no, and it’s, and it’s-
01:06:02
Jamie Metzl: Like if there’s… Yeah, yeah. But I think that’s how, that’s-
01:06:04
Eric Weinstein: No- nobody uses the phrase-
01:06:05
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:06:05
Eric Weinstein: … hate data.
01:06:05
Jamie Metzl: But that, that’s how, that’s how, I think Ezra Klein, that was the essence-
01:06:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah
01:06:09
Jamie Metzl: … of his, of his argument. And I, so the thing I, that I didn’t like about that, uh, 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, and Ezra Klein said, “Well, this, this data could lead us into an ugly place, and we need to remember the, the, the science exists within the social context.” And both of them h- were right in, in, in, in some ways. And that brings me to your, 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, that exists has shown that men, and at this highest level, men out- the, 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 w- are woven in. But my g- yeah, my gut instinct is there’s something about men and women are just physiologically different, and that just exists, and there’s, there are certainly people who are on the-
01:07:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I also agree-
01:07:17
Jamie Metzl: … bounds
01:07:17
Eric Weinstein: … that men, men and women are physiologically different, but let me tell you the cautionary tale-
01:07:21
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:07:22
Eric Weinstein: … that has occupied me. Uh, I was a, a mathematics graduate student at Harvard, and I believe that the department kind of informally always wanted w- more women, but there was no track record m- or not much of a track record of success.
01:07:39
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:07:39
Eric Weinstein: 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.
01:07:45
Jamie Metzl: Hm.
01:07:46
Eric Weinstein: 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-
01:07:54
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:07:54
Eric Weinstein: … careers in mathematics.
01:07:55
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:07:55
Eric Weinstein: So you could have told the ta- the tale-
01:07:58
Jamie Metzl: Right
01:07:58
Eric Weinstein: … that said, actually, there’s an inability, um, to do math because we’re talking-
01:08:04
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:08:04
Eric Weinstein: … about tales and at the highest level, and it’s very clear to me-
01:08:05
Jamie Metzl: Larry Summers got in trouble for making that exact argument.
01:08:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, that was f- the odd part about that-
01:08:09
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:08:09
Eric Weinstein: … that was in a seminar that I actually founded with Richard Freeman-
01:08:13
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:08:13
Eric Weinstein: … at the National Bureau for Economic Research, and we can go into [laughs] the details of that. I, I’m concerned that we are glibly… Uh, look, I don’t think there’s any way-
01:08:25
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:08:25
Eric Weinstein: … 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, uh, lambasted, uh, 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-
01:08:46
Jamie Metzl: Right
01:08:47
Eric Weinstein: … that I am accusing others of. I should go back.” So he was doing some kind of-
01:08:51
Jamie Metzl: Right
01:08:51
Eric Weinstein: … internal penance.
01:08:52
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:08:53
Eric Weinstein: 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, it brings up this question that there are no dispassionate arbiters, and this is-
01:09:28
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:09:28
Eric Weinstein: … the thing that I don’t like to talk about where the 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-
01:09:45
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:09:45
Eric Weinstein: … that, you know, maybe, maybe intelligence is much more volt- multivariate. For example, uh, people talk about IQ, where one of the components of IQ is processing, and lots of people who I think of as being very, 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 tales, the utopian, the dystopian-
01:10:43
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:10:43
Eric Weinstein: … and the impasse tale. This is where I see that we’re blocked, and in, in terms of the theme of the show, is there a portal whereby we can start using our extra power to find a really graceful exit from what seems to me to be a very powerful conundrum?
01:11:01
Jamie Metzl: And we have that portal.
01:11:03
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:11:03
Jamie Metzl: And we’re losing it [laughs]
01:11:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, tell me about it.
01:11:05
Jamie Metzl: Because it’s called conversation.
01:11:07
Eric Weinstein: All right.
01:11:07
Jamie Metzl: It’s called connection, uh, because there is no doubt, and I said it before, our… 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, that’s how, that’s how consciousness works. Um, 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.” I mean, 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, 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, um, where, um, Ezra and Sam kind of got confused because when you’re making a cla- a classification like Charles Murray did, like white people versus Black people, what is a white person? What is 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.
01:12:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but, but let me come… I mean-
01:12:31
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:12:31
Eric Weinstein: … this is why this is so-
01:12:33
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:12:33
Eric Weinstein: … fun and so-
01:12:34
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:12:34
Eric Weinstein: … horrible. Um, let’s… I wanna, I wanna devise, um, an experimental setup that I think would be highly educational and would elucidate a lot. I’m not sure if it’s ethical, so let me propose it to you.
01:12:46
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
01:12:49
Eric Weinstein: More or less, if I understand correctly, whether we are phenotypically male or phenotypically fa- female comes down to this SRY complex on the Y, usually found on the Y chromosome-
01:12:59
Jamie Metzl: Oh
01:12:59
Eric Weinstein: … unless it migrates somehow to the X.
01:13:01
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:13:02
Eric Weinstein: So given-
01:13:02
Jamie Metzl: And some fish can change gender, and, and as a-
01:13:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, but gender may have arisen-
01:13:05
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, yeah, yeah
01:13:05
Eric Weinstein: … multiple times.
01:13:06
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:13:06
Eric Weinstein: We have to get into that.
01:13:07
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, yeah.
01:13:09
Eric Weinstein: But just let’s stay with humans. Assume that I propose the following, uh, experiment. I decide that I want identical twins but for an SRY pro- uh, protein, and so I’m going to mangle the SRY protein in one-
01:13:25
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:13:26
Eric Weinstein: … and I’m going to preserve it in the other, and I’m gonna m- or maybe I’ll, 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-
01:13:39
Jamie Metzl: Not anymore because you-
01:13:41
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no
01:13:41
Jamie Metzl: … you made that change
01:13:41
Eric Weinstein: … identical up to. As identical-
01:13:44
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:13:44
Eric Weinstein: … as is humanly possible. Nobody’s ever come up with anyone-
01:13:47
Jamie Metzl: Right, right
01:13:48
Eric Weinstein: … this, this identical.
01:13:49
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:13:49
Eric Weinstein: Now I can start to run controlled trials.
01:13:52
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
01:13:52
Eric Weinstein: But I’m also sort of in Mengele territory.
01:13:54
Jamie Metzl: Yes. Yeah.
01:13:56
Eric Weinstein: How is this in some sense different? Is there any way of maintaining this-
01:14:01
Jamie Metzl: Well, so my thing is you wouldn’t do that on a human. Like, that, that’s… So let’s just say, I mean, that is an experiment-
01:14:06
Eric Weinstein: Let’s say I do it on mice then.
01:14:07
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, so, so-
01:14:07
Eric Weinstein: I look at maze running ability.
01:14:08
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. No, no, so, so, um, we don’t have that ability yet, but because, uh, which is my thesis, that, that biology is increasingly readable and writable and hackable, I have no doubt that at some point in the not distant future we will be able to try something like that on mice. So basically you have, um, two identical twin embryos-
01:14:29
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:14:30
Jamie Metzl: … and then you use a gene editing tool, um, and you’re able to change gender, which again is not something that’s possible now, but it’s the kind of thing it, it should be possible just when, when you, as a, 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, and we talked about Sydney Brenner who, who recently died, that was his great insight is that we’re all, we’re genetically related to so many, to all of these, um, uh, 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, that’s going to create a lot of vulnerability because either you have to change the mythology or people are gonna say, “Hey, like, 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 a, just a preposterous, ridiculous, um s-
01:15:42
Eric Weinstein: It’s a very not careful idea
01:15:43
Jamie Metzl: … stupid… Yes. But if you’re part of some highly isolated tribe on an, let’s just make it, on a, tribe on an island that’s been, 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 [laughs] island-
01:16:04
Eric Weinstein: Exactly
01:16:05
Jamie Metzl: … for 50,000 years. And so we, 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?
01:16:18
Eric Weinstein: W- right. But look, one of our core values is hypocrisy, and let me make an argument. You’re familiar with, uh, the Ginger Rogers principle in male/female relations?
01:16:32
Jamie Metzl: No. [laughs]
01:16:32
Eric Weinstein: Ginger Rogers principle says that Ginger Rogers could do everything that Fred Astaire could do except backwards and in high heels.
01:16:39
Jamie Metzl: [laughs]
01:16:40
Eric Weinstein: Right? So that’s, that’s a, a, a belief that in some sense women are as good or better than men.
01:16:47
Jamie Metzl: Which I believe.
01:16:48
Eric Weinstein: You do?
01:16:49
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. So I’m not saying there’s-
01:16:50
Eric Weinstein: No, no, but let, let me continue.
01:16:52
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, yeah.
01:16:52
Eric Weinstein: Then 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. The-
01:17:09
Jamie Metzl: But why? Why?
01:17:10
Eric Weinstein: Well-
01:17:10
Jamie Metzl: Like, I, I disagree with that.
01:17:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, m- I mean, mathematically I could write you a proof.
01:17:14
Jamie Metzl: No, no. Well, no, but then what I’m saying is that it depends on what we mean by equal. So let’s just assume that we accept, I mean, there are men-
01:17:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, but I mean, we-
01:17:22
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:17:22
Eric Weinstein: … we have a concept of equal in biology-
01:17:24
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:17:24
Eric Weinstein: … which would be the equivalence of Fisher, which Fisher would say-
01:17:27
Jamie Metzl: Right
01:17:28
Eric Weinstein: … that it, you know, you, you, you beautifully pointed out the geographically separated populations can have extraordinarily different traits, and there’s nothing-
01:17:37
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:17:37
Eric Weinstein: … 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, f- 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 e- expected value. The distributions don’t have to be the same.
01:18:15
Jamie Metzl: I, I agree with that, but, but it, it’s your use of the word equality. So yes, there’s-
01:18:19
Eric Weinstein: Expected return.
01:18:20
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, so, so yes, like, if you, you know, if you have a penis and the other person has a vagina, that’s like, that’s chocolate and, 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.
01:18:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, yeah, I, I, I think that doesn’t… I mean, the reason that I’m, I’m, uh, I’m throwing it back-
01:18:38
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, sure
01:18:38
Eric Weinstein: … is you’re, you’re talking about the most interesting [laughs] stuff in the world.
01:18:40
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, sure.
01:18:41
Eric Weinstein: Uh, arguably what’s happened, and this is an argument, um, 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.”
01:18:54
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
01:18:54
Eric Weinstein: “But what really happened was that, um, 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 I- i- in the US. Ergo, it’s gotten much, much better to be male very recently, 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 wanna know is who gets the corner offices,’ and then we have to have a different discussion.” So I, I, 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, 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 gonna break, and it’s gonna break hard.”
01:20:10
Jamie Metzl: But I don’t think it, it, it, it has to break, because, like I said, there’s, there’s n- 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 make it easy. Let’s just assume that the, 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.
01:20:44
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
01:20:44
Jamie Metzl: Just to, to connect… And so, like, that’s the thing. And, and so the, the more, the closer you got to being a grandmaster, the more wealth that you had.
01:20:51
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:20:51
Jamie Metzl: And so then in that model, you would say, well, men have an advantage if what I said earlier is true, which I, which I believe it to be. Um, 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, like, so- there are infinite number, massive, uh, number of different stories that are, are happening in our complex societies. And let’s just say that, that we are moving, and we haven’t talked about, about AI-
01:21:35
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:21:35
Jamie Metzl: … 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 that w- a form of chess that was more intuition-based-
01:21:58
Eric Weinstein: Yep
01:21:58
Jamie Metzl: … and it was more interactive, that you had to understand the other person’s emotional state, maybe poker, um, 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, like, again, to use the example of chess-
01:22:18
Eric Weinstein: Sure
01:22:18
Jamie Metzl: … AI is going to play chess better than our grandmasters, it could be that those h- very human traits, that whoever has them is going to be rewarded. And so I just think that, that, uh, that-
01:22:30
Eric Weinstein: But, but the-
01:22:30
Jamie Metzl: … the model that you describe, it requires a lot of, um, uh, uh, of factors being fixed, and I see this variable.
01:22:35
Eric Weinstein: No, I, I understand that. I think what’s, what’s fascinating, of course, we do have occupations which are wildly female-tilted. So for example-
01:22:42
Jamie Metzl: Mm
01:22:42
Eric Weinstein: … fashion models, I believe, at the top earn about… The, the wage gap, I think, is 90 cents in the top 10 male-
01:22:51
Jamie Metzl: Hmm
01:22:51
Eric Weinstein: … models versus the top 10 female models.
01:22:54
Jamie Metzl: This is an outrage.
01:22:56
Eric Weinstein: Well-
01:22:56
Jamie Metzl: No, I’m j- [laughs]
01:22:56
Eric Weinstein: But the, the key point is, is that many of us don’t value that trait as men-
01:23:02
Jamie Metzl: Mm
01:23:03
Eric Weinstein: … in ourselves. It’s like-
01:23:05
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, but that exists in, within the context of society with all of our dysfunction and superficiality-
01:23:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I understand that
01:23:11
Jamie Metzl: … and all of that.
01:23:12
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I, I think what I’ve been driving at-
01:23:14
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:23:14
Eric Weinstein: … 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, is that in the early ’50s, we unlocked two nuclei with fusion-
01:23:28
Jamie Metzl: Yep
01:23:28
Eric Weinstein: … uh, and with the cell.
01:23:30
Jamie Metzl: Right.
01:23:31
Eric Weinstein: And that what’s been remarkable is how little these, these events have affected, um, our lives as opposed to how much they’ve affected our lives. We are still l- we resemble, uh, our ancestors from thousands of years ago s- to a remarkable extent.
01:23:50
Jamie Metzl: Mm.
01:23:50
Eric Weinstein: Now, if I could get a pair of, like, dragon wings and spit fire and stuff, I’m not positive after watching Game of Thrones I wouldn’t go in for some modifications.
01:23:59
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
01:24:00
Eric Weinstein: 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 b- rather than just going through the morality of it, what do you think the m- the highest likelihood would be for the big changes over the next 10 to 20 years?
01:24:24
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. So in the near term, um, 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 w- the way we’re going to, 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 will be your genetic information. And with the cost of genome sequencing trending toward zero, everybody’s going to be sequenced just as, as part of, of, of being in, in the healthcare system. And so then, within, again, within this, this 10 to 20 year model, um, 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 their course of their lives, are going to be in these same massive big data pools. And 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, and, and fundamental change. And, and we talked about our mythologies and our stories.
01:25:36
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:25:36
Jamie Metzl: You see a little baby and you say, “Oh, the world is, is open to you.” But maybe part of the world is open to you, and, 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, this movie w-
01:25:53
Eric Weinstein: I forgot it. [laughs]
01:25:54
Jamie Metzl: What’s that? Yeah. No, so, so Ethan Hawke is this, this guy who was born the old-fashioned way and he wants to get in the space program, and then he, uh, at the end, he has to pull all these tricks and he gets into the space program. And ev- and the story, the thing is, isn’t it so great that that guy was so determined? But I think, like, that, 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. Just, and, and I think we, we, we may need to, to, uh, to move in the, in this, um- Uh, in, in this direction. So there’s this, th- th- 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 our, not just our disease risks, but maybe there are going to be people who are in refugee camps now who we’re gonna say, “This person has a potential to be a Mozart. Let’s make sure that we get resources to that, that person.” 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. Um, 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, of healthcare. And then we’re going to see this shift, uh, in how we make babies, a shift toward increasing numbers of, uh, percentage of babies born in IVF. Uh, US, it’s about 2%, Japan’s 5%, Norway and Denmark are now 10% IVF.
01:27:36
Eric Weinstein: Wow.
01:27:36
Jamie Metzl: And then we’re going to see that trend, and that, 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 gonna scary- scare a lot of people.
01:27:52
Eric Weinstein: Is there anything that you in particular are terrified of?
01:27:55
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. Oh, my God. So I’m afraid that, 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.
01:28:10
Eric Weinstein: Say more.
01:28:11
Jamie Metzl: So, so like right now, you ask most people, uh, the people would say, “Well, I want a, kind of a, a, 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, that people who have those traits now actually are, are thriving. But diversity isn’t just some kind of nice-to-have thing in our, in our species. It’s, it’s the sole survival strategy of our species or of, of any species. And so we, this thing, as I mentioned before, this diversity that’s just happened to us for four 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, this is, th- like there are existential level risks. It’s not just with if we make our species less, less diverse, um, 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, and biohacking. I was speaking in New York at the World Science Festival about a month ago alongside Jennifer Doudna, and Jennifer-
01:29:27
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm
01:29:27
Jamie Metzl: … is the co-inventor of the CRISPR-Cas9 system. And what I said, uh, b- you know, a little bit tongue in cheek, is that if you invent the CRISPR-Cas9 system like, like Jennifer, actually, she’s on my left, like Jennifer, uh, did, um, 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, [laughs] this woman came down and said, “Hey, didn’t wanna 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, is out, and-
01:30:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, but y- you know, y- y- to that point, th- there’s this story, and I should chase it down so I-
01:30:10
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:30:11
Eric Weinstein: … I have it exactly, about somebody scavenging radioactive material from 500 smoke alarms or something-
01:30:19
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:30:19
Eric Weinstein: … like that to build a functioning reactor.
01:30:22
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:30:22
Eric Weinstein: Uh, it’s not clear that, um… I mean, it’s just n- it’s not clear that nuclear is going to stay the, the province of states. I mean, it’s-
01:30:34
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, I, I totally agree.
01:30:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:30:35
Jamie Metzl: I mean, I think all of technology is m- is moving along this, this curve, but biology, it’s just happened so quickly.
01:30:41
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:30:41
Jamie Metzl: And so I totally agree with that. And so, you know, it was a year and a half ago, a, uh, a, a group of Canadian researchers, mostly grad students, they used synthetic biology tools to create an active, uh, form of horsepox, [laughs] which is a relative, uh, of smallpox, which can kill a gazillion people. So that’s for, that’s $100,000, and my guess is you could do that now for $50,000, and in five years, $5,000 [laughs] ’cause we’re just like th- this whole thing of BioBricks, that we are, 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 just as we have these tools to do good, because like I said before, these tools are themselves agnostic, there are, uh, cap- capabilities to do bad.
01:31:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, let’s talk about, um, the way in which this interacts with national culture.
01:31:33
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:31:35
Eric Weinstein: Which are the national cultures that are the most gung ho to actually try to exploit these things in the here and now?
01:31:42
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:31:43
Eric Weinstein: And how do you feel about those national state-sponsored experiments, and do we have to worry about, uh, geopolitical tensions-
01:31:51
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:31:51
Eric Weinstein: … and biology being the next, uh, battlefield-
01:31:54
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:31:54
Eric Weinstein: … where we won’t even kn- know if war has been declared?
01:31:57
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. Uh, leading the witness, Your Honor. Um, so yes, and, and I write about in the, in the book what I call the-
01:32:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, I should say I’m not really leading the witness-
01:32:04
Jamie Metzl: [laughs]
01:32:04
Eric Weinstein: … because I was given the book 10 minutes before we-
01:32:06
Jamie Metzl: No, no, no
01:32:06
Eric Weinstein: … started the podcast.
01:32:07
Jamie Metzl: And, and you were incredible. You absorbed the whole thing so quickly. Um-
01:32:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. [laughs]
01:32:11
Jamie Metzl: The, uh, so China is, like, the, is the, the big And I would say it’s, 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. You know, I, I study China and, and, and do a lot of work in and, and around China, and I have a lot of very deep, uh, concerns. I feel like China is in many ways breaking the world, um, through many of its, uh, uh, of its actions. And certainly there are privacy advocates in, in places like, 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, they’re building just these massive data sets. And these data sets can and are being used to oppress people. But they also can be used to, to do a lot of things that we think are good, like, um, to, to have a training set for autonomous insert whatever it is, insert noun-
01:33:14
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:33:14
Jamie Metzl: … autonomous vehicles or whatever when those big data sets, or, um, for precision personalized medicine, that, that having these big data sets is going to allow whomever, uh, the Chinese or others, to, to develop actionable insights about how cancers form, about predisposition to certain diseases, or, uh, 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, uh, China has a lot of things. It has a lot of money. It has incredibly talented people. It has, like, 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 Ch- 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, uh, to get there. And that’s translating into a lot of very, very aggressive applications of revolutionary science, and genetics is at the, 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, um, restrictions here in the United States than they tend to have in, in, in China. And that’s why my, uh, He Jiankui, um, who is this Chinese biophysicist who, who, who genetically engineered these, 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, this conquering hero and bring glory, uh, to, uh, 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, uh, of, of one species. And so like you said earlier, there’s a race because this technology is moving so quickly.
01:35:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, but if China won’t be restrained, then is it really prudent to hold back in a way in which, um, China lurches ahead because they don’t have the same ethical concerns that we do and-
01:35:33
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. So the que- I mean, there’s-
01:35:34
Eric Weinstein: So in other words-
01:35:35
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:35:35
Eric Weinstein: … does it become ethical to compete-
01:35:37
Jamie Metzl: Right
01:35:38
Eric Weinstein: … because lack of, uh, competition means c- ceding the game to an e- an actor you think is less ethical?
01:35:45
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. And so that’s, that’s this whole arms race mentality, and I think that’s what we are entering. And so-
01:35:53
Eric Weinstein: We win
01:35:53
Jamie Metzl: … I believe that American values, uh, just writ large, that, that Ame- the values that America has pushed into the world, particularly over the last 70-plus years, uh, 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, in, 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, in, in many cases, and undermining these principles, um, that the greatest generation of Americans, people like Dean Acheson and George Marshall, pushed out into the world that, that, that, uh, that helped everybody. And so I, I, I feel like it’s really important for the United States to maintain its position in, in the world, and it’s, the foundation of that is economic competitiveness, and the fation of, uh, the foundation of that is that we need to be the world leaders in technology. Having said that, though, um, and you could say, you could talk about this across technologies and whether it’s, 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 m- making those investments. And so I, but I think that we can’t sacri- We need to be competitive. We can’t sacrifice our very humanity in order to do it, and we need to recognize that, that this is a societal race. And so it’s not necessarily so, and I don’t believe it’s so, like the, the first country to have the first genetically engineered human wins the race or the country with the least privacy win- 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, that requires certain kinds of trade-offs. But- We should be, and that’s certainly, I’m doing this work in, in Geneva, um, and elsewhere and, and trying to work with, uh, 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, uh, nuclear weapons, even for climate change im- imperfectly, and we have to be working in that direction.
01:38:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, are, are we up for a biological non-proliferation treaty?
01:38:36
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, I wrote… It’s funny, I, I mentioned the article that I wrote many years ago that Brad Sherman read, and that was what I, I talked about. I talked about using the model of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. But the thing that changed has changed since then.
01:38:49
Eric Weinstein: No, it’s, it’s, uh, I hadn’t thought about it-
01:38:50
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:38:51
Eric Weinstein: … but just a different nucleus.
01:38:52
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, yeah. [laughs] It’s true. Um, the thing that’s changed since then is this technology has become so distributed that in the, in the NPT, the Nuclear or Non-Proliferation Tre- uh, Treaty, you get technology for restraint. That’s kind of the trade-off for people in, in, in the world. And right now, um, this technology is really accessible. But what I believe we need to do is to have, um, uh, every country needs to have, uh, reasonable national regulations which are in those countries’ interests. I mean, the United Kingdom is, is probably, in my view, the best regulated country in the world in these, uh, 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, for these kinds of investments that come at that, uh, at that in- in- intersection. Um, but yes, we, we could have, and, and maybe even will have a genetic arms race because we have differences within and between societies. People are doing, willing to do all kinds of crazy things like, like these dumb people who paid the, the soccer coach at Yale when it would’ve just been smarter just to, to pay the, uh, the, um, to build a building for the same money. [laughs] So it’s just like I’m against this, this dumb corruption. Um, so people will do anything to advance their kids’ interests, and if, if selecting embryos with higher IQs is one of those things, I think a lot of people are going to do it. But w- we are social animals, and we, w- there, it’s not that there are no examples of norms constraining our behaviors. We have lots of examples of them.
01:40:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, we do, but I, I don’t know… I mean, we could go for a Singaporean solution and decide that, uh, we should punish certain kinds of biohacking-
01:40:38
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:40:39
Eric Weinstein: … the way you pu- punish, uh, you know, being found with, uh, with weed, uh, in the wrong country.
01:40:46
Jamie Metzl: In the wrong place. Yeah.
01:40:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, I’m, I’m not sure-
01:40:47
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:40:47
Eric Weinstein: … what does, what does Singapore and Malaysia do now? It could be-
01:40:49
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. No, and don’t go, if you have your weed, go to Oakland. Don’t go to Singapore.
01:40:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, and then the question, of course, is what, what, you know-
01:40:56
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:40:56
Eric Weinstein: … I, I know biohackers in Oakland, and-
01:40:58
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:40:58
Eric Weinstein: … they’re pretty good too. [laughs]
01:40:59
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:40:59
Eric Weinstein: Um, but my, my concern is, I mean, l- let me just be honest about this. I am not averse to the conclusion that we are now watching an unstoppable force and an immovable object, and that we have no idea whether this is going to be a disaster or the best thing that ever happened, uh, whether we’re going to be able to, whe- whe- whether China’s gonna learn enough to scare the, the living-
01:41:28
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:41:28
Eric Weinstein: … crap out of themselves, and they’re going to be coming, hey, say, “Look, uh, this is much more profound. We have better data than you do, so you, you have to listen to us.” That would be a great outcome. I don’t hear something that is coherent because I hear so much that is utopian, and I’m excited about the-
01:41:50
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:41:50
Eric Weinstein: … utopian part of it, and so much that’s dystopian.
01:41:52
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, but it’s unknown. I mean, there, there is lots that’s potentially utopian. There’s lots that’s potentially dystopian. There’s a, a, a middle. Um, and it, it, it hasn’t played out yet.
01:42:04
Eric Weinstein: Well, but-
01:42:05
Jamie Metzl: And so, and so but for me, the way that we try to have some influence on whether it, it, we move the dial a little in the direction of utopian or-
01:42:15
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:42:15
Jamie Metzl: … a little in the direction of dystopian is values, is how can we, how can we infuse a conversation about values and norms into the development of these very powerful technologies?
01:42:30
Eric Weinstein: Well-
01:42:30
Jamie Metzl: And, uh, there are examples of doing it. Um, and, you know, there’s, there’s the international concept of international law-
01:42:38
Eric Weinstein: Sure
01:42:38
Jamie Metzl: … the concept of human rights. I mean, these aren’t s- 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-
01:42:55
Eric Weinstein: Side by side
01:42:55
Jamie Metzl: … everything in between. It, it’s going to happen. That’s, that is it. That is the story. And it’s going to increase forever. I mean, just we’re on this, this J curve, but the technology is going to get more and more and more powerful forever. And so the, the sifi- the complexity of our biology has been-
01:43:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:43:12
Jamie Metzl: … roughly the same for millions of years, and the sophistication of our tools is, is shooting up. So we just, just look at, at that graph, at that intersection, and we are going to be, we are increasingly understandable and, and hack-
01:43:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, that, that, I mean, this is really the, the message for me is that you can moralize [laughs] all you want, but really what’s going to happen is is that this is going to play out relative, ironically of course, uh, according to a system of selective pressures. And what we don’t know is to, whether this constitutes a sort of final, um, paradigm shift, the likes of which w- to be honest, we’ve never seen.
01:43:50
Jamie Metzl: It could, it could well be.
01:43:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:43:52
Jamie Metzl: And that’s why I’m saying, you know, uh, we don’t know the answer to that ques- It’s not knowable, but what we do know is that we are beginning a process.
01:44:03
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:44:03
Jamie Metzl: And that we do know that we have- principles that we’ve fought for. I mean, we, th- these ideas of equity and diversity, things that our ancestors probably didn’t value, we value for good reasons because we’ve l- we’ve lived through and our parents and grandparents have lived through these experiences. We talked about Nazism, 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?
01:44:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, I th- I think that one way of looking at it is through the lens of selection, and I’ve made this comment that there are 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-
01:45:04
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:45:05
Eric Weinstein: … uh, heritability, and differential success.
01:45:07
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:45:08
Eric Weinstein: Now, the social interpretation, which I think weirdly almost nobody seems to talk about or mention, is that, um, variability cons- constitutes the human value of diversity.
01:45:19
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
01:45:20
Eric Weinstein: Heritability has to do with what we would call privilege, and differential success has to do with inequality. And so the, the th- 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 it produces inequality, and then you take that as the feedback into the system and l-
01:45:45
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:45:45
Eric Weinstein: … then just loop it.
01:45:47
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:45:47
Eric Weinstein: Now, the one thing that you’re talking about is destroying heritability. In effect, you’re giving somebody the, who is not, um, blessed with the genetics that they might want, uh, genetics that might be borrowed from somewhere else. And so-
01:46:01
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, I wouldn’t say destroying. Uh, it’s morphing, that you have a certain kind of heritability.
01:46:06
Eric Weinstein: Sorry.
01:46:06
Jamie Metzl: You’re adding a new kind of, of, a, a, a new aspect of heritability.
01:46:10
Eric Weinstein: Or you could call it facultative heritability-
01:46:13
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, yeah
01:46:13
Eric Weinstein: … rather than obligate heritability.
01:46:15
Jamie Metzl: Yes, yes.
01:46:15
Eric Weinstein: And so that is the, that is the design and designer.
01:46:18
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:46:18
Eric Weinstein: Right?
01:46:19
Jamie Metzl: Yes.
01:46:19
Eric Weinstein: And so in that system, you are effectively breaking something very s- in a very strong way. Now, i- it was always the case that we learned how to breed, let’s say canines-
01:46:31
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:46:31
Eric Weinstein: … and create very exotic breeds.
01:46:32
Jamie Metzl: But we, we are that.
01:46:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, we are-
01:46:33
Jamie Metzl: I mean, our whole species, i- that, I mean, our species-
01:46:36
Eric Weinstein: Well, that was the point of a dinner and a movie
01:46:37
Jamie Metzl: … it emerge, yes, emerges from that thing. That is how evolution works, and that’s, that’s why the title of the book is Hacking Darwin. We are, we’re hacking that process, and it, it just has such profound-
01:46:50
Eric Weinstein: Found. I absolutely agree
01:46:51
Jamie Metzl: … implications, and that’s… [laughs] I started talking about Dick Clark as the Cassandra. Like, I feel that, that it’s like I’m tr- uh, what I’m trying to do is say, look, like, 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 it’s happening.
01:47:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is, uh, this is a great segue to one of the last two topics I really wanna get to.
01:47:16
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:47:18
Eric Weinstein: That is, if we are going to try to figure out how to guide and steer our own future-
01:47:23
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:47:24
Eric Weinstein: … 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, um, with the level of knowledge that our population currently has? Like, if they had to pass a test-
01:47:41
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:47:41
Eric Weinstein: … they probably couldn’t pass a test to be minimally competent on some bill that might come up.
01:47:46
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:47:46
Eric Weinstein: And yet, um, we have to vote on these things.
01:47:49
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:47:49
Eric Weinstein: Is there… What do we do here?
01:47:51
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. So we have a big problem, and, um, on issues like science and certainly foreign affairs, um, we used to have, in this country, a, a more representative democracy, and that’s why when I started out in my early career working in government, when 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, our decision-making process for foreign affairs, for all sorts of things, like including highly technical-
01:48:30
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:48:30
Jamie Metzl: … 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, I have a feeling that the EU, um, 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 w- b- the regular people are being, making big decisions kind of like we’re Switzerland, but unlike Switzerland that’s actually educating its public really well, we’re doing a, 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, our public. The good news for me, um, is, you know, I d- I speak to a lot, to a lot of, of different groups, and I speak to, 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 Schechter in Bergen County, New Jersey, and I went and I spoke to their seventh and eighth graders. And when I got to the point of just kind of laying out the basic axioms of-
01:49:34
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:49:34
Jamie Metzl: … my argument, 50 hands went up. ‘Cause these kids, and granted, they were, they were mini-Talmudic scholars, they were human, and they understood what’s at stake. So I think that there, there’s a technical underpinning to this conversation. But once people understand the basics, what we’re talking about is something, it’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, 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, I think people can take it, and even an example of this is the, the, um, uh- Uh, the debate about abortion in states like Alabama, um, in most of these states, IVF is not being restricted.
01:50:21
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:50:22
Jamie Metzl: And, and so, like, there’s, there’s, like, play, and then that’s, that’s a cause for optimism because people are saying, “Oh, that’s not, you know, that’s not life. That’s just some stuff in, in a, in a dish,” because the, the people in the evangelical and other communities are 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, and we see, uh, populism, uninformed populism is just a massive threat because it’s just the… You s- You don’t need much information, and people can fly around to different views, so we have to engage people.
01:50:56
Eric Weinstein: I, I quite agree, although I would come back at you in a way that you may not [laughs] like, which is that having spent a lot of time with leading biologists, I would say that n- I find that they suffer from a different problem, which is that this is so cool.
01:51:14
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:51:14
Eric Weinstein: This is so unbelievable-
01:51:16
Jamie Metzl: It’s exciting. Yeah
01:51:17
Eric Weinstein: … unbelievably exciting, that the, the selective pressure there is, “Let’s just goddamn try this.”
01:51:25
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:51:25
Eric Weinstein: And I’m not positive… And then there’s the geopolitical. I, I actually don’t think there’s a solution. I think this is gonna 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, is that it mostly has 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.
01:51:50
Jamie Metzl: We’re not gonna be able to control, but I think we have to start building the infrastructure that is better than it otherwise might be.
01:51:57
Eric Weinstein: Well-
01:51:57
Jamie Metzl: I talked about, about the United Kingdom. Like, 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.
01:52:08
Eric Weinstein: Right.
01:52:09
Jamie Metzl: It’s a good example because we’ve at least built some infrastructure that if, that if and when, probably when things get a lot worse, we’ll at least-
01:52:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I think we need-
01:52:18
Jamie Metzl: … have done that work, and we haven’t even, we haven’t even laid that foundation in this area.
01:52:22
Eric Weinstein: We need near-death experiences in order to animate us, unless-
01:52:26
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:52:26
Eric Weinstein: … our storytellers-
01:52:27
Jamie Metzl: Yes, that-
01:52:28
Eric Weinstein: Hint, hint, hint.
01:52:28
Jamie Metzl: Yes. [laughs] Th- 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 going to be really h- impossible to go backwards. And so now when nobody’s paying attention is when the hard work needs to be done, and that’s what I’m trying to justify.
01:52:44
Eric Weinstein: I would love it if you would write two stories which had a fork, and one of them went to some unbelievable place-
01:52:50
Jamie Metzl: Mm
01:52:50
Eric Weinstein: … and the other went to some horrible place so that people could see that maybe-
01:52:54
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:52:54
Eric Weinstein: … um, how this would play out. Let me ask you my last set of questions.
01:52:58
Jamie Metzl: Sure.
01:52:58
Eric Weinstein: Sometimes people call cancer a disease, and I’m very reluctant to call cancer-
01:53:03
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:53:03
Eric Weinstein: … a disease, and it has to do with the fact that cancer is strangely sort of a, a problem of immortality, where a cell line decides it wants to-
01:53:13
Jamie Metzl: Exactly
01:53:13
Eric Weinstein: … live forever.
01:53:14
Jamie Metzl: I know. That’s the bad live forever.
01:53:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, it’s the ba- Well-
01:53:16
Jamie Metzl: [laughs]
01:53:17
Eric Weinstein: … but there’s sort of two ways to die as an o- as an organism.
01:53:20
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
01:53:20
Eric Weinstein: One way to die is through a 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, you’ll, you’ll take up all of the resources of the computer-
01:53:40
Jamie Metzl: Right
01:53:40
Eric Weinstein: … if you don’t set a recursion limit.
01:53:41
Jamie Metzl: Right.
01:53:42
Eric Weinstein: Right? And if the recursion limit is the Hayflick limit, let’s say-
01:53:44
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:53:44
Eric Weinstein: … with the number of times a cell can divide-
01:53:46
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:53:46
Eric Weinstein: … then you have a situation where do you wish to die from your recursion limit, which will-
01:53:51
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm
01:53:51
Eric Weinstein: … introduce imprecision into a floating point calculation?
01:53:54
Jamie Metzl: Mm-hmm.
01:53:55
Eric Weinstein: Or do you wish to, to die from trying to compute it perfectly and it’s a fool’s errand?
01:53:59
Jamie Metzl: Right.
01:53:59
Eric Weinstein: Um, in such a circumstance, uh, is… 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-
01:54:17
Jamie Metzl: Mm
01:54:17
Eric Weinstein: … with any kind of state or structure-
01:54:20
Jamie Metzl: Right
01:54:20
Eric Weinstein: … which is what we, what our minds are.
01:54:21
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:54:21
Eric Weinstein: All of our memories are a buildup of state. Is there any prospect in this story, no matter how positive, in which we really get, uh, to evade these fundamental trade-offs between the death from resource leaks versus the death from, um… I don’t know, how do I have it? Uh, a, a recursion limit.
01:54:46
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. So I’ll start at the end, and then I’ll go backwards. We’re all gonna die of something, and even if let’s just say-
01:54:51
Eric Weinstein: Even if it’s just insult.
01:54:52
Jamie Metzl: [laughs] Well, even if let’s just say we crack the code and you can live forever, then just the law of probabilities are going to, is gonna get you. Like, some wayward pigeon is gonna smash through your head. Just [laughs] as the, um-
01:55:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, that’s what I meant by insult.
01:55:04
Jamie Metzl: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so, and again, it’s all about perspective, uh, because you talked about cancer cells being immortal. We have immortality. It’s just the we is the cancer cells, and we just, we don’t identify as the cancer cells. [laughs] We identify as the host organism in which the, the cancer cells-
01:55:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, our lineage is immortal.
01:55:23
Jamie Metzl: Yes, yes. So the question of… I have a chapter in, 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 healthspan but extreme healthspan. The longest, as you know, the longest-lived, um, person on record is not-
01:55:42
Eric Weinstein: 122
01:55:42
Jamie Metzl: … Methuselah. It’s 122, Jeanne Calment in, in Arles in France. Um, and so I think we’re going to be able to go beyond average healthspan, and that’s in, in the, the blue zones that Dan Buettner and others, uh, talk about, and individual lifespan. And the reason why I believe that is just we look at the variability of biology. We have these, some eng- closely related animals, like mice and naked mole-rats or hard clams and quahog clams, and there, there are lots of examples where one lives a short time and one lives a lo- a much longer time. And there are, there… We will find and are finding that there, 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 rapam- rapamycin and the NAD+ boosters that are kind of mimicking that- That experience. So I, I think that we will. It’s not gonna be one magic thing, um, but we’re never going to get to, to immortality just because parts wear out. The only kind of… You know, I was, I was, about two months ago, I was in Kyoto, and I went to the, the- visited, uh, Hiroshi Ishiguro, who’s this incredible, uh, humanoid roboticist, and he was saying, um, that he thought the future of humanity is non-biological.
01:56:54
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.
01:56:54
Jamie Metzl: And you could say, well, if we have immortality, we’ll just download our brains into some kind of immortal, uh-
01:57:00
Eric Weinstein: Silicon substrate
01:57:00
Jamie Metzl: … beings. Yeah.
01:57:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:57:01
Jamie Metzl: You know what I said is I don’t believe that, ’cause I think that when that happens, let’s just say, which, you know, let’s just hypothe- hypothetically say you could download your brain. Your brain goes into this, 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, is connected to everything. It’s connected to your gut-
01:57:26
Eric Weinstein: Your liver
01:57:26
Jamie Metzl: … your body. Like, it’s just that, that’s a different thing. It’s like a, a, it’s a, a derivative of you. So, you know, we’re not going to live forever, but the science of human life extension is real, and they’re all… It’s, it’s coming back to this point of, of biohacks, and whether it’s, uh, these, these blood, uh, transfusions, the, the parabiosis, and there’s, there’s something there. Whether it’s embryo selection because we’re going to understand the, we are increasingly understand the genetics of longer healthspan, whether it’s mimicking the proteins that the people who have the genetics of healthspan, the, what their cells, what their genes would be doing. I mean, there are a lot of things, so we are, we’ve been doing it for a long time. We’re going to continue to push the bounds of our mortality.
01:58:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, I’ve always found it, it funny that, um, in our tradition, the Jewish tradition-
01:58:14
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:58:15
Eric Weinstein: … that we ask that people should live to the age of Moses, which is 100 and [foreign language], 120.
01:58:20
Jamie Metzl: [laughs]
01:58:20
Eric Weinstein: And it’s more or less the hard stop for human beings.
01:58:22
Jamie Metzl: You know, it’s so funny. In the Bible, and again, I write about this in the book, um, they, 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 900. And then it’s like a few chapters later, um, it says, “But then I decided that the longest that anyone can live, uh, is 120.”
01:58:43
Eric Weinstein: And 20.
01:58:43
Jamie Metzl: Just go, [laughs] don’t get any ideas.
01:58:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, the funny part, I was gonna bring this up, is that-
01:58:47
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:58:47
Eric Weinstein: … uh, I think hydra have immortal and non-immortal-
01:58:51
Jamie Metzl: Yes. Yeah
01:58:51
Eric Weinstein: … it’s a, it’s a model species with, with immortal-
01:58:53
Jamie Metzl: Right
01:58:53
Eric Weinstein: … and non-immortal life.
01:58:54
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, and I write in my last novel, Eternal Sonata, that’s the, the secret-
01:58:57
Eric Weinstein: That’s the thing
01:58:57
Jamie Metzl: … of, of, of immortality.
01:58:58
Eric Weinstein: But one of them is sexual, and one of them-
01:59:00
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:59:01
Eric Weinstein: … is asexually reproducing.
01:59:02
Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
01:59:02
Eric Weinstein: And the immortal one is the asexual.
01:59:03
Jamie Metzl: The asexual, yeah.
01:59:04
Eric Weinstein: So I always go back to Gershwin’s line-
01:59:06
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:59:06
Eric Weinstein: … which is, “Methuselah lived 900 years, but who calls that living when no gal would give in to no man what 900 years?”
01:59:13
Jamie Metzl: [laughs]
01:59:13
Eric Weinstein: That, i- in essence, an asexual life is not a life worth living.
01:59:18
Jamie Metzl: You know, who knows?
01:59:19
Eric Weinstein: Who knows?
01:59:20
Jamie Metzl: 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-
01:59:39
Eric Weinstein: Right
01:59:39
Jamie Metzl: … we, we, we, we, you know, our, our, our sexual reproduction is only hundreds of millions-
01:59:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, our mitochondria-
01:59:45
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:59:45
Eric Weinstein: … are effectively the part of us that’s-
01:59:47
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
01:59:47
Eric Weinstein: … asexually reproducing-
01:59:48
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, no, but, but-
01:59:48
Eric Weinstein: … for the most part
01:59:48
Jamie Metzl: … I mean, sexual reproduction-
01:59:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:59:49
Jamie Metzl: … is only about 600 million-
01:59:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah
01:59:51
Jamie Metzl: … years old. So we, see, we’ve been around for 3.2 billion years.
01:59:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
01:59:56
Jamie Metzl: So we’ve been a lot of different things. We could be a lot of different things. We are not at the endpoint of our evolutionary journey, and there are these, these, these “traditional evolutionary drivers,” and now we’re introducing a whole new set, as we’ve been discussing, of, of evolutionary drivers that are, we don’t-
02:00:16
Eric Weinstein: Do you think-
02:00:16
Jamie Metzl: … understand where it’s heading.
02:00:17
Eric Weinstein: Do you think there’s a portal to a Cambrian explosion of different successors to humans?
02:00:22
Jamie Metzl: Yes, there must be.
02:00:23
Eric Weinstein: Right.
02:00:24
Jamie Metzl: Yeah, but I mean, it has to be.
02:00:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, I just wanted you to tease that.
02:00:26
Jamie Metzl: Yes. No, no, this-
02:00:27
Eric Weinstein: That’s really what you’re talking about.
02:00:28
Jamie Metzl: Yes. No, no, this is like, this is like an… You’re getting me all agitated now.
02:00:32
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, it’s good.
02:00:32
Jamie Metzl: Um, [laughs] this is, like, an, it’s a turning point. It’s 3.8 billion years of evolving by random mutation and natural selection. We are turning a corner.
02:00:42
Eric Weinstein: Now, this is like-
02:00:43
Jamie Metzl: Yeah
02:00:43
Eric Weinstein: … when cells went eukaryotic.
02:00:44
Jamie Metzl: Yes.
02:00:45
Eric Weinstein: It’s a huge discontinuity.
02:00:47
Jamie Metzl: It’s a huge thing. I mean-
02:00:47
Eric Weinstein: So-
02:00:48
Jamie Metzl: … this is… And, and so we cannot… I mean, I’m a science fiction writer, and so-
02:00:52
Eric Weinstein: Right
02:00:53
Jamie Metzl: … I, I spend 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, 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 processes going forward.
02:01:27
Eric Weinstein: Or you could also take a different perspective, which is that those values were actually protocols that allowed one group to handily out-compete another that lacked such values, and that, in fact, values, uh, which we’ve, we’ve forgotten this, are a cudgel with which to beat rival groups.
02:01:43
Jamie Metzl: It could be, and it could be that values themselves are evolving, and yet we can’t become so relativistic that even our most cherished principles, we just, we just jettison. And 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, in, [laughs] in, in Italy, and, and, and it, it led to fascism. We, we’re coming from somewhere. We’re coming from-
02:02:16
Eric Weinstein: Right
02:02:16
Jamie Metzl: … a culture. We’re coming from, you know, thousands of years of struggling for values, and we need to think about them. We need to challenge them. We need to recognize that ch- these, these technological challenges are new, but we’ve fought hard for these value systems, and we need to fight for them.
02:02:32
Eric Weinstein: Jamie, this is absolutely fascinating. I, uh, I can’t wait to dig into the book, and I hope that everybody out there in the Portal audience will, uh, take a look at this book, Hacking Darwin by, uh, Jamie Metzl. And Jamie, it’s been a fantastic conversation. Thanks for coming through the portal with us.
02:02:50
Jamie Metzl: Really my great pleasure. Thank you, Eric. [outro music]
