The Joe Rogan Experience - #1616 - Jamie Metzl

Episode Date: March 9, 2021

Jamie Metzl is a futurist, author, and founder of OneShared.World.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Okay, cool. What's up, Jamie? Good to see you, man. Hey, Joe. Nice to see you again. Thanks for coming down here. It's really my pleasure. I'm bringing you chocolate with you again. You know, I always bring the chocolate. You got to be ready.

Yeah, you're a legitimate chocolate fiend. I'm definitely a legitimate chocolate fiend. How much do you eat a day? How much chocolate do you eat a day? You know, every single morning I have hot chocolate and it takes about 45 minutes of preparation time, has about four different ingredients. So I start that and then I have some chocolate over the course of 45 minutes. Yeah, a lot of it is simmering. So it's not really fully active, but it's some active and some passive intervention. Is this a preparation that you do? Like, is it does it prepare you for the day? Is it like, a meditation thing? You know, it's probably some kind of morning ritual, but it's just, I don't know, it's very calming for me. And by the time after this 45 minutes, it's like

pudding. I mean, it's like this thick, bubbling hot chocolate. It brings me joy. I feel like everyone should start their day with joy. There's some positive qualities, and it's not just a good tasting thing, right? Oh, yeah. Chocolate has some... Oh, yeah. Dark chocolate, especially, has all kinds of very positive health benefits. I'm not saying that everyone should just eat chocolate bars all day and you're going to live forever, but actually the woman who lived longest of everyone in recorded history

ate two pounds of chocolate a week, Jean Calment in France, so at least it could help. Two pounds seems excessive. It's a lot, but she lived to 122. But chocolate's different in terms of like some chocolate is like really sugar-based and some chocolate is more of like kind of... I really like dark chocolate and peanut butter together. You know...

Like a chocolate bar. Yeah, or like a Reese's Pieces. Yeah, so the dark chocolate is the healthier version of chocolate on average. And so the darker, pure cacao, that's where the health benefits are. But some people think there's some psychoactive benefits to chocolate, right? To cacao. Well, there is a little bit, yeah. So cacao has been used ceremonially for about 5,000 years. So there definitely is a history of that. And it has some, I mean, it's not as psychoactive as some of the other stuff you talk about on the show,

but it has a little bit of it. Well, we did a podcast before the podcast while we're getting COVID tested out there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly, talking about our experience last time. Yeah, and so there's another thing that happens that I was reading about. Some people like chocolate because it replaces, like it

gives them a feeling of being loved. Have you ever read that? I haven't read that, but I mean, maybe it's true. I don't know whether there's some doubt there's something that's chemical about chocolate, but I think there's probably an association with chocolate and happiness and everybody's hope. Lots of people's grandma grandmothers gave them little chocolate so i think that there's a little bit of that

maybe it's part of the chocolate maybe it's part of our experience i think it's like a god i wish i could remember it see if you can find this like really that's what it is this article says it's a fan amino acid small quantities but it is a flavin it's is the yeah. Does it have something to do with love? What is what it says here? Wow, this is fast acting. Chocolate in the brain, science behind chocolate. But, okay, there we go.

Butterflies we feel when falling in love. Wow, all right. Great. Well, if the internet says it, it must be true. Must be. That was the idea that I had read, that some people like chocolate when they're depressed, when they're heartbroken. They like chocolate as sort of a replacement for love. Yeah, I mean, definitely, if you're feeling bad and you eat chocolate, you're probably going to feel better.

So maybe it is a replacement in a little way. So you were a part of this open letter recently about COVID-19 where you want to get to the bottom of the origins of it. And this is something we've talked about on the podcast before, and a lot of people have been talking about it lately now that Trump's out of office. It's sort of freed up the discussion. Right. For the longest time, discussing that in terms of it not being just some sort of a random mutation from bats and coronaviruses

that it may have been a lab leak was so taboo because it was what Trump was pushing. And it's so crazy that something which is science, it's a scientific discussion and inquiry that it could be stunted by these political ideas when someone is so polarizing, like Trump, that people just completely want to reject very plausible and possible ideas just because of him. It's exactly right. I was the lead drafter with a community of other people and lead scientists around the world of this letter. And since the beginning of last year, 2020, I had maybe the leading website in the world that was just stating what is the evidence about the origins of COVID-19, particularly the evidence for a lab leak. And the evidence is

actually really strong. It's all circumstantial evidence, but we don't have any evidence of the other hypotheses of where COVID comes from, like this series of jumps through different animals in the wild. we need to look really seriously at this, not because we know or certainly I don't know for sure that's where COVID comes from. But in my view, it's the most likely hypothesis worthy of a full investigation. And so there was a World Health Organization organized an independent advisory committee. And they went on a study mission to China earlier this year, 2021. And then they had a press event any further, but we should investigate what seems like a much less likely hypothesis that COVID started with frozen foods being shipped to Wuhan. And so we already had a community of scientists and others who'd been meeting virtually for

a while trying to really say, where does this come from? What's the evidence? We had academic presentations challenging the data, trying to figure out where are the gaps. And we looked at that and we said, that can't be right. And we decided we needed to put out an open letter, which we recently released, and it was covered in newspapers all around the world. And the letter made a count of key points. One is that this is a terrible pandemic. We have to understand where it came from. Two, that this current investigation is not the kind of full

investigation that's needed. And three, here's what a full investigation looks like. And we call on governments to do it. But your point that it's been taboo for the year is exactly right. And it's just crazy because it seems this is a really, in my view, likely possibility. I can't say for sure. We should be investigating all hypotheses, not saying we can't even look at something that really could be the real story here. And it's also really unfortunate that a lot of people are not trusting anything that the World Health Organization says anymore. Because the World Health Organization, I'm sure you saw the spokesperson for the World Health Organization speaking with a reporter, and he wouldn't even mention the name Taiwan. Did you see that?

Yeah, I know. So I did see that. He logs off and then comes back on. And then she asked him again about Taiwan's response to COVID-19. I know. So I did see that. He logs off and then comes back on. And then she asks him again about Taiwan's response to COVID-19. And he says, well, China's done an amazing job. And let's just change subjects. And the woman keeps getting back to Taiwan. And he won't recognize Taiwan because China doesn't recognize Taiwan.

And China has some sort of strange, I don't know what it is, but there's some sort of political influence on the World Health Organization. Yeah, so there's a lot there. So first, full disclosure, I'm a member of the World Health Organization International Advisory Committee. You were until this podcast. What's that? I said you were up until this podcast. Exactly, exactly. They're going to catch you off.

Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing. And so I'm actually a real supporter of the World Health Organization. But there's a big problem. And that problem is being realized and we're seeing it through the course of this pandemic. So first, in the earliest days of the pandemic, why was it that World Health Organization inspectors weren't able to go to Wuhan? And the reason was the Chinese government wouldn't give them visas, and there was nothing the WHO could do. Why was it that the WHO was just essentially, unfortunately, parroting the reporting from the Chinese government in the earliest days? And part of that, at least, is because they don't even have the authority to have their

own surveillance network. Why is it, referencing your point about Taiwan, that Taiwan has all kinds of expertise in treating and responding to terrible outbreaks like this, which is why they've only had nine COVID deaths in Taiwan since the very beginning? And why is it that the WHO is in this weird position? It's in part because the WHO is created by these member states that have a lot of influence. And it's terrible. We're all suffering because Taiwan didn't have a full voice.

On December 31st, 2019, Taiwan declared a national emergency on COVID. That was way before we did. I wish Taiwan had had a bigger voice. So WHO is in a really, really difficult position because on one hand, we're asking them to investigate and call out a member state. On the other hand, their governing body essentially is made up of member states, including China. Yeah, it's just so strange to see scientific inquiry and analysis pushed and manipulated by politics. Well, that's the whole story here. I mean,

that's unfortunately the story of COVID is that. I mean, it was politics that made it so that you could have this outbreak, and we can talk more about where the outbreak started, but wherever it started, whether it was a lab leak or something else, if you had had a fully functioning system, if it hadn't been Chinese politics and the national instinct or the natural instinct hadn't been to cover up, to silence the whistleblowers, to lie essentially to the World Health Organization and the international community, it could well have been possible to suppress COVID in the first few weeks, and we wouldn't be having any of this. And then it was politics that made China, again, whatever the origin,

carry out this massive cover-up over the course of the last year where they destroyed samples, eliminated or removed databases, imprisoned journalists, Chinese journalists asking tough questions and put a universal gag order on their scientists, making it impossible for them to speak about any of this stuff. That's pretty incredible that that's not really well known. about any of this stuff. That's pretty incredible that that's not really well known. Yeah. So for me, it's been more than a year, and I have it on my Jamie Metzl website, and I've been trying to tell everybody not to point fingers, but to say, like, we have a real problem here. Unless we can just be really honest about what's the problem that

we're facing, how are we possibly going to address it? Now, what is the circumstantial evidence? Sorry. So let me start from the beginning of this. So we know we have a long history of these pathogenic outbreaks, and they tend to happen in more tropical parts of China and Southeast Asia and just tropical parts of the world. So when SARS, when this outbreak began, for me, I had a little bit of background. One of the reasons why I started to get suspicious very early on is I'd recently, before then, been in Wuhan. And I knew Wuhan wasn't a place where a bunch of yokels are eating bats. Wuhan is a really sophisticated city. It's their Chicago.

And I knew that they didn't have horseshoe bats in Wuhan. As a matter of fact, when the outbreak happened, it was winter there. And so there weren't bats there. And I knew early on that this whole story of the wet market was a lie. And as the Chinese government knew, and they for many, many months pushed that story, even knowing it wasn't true. How did you know it was a lie?

Well, the Wuhan story? Because there was a paper that came out in The Lancet in January of 2020. And in that paper, it made clear that around a third of the first COVID cases had no exposure to that market. And so if everything started in the market, you would have expected all of the early cases to have had a market exposure. Their government knew that in January, but they didn't admit it until May of last year. Was there a common denominator for all the people that were exposed? That's the big question. Now, so the finding patient, so-called patient zero, that's the essential question. If the lab leak hypothesis is true, then either patient zero

would be someone who works at one of these Chinese virology institutes, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or it would be someone who was exposed to a virus that had somehow escaped from that, whether it was through waste or maybe an animal escaped or something like that. If the alternative story that many scientists believe and could also could well be true, that the patient zero, it comes from a series. There was animal to animal, what are called intermediate hosts. It started with a bat and then went bat to a pangolin or whatever, and eventually to a human. Then you would find a patient zero somewhere that was that first human. But if, I mean, I think this is a really important point,

if that's the case, you'd have to say, well, what are the chances that that patient zero from this series of animal to animal to human transmissions, it just happens to be, it shows up in Wuhan, which is the only city in China with a level 4 virology institute that has the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses that is doing gain-of- function research trying to make those viruses more virulent, particularly by making them more able to infect human cells. So in my mind, if patient zero is just somebody who had an exposure to an animal, you have the mathematical odds of that person just showing up in Wuhan would be actually kind of absurd.

There's also an issue with the actual structure of the virus itself, right? Yes. Yeah. with the actual structure of the virus itself, right? Yes. Yeah. So, well, this is a virus that is ready-made for getting to humans. For the first SARS, we were able to track how it jumped. And you could see, in retrospect, how you could see it got closer and closer. And as the virus mutated, it became more able to infect humans.

This virus showed up fully able to infect humans. As a matter of fact, in the comparative studies of different animals, including humans, humans are the most susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So somehow you have to explain how this virus shows up, kind of seemingly out of nowhere, in Wuhan, ready for action, ready to fully infect humans. Now, this level four virology lab that's in Wuhan, what are they doing those studies for?

Like, what is the intent? Yeah, it's a really important question because there are a lot of people who are saying things that I don't agree with, that, oh, this is some kind of military bioweapon. And say what you want about Chinese government. They're not stupid. And so for them, I truly believe, if you had to ask me what's the most likely story, I believe that they recognized that these kinds of pathogens are a big threat to humans and that we're getting more and more, the frequency of these kinds of

outbreaks is growing. And rather than being behind the curve and waiting for some terrible outbreak, the idea was, well, can we predict how these viruses will evolve? Can we get ahead of the game in developing treatments and vaccines for what we think may be coming? And that's what this gain-of-function research is about. And so we know that the Chinese government, I'm sorry, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was doing this kind of gain-of-function research. Some of it was actually funded with United States government money through the NIH, and I know you'll get a lot of action in the Twittersphere on this. I truly believe that there was well-intentioned work trying to develop vaccines and treatments, trying to understand how the most dangerous pathogens might develop. And if my hypothesis is true, I think there was an accident.

And there's a whole history of people who were warning, saying, well, we're trying to prevent some kind of future threat. But in our effort to prevent it, we're actually increasing the likelihood of it happening. Wasn't that lab cited in 2018 for safety violations as well? Yes. Yeah. So the U.S. embassy sent a small delegation. They visited the lab. And then there were two cables about this saying, hey, this is really dangerous. They're doing experimentation with these dangerous

coronaviruses. And their safety protocols aren't up to snuff. So there was a lot of warning and a lot of fear. Have any of the people that were initially skeptical or pushing back against the idea that it came from this level four lab, are they coming around or are they still digging their heels in? So some are coming around. And so certainly there are people like Matt Ridley, who's a member of the House of Lords in the UK, a kind of very well-known science communicator. He was firmly on the other side. And now he started to be more open and actually has been quite vocal.

What was his motivation for being on the other side? Yeah, I think that it's a really interesting story because in the earliest days of the pandemic, there was a concerted effort by a relatively small number of high profile scientists, virologists, who recognized that if the story was that this came from a series of what are called zoonotic jumps between animal hosts in the wild, that was going to lead to kind of a positive outcome where we'd say, hey, let's be very mindful of our encroachment into wild spaces, climate change, all those things that we should be very mindful of. But they were, I think, probably worried that if this story became dominant of an accidental lab leak, I mean, that would have huge implications for all of the research that people are doing. And a lot of it is very well-intentioned. So early last year, there was a process where a series of scientists did two things. One, they came out with a letter

in the British medical journal, The Lancet, which we've subsequently learned was highly manipulated by a small number of people who may have had vested interests. And there was an academic paper in a journal called Nature Communications, and both made the case, oh, this isn't a lab leak. And then there was a concerted effort to label anybody else as a conspiracy theorist. And so I kind of spent last year in that uncomfortable space. I mean, I don't live my life as a conspiracy theorist. And so I kind of spent last year in that uncomfortable space. I mean, I don't live my life as a conspiracy theorist. I try to be data-driven in everything that I do. But I really felt that this was a very real possibility, and it deserved a full investigation. And it was only in the beginning of this year, 2021, that that started to turn. I know I wrote some things.

Someone named Nicholson Baker, he had a great piece in New York Magazine. The Wall Street Journal did a great job covering this. And so the space was starting to open up. Then they had that really, in my mind, ill-fated press event in Wuhan, where it was this independent committee and the Chinese government. And they said, don't investigate lab leak, investigate the frozen food hypothesis. And then in every newspaper around the world, the headline was, World Health Organization says lab leak is not possible, essentially. And so I immediately sent messages to my friends at the World Health Organization and saying, look, this is being misreported.

The World Health Organization hasn't said this. And the position of the WHO must be we have to investigate all hypotheses. And I was very pleased that three days later, so the press event was on a Tuesday, that Friday, Tedros Adhanom, who's the director general, he then said in a press event that we believe that every hypothesis needs to be investigated, which implicitly meant the lab leak hypothesis. And then our letter came out, which was just last week. I mean, it feels it's been such a whirlwind since then. And that's been picked up in newspapers all around the world.

So now I feel like there is an opening, and I hope that we can continue. And the goal, in my mind, isn't to prove. I don't feel like I need to. If it's provable, I'd love to prove it, but it's not to prove that right at this point that it is a lab leak or isn't. But we at least need to have the most thorough, unrestricted, unpoliticized investigation into what happened with access to all the lab records, all the samples. There's tons of scientists in China who were working on these issues. Very, very few of them have been interviewed.

We don't have access to them, and frankly, I think a lot of them are afraid that if they speak up, they'll be imprisoned or worse. Yeah, that is the problem, right? The people that were initially very vocal and biased towards the idea that it wasn't a lab leak, and you said they were highly motivated, and they labeled other folks a conspiracy theorist. What was motivating them? Yeah, so it's a really tricky point. And so there's been a lot of controversy around a guy named Peter Daszak. And Peter is an interesting figure, because if you had asked me a year ago, a year and

a half ago, who are the people who you respect most in the field of virology, he would be really at the top of my list. He was one of the heroes of understanding where the first SARS came from. He has an organization called EcoHealth Alliance that was really trying to get ahead of the curve on understanding these pathogens. But he also, through EcoHealth Alliance, was a funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically the gain-of-function research that was being done there. And I truly believe it wasn't anything nefarious. The idea was, well, if we want to understand dangerous pathogens, we have to do it in the

place where those dangerous pathogens are. Then under the Obama administration, there was a moratorium on this kind of gain-of-function research, and then it was lifted in the Trump administration. So that's one piece of it. And so for Peter, I understand that his whole experience of his life has been, well, this is where these kinds of outbreaks come from. But this could be just a very different story. And for me personally, that's, I think, one of the reasons why I was able to see this a little earlier, perhaps, than other people, is that, you know, part of a big chunk of my life has been in the world of science. But another big chunk of my

life has been in the world of understanding China. And so I think if you're just in the world of science, you don't understand China, you think, well, the Chinese government says that this isn't from a lab leak. It must not be from a lab leak. But I know that in the Chinese government, they've totally suppressed the entire basically history of Mao and all the millions of people who died under Mao. When they got their speed trains going, the first train had this terrible crash and they just buried the whole train and pretended like it never happened until there was an outcry and they had to dig it up. So I feel like I understood a little bit more about the pathology

of the Chinese government. But coming back, I think there were people in the kind of more traditional virology world who felt like we're going to open up a whole can of worms if we say, well, maybe it was a zoonotic jump and maybe it was a lab leak. So this one guy and his influence shaped the way the entire world was addressing this outbreak? I wouldn't say it's one guy, but it was, I think, a relatively small number of people, because they certainly, the Lancet letter, and it was all kinds of big luminaries who signed it, that really shaped things. And so definitely, if the story in the beginning had been, maybe this comes from a zoonotic jump, maybe it comes from a lab leak,

we need to look at both options. I think that would have been a much healthier place because there would have been more pressure on China. So it wasn't just one guy, but Peter certainly was very influential. And then, in spite of this conflict of interest, he actually was selected as a member of this World Health Organization Independent Advisory Committee. So one of the people who went on this mission to China was Peter. He also is the chairman of The Lancet, the same British journal that I mentioned. They have a study group. He's the chairman of that. And I'm not saying he's doing anything wrong. I'm just saying if you have that kind of conflict of

interest, you shouldn't be in those kinds of roles. It's just always so disturbing to someone like me who's a non-scientist who relies on scientists to be unbiased and to just look at the data when you find out that things are being influenced by very human factors like ego and financial gain and relationships with foreign powers and laboratories that they're involved with. And that scares the shit out of me. Well, you know this better than most anybody, Joe, because you kind of are here every day looking into people's psyche. And people are people, even scientists. And everybody in the world has a story that explains what they're doing and why. And so I'm sure that you could, maybe even should, have Peter on the show, and he'll give you his story. But at least from the outside looking in, the way I would see it is, well,

he's invested his entire life into doing the right thing, trying to protect us from this terrible threat of a pathogenic outbreak. He correctly recognizes that encroachment into wild areas and climate change are big threats. Wherever COVID-19, SARS-2 comes from, still those are good things to do. He has a longstanding relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a friendship with the people who work there. And so you can see how my guess, and I can't speak for him, he's become kind of a stakeholder in this story. But this isn't just about Peter. I mean, there are lots of very prominent scientists. I would say there are more prominent scientists who believe that this comes from a series of zoonotic jumps through intermediate animal hosts in the wild than there

are who believe that it's more likely to come from a lab leak. But what I will say, I get a lot, I'm in touch with lots of people who are world-famous scientists, scientists who many, many people will know who are privately telling me, well, we think that there's a 90% chance that it comes from a lab, but really don't want to speak up because we don't want to get pulled into the muck. You were talking about Trump before. People remember the Iraq war where there were all kinds of experts who were saying, oh, they definitely have nuclear weapons. And then we invaded the country. It's like, oh, oops, they don't have it. So people didn't want it to justify any kind of bad things. And as scientists, I mean, the problem is the scientists rely on data and there wasn't data because China was covering it up. And the

journalists require scientists to legitimate claims about the origins. And so there was this weird thing that's lasted for a year, and our hope is, and we're starting to see, that our letter has opened up some space where we can have a real honest conversation about let's look deeply into all the possibilities and try to get to the right answer. What has started to be discussed mainstream, like Newsweek had the cover,

talked about the lab leak hypothesis, and people were talking about it more often. Brett Weinstein, who was very vocal about it very early on, and Heather Hying were just on Bill Maher talking about it. I loved it. It was great. I thought that was a fantastic interview, and that's why I'm so happy to be here with you, Joe, because it's one thing where people have a gut feeling. here with you, Joe, because it's one thing where people have a gut feeling, like, oh, I don't trust China. I feel it was a lab leak, or I want to protect the environment. I feel like, well, this is the kind of thing of nature fighting back. And we don't know, but we have to follow the data and be fearless in asking tough questions. Yeah, that's a problem that we have with our

culture today is that we've fallen into this very strange situation where we really have two sides of America. We have a left side and a right side. And I don't understand how it happened this abruptly where it even has an influence on the way we view this pandemic. It has an influence on the way we look at scientific inquiry like people don't want certain results because those results would somehow or another solidify this political party that's you know so polarizing or would go against this other party that is to the more to their liking and it's it's just such a strange situation to be again as a non-scientist someone who relies on

scientists to figure things out to go hey what the fuck is going on like why why is this politics we're talking about a pandemic like you we've got to know what this is and how to fight it and where it came from and if you think it's just jumping from animal to human that quickly, how often can this happen? Can this happen with other ones? Like, this is not a normal thing. It's usually they can trace it. Yeah, yeah.

So two great points. One, it can happen. It's happening with more frequency of viruses going from, let's say, bats through intermediate hosts to humans. We've seen it with Hendra virus and Nipah virus and other viruses. That's real. But it's really unfortunate. Exactly what you're describing is that people, we live in these kind of information cul-de-sacs where we just are stuck.

And it seems to me we should just say, well, let's try to be open-minded. And that doesn't mean we don't have views. We all exist on some kind of spectrum kind of for everything. But if we're just stuck there and we can't even look, we can't even hear what other people are saying, we're going to drive ourselves to not just to ignorance, but terrible decisions. We just have such a tendency to buy into narratives. And I think now more than ever, because there's almost, not almost, there's too much information out there to pay attention to everything. So we find the information that fits our narrative, we lock into it, we hold onto it, and then we just stick with it and argue against anything that opposes it.

It's exactly, and I'm mindful of it because especially with all of this conversation about the origins of the pandemic, I'm now on Twitter more than I was before all of this, because there's a lot that's- Terrible place, isn't it? Well, I mean, it's great in a way. But now every time when I go on Twitter, it's like all these people who I really respect, who agree with me, I see their feeds. And obviously, I like their feeds. And because I like their feeds, the next time I go on Twitter, I see more of it. And so that's why we all have to kind of challenge ourselves, because social media is kind of pushing us into two things. One, into these little realities that are self-reflective.

one, into these little realities that are self-reflective, and two, into a world where conflict is rewarded more than finding middle ground. Like if you say reasonable things on Twitter, you get like three people like what you say. If you say the most incendiary things, you start like a whole you-know-what storm. And I just think that that's, I think being mindful of the environment in which these ideas are being shaped is as important as the ideas themselves. I agree with you wholeheartedly. Now, moving forward from here out, what do you think needs to be done in terms of opening up inquiry, being able to completely figure out the origins of this virus, and what could be done to sort of influence the people that are still either on the fence or on the other side? So the next step is going to be when this joint committee that I mentioned, made up of the Independent Advisory Committee to the World Health Organization and their Chinese government counterparts, they are going to be issuing their preliminary report within

a couple of weeks. As I've said very publicly, I hope that the report is much better than just the really just atrocious press event that they had on February 9th. In the best case scenario, they'll say, just exactly like we did in our open letter, that one, this wasn't a full investigation. I mean, they essentially had four weeks on the ground in Wuhan, two weeks in quarantine, and two weeks, a fully chaperoned, weeks, a fully chaperoned, highly curtailed study tour. But if they were to say, here is what a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into the origins of the pandemic with full access to all samples, records, and personnel would look like, that would be a start. But they're in a real bind because it's going to be a joint report. If they say what needs to be said, just in total honesty and fearlessness, this is the full investigation, examining all hypotheses, including the possibility of a lab leak, it's

very likely the Chinese government isn't going to sign off on that letter, on that report. But if they do another compromise, like they tried to do in the February 9 press event in Wuhan, where they try to, you know, harrow out some tidbits, have a little more information, but not too much upset their Chinese counterparts, then that process is going to be delegitimated. So I don't know how they're going to get out of that bind, but I certainly hope that they're honest. But let's just say hypothetically for now that they're honest. The Chinese government is unlikely to say, oh, sorry about that. We've been doing this full cover-up for a year. We've destroyed the samples, eliminated the records,

imprisoned the journalists, gagged the scientists. Our bad, just come in and do what you want. So then we can say, well, what are the next options? We can try to renegotiate the terms for a new investigation, maybe with different skill sets of people. You still run into the China problem. You could try to go to the United Nations for a stronger mandate. You still run into the China problem. You could try to go to the United Nations for a stronger mandate. You still run into the China problem. To tell you the truth, I don't know whether we're going to be able to have the full investigation

that we need to get to the bottom of this, but at very least, we should articulate what that is. And if China wants to tell the rest of the world, essentially, screw you, we have millions of people dead from this totally avoidable pandemic. The future of our species depends on understanding where it comes from. But we don't want you to look at deeply at what happened. At least, at very least, there should be a political cost for that. But at most, we'll get as much information as we possibly can. I was reading that if China had been honest about it from the beginning and let everybody know about

the pandemic, like the moment they knew about it, it would have saved 95% of their lives. I truly believe that. And it could be even more. It could be less, but I really think it could be more because these viruses, I mean, you talked about patient zero. So there was one person who had this. Then it became two. And then, I mean, that's what exponential growth, what we call viral growth. then, I mean, that's what exponential growth, what we call viral growth.

But the earlier you intervene, the greater the possibility to stop it. And this is certainly a highly contagious virus. But in those early critical days, I mean, China, they silenced the whistleblowers. They started destroying the materials they didn't share immediately, even the genomic sequence of the virus. I mean, really, for the first month, China was absolutely atrocious. And there's a percentage, not the full percentage, but every single person who dies from COVID, part of that is attributable to the failure of the Chinese government, particularly in the first month. There's other parts of it that are attributable to the massive failures that we had here in the United States and elsewhere. It's such a fascinating country,

you know, because they have this weird mix of the government and business. They're intertwined inexorably, right? And they have influence over the media. They have a full lockdown on the internet. And if anybody promotes anything that's negative about the Chinese government, whether it's bloggers or journalists, they just arrest them and make them vanish. Well, so what I would say is it's the Chinese government. Even business is subject's the Chinese government. Even business is subject to

the Chinese government. And it's an authoritarian system. And we've experienced authoritarian systems before. The Soviet Union was one, but never one as sophisticated as these guys. And it's not like, you know, I traveled in former Eastern Europe in the old days. We talked about it last time I was on the show. I've traveled all through North Korea. And there's one thing when you go to an authoritarian, or in this case, a totalitarian system, when it's totally dysfunctional. And you see that when you see people pulling plows on their backs in North Korea. It's another thing to go to a place like China, where it's an incredible level of

sophistication. I mean, one of the reasons why we're even having this conversation is their level of scientific acumen and artificial intelligence and genomics, it's incredible. But they have a real level of control. And if you stay out of politics, there's a lot that you can do. But that's why I am certain that there are many people in China right now who have lots of highly relevant information that could tell us a lot about the origins of the pandemic. Those people don't dare speak because they know that if they do, the cost to them and maybe even their families would be extremely high. Well, a lot of people that broke stories about it initially have vanished. Yes. Yeah. Which is really, that's so spooky.

Well, it's spooky for them and it's spooky for us. I mean, one of the things that this virus has shown us, if we didn't already know, is that all of our fates as humans are connected. And so, you know, a virus that starts somewhere and spreads, it affects all of us. So our fate is dependent in this and in many other ways on the behavior of governments like China's. And so when they have these kinds of terrible catastrophes, I don't even want to call it a breakdown because maybe the government was working as designed to prevent the Communist Party from losing face. Then it affects all of us. And

so this idea that, well, what happens in your country is your business, it doesn't really make sense when we're talking about highly contagious viruses and lots of other things. Lots of other things. I want to talk about, is there anything else you want to say about coronaviruses? You know, just I encourage, I mean, I have a very strong view that not just that I think lab leak hypothesis is the most likely, but that what we need is a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into all this. But I would certainly encourage your listeners not to take my word for it, but to really read the evidence. And that's why on my website, on jamiemetzel.com, I just laid out the evidence. I have lots of links. And I would encourage people just to go there and look and read and disagree. I

mean, I think we have to have a space for the conversation. I think that's the key point. And it should be data-driven. It shouldn't be political. And I'm hoping that it can be now. Now that Trump's out of office, it seems like I personally feel like the country's more relaxed. Oh my God. It's so relaxed. It's like, well, I think the thing is everybody wakes up and then you, the first thought is, huh, I wonder what I'm going to have for breakfast. It's not taking out the phone. It's like, what did Trump do? It's like, we don't have to think about politics all the time. Well, he's so polarizing, unfortunately, you know, because if he did a lot of the things that he did in terms of policy, but didn't have this sort of polarizing personality, we'd have a very different discussion about all these different things.

Yeah. I mean, I don't disagree. I don't agree with a lot of the and large, at least in the United States, some good things are going to happen. Sometimes there'll be screw ups. And I think that when you don't have the faith that your government is going to do things right or just what to expect or just that when you hear the voice of the president, it's like it should kind of soothe you a little bit. Like Joe Biden, my former boss, when he speaks, I mean, he's an exciting enough guy, but you think like, all right, I'm going to listen before bed, and then I'll fall asleep. You'll fall asleep halfway through the conversation.

But with Trump, it's like you listen, and then you're all agitated, and then you pass it to your dog, and your dog is agitated. Well, Obama was the best example, right? Because he's such a statesman. Like the way he would talk would be so measured and intelligent and articulate. Everything that he said, like you felt like, all right, he's got it. That's how I felt. He would talk like a president and you'd go, all right, that's a president.

And whether you agree or disagree, and I agree with a lot of what he did, you think like he's, there's a process that I trust. And I think that's, I think we've just gone through this experience where many of us just didn't trust the process. It felt chaotic. It didn't feel safe. But to get back to my point, data, we have to be able to look at these situations like the pandemic outbreak and look at it and not have and experts looking strictly at the evidence and discussing the evidence without any bias, without a need for one conclusion or the other to be true. Yeah, exactly. I don't feel that that has been the case.

There's been so many articles. I mean, there was an article written about Brett Weinstein after he came on my podcast about how I was having this guy on to promote this conspiracy theory that's been widely debunked. And I remember reading that, and there was no data in that article, but it was basically a smear article. Yeah. And you're going to get it after this podcast, you'll get it more. And I guarantee you people- I think less. I hope so. I think the tide's turned on that theory. But I think that even in the response to our letter, I mean, we've had the media response has been great, but there are a lot of people who've been saying, well,

there are more prominent scientists who are saying that the zoonotic theory is more likely. And my feeling is they may even be right. And I welcome the conversation, but we have to have the conversation. You have to have the conversation. So is there a possibility of getting those prominent scientists that do have this opinion and matching them up with prominent scientists that believe the lab leak hypothesis and having some sort of an actual scientific debate? Yeah. So it's funny that you mentioned that because there was a private thing, but I will now make public in our conversation. So I sent a note a few days ago to Peter Ben-Embarik, who is the person who leads the World Health Organization Organized Independent Advisory Committee. advisory committee. And when I said to Peter in that note, and I haven't yet heard back, but I imagine I will now, I said, why don't we have a private Zoom dialogue between the members of your committee and the signatories of our open letter, and let's just have this conversation.

And I think that's the kind of thing that we need to do. And I hope it's possible. Certainly, in writing this letter, our goal wasn't to shut down conversation, but to open space for it. Well, that's the best case scenario. Best case scenario is scientific inquiry is supported, and this becomes something we could all look at and say, okay, these guys are acting rationally now, and let's figure out where this came from. And how does it stop? How do we make sure that this doesn't happen again? The level four virology lab in Wuhan, are they still operational? They are. They've been taken over by the military. I mean, the first thing that happened after the outbreak is that the Chinese military came and took over.

And it's not only that. There are lots of other virology institutes around China and around the world. I mean, right now, Singapore, for example, is building a level four virology institute. So there's a real conversation to be had. One is how should we think about safety in these kinds of virology institutes, these kinds of biolabs? about safety in these kinds of virology institutes, these kinds of biolabs? Second, should we have them at hub cities like Wuhan or Singapore, or should we just put them out in the middle of Siberia or someplace like we put nuclear waste? And those are the kinds of conversations that we need to have. And that's why, coming back to your earlier point, this issue of polarization is so significant

because, again, if we can't have the conversation, we're screwed. Well, here's another question, rather. What did they learn in studying these super dangerous viruses that was applicable in this pandemic? Because you would hope that if you're going to study these super dangerous viruses you're going to have some solutions but it didn't seem like there was any solutions on the table when the pandemic initially started that's that's exactly right and there are people like there's a scientist mark lipsitch at harvard who were who have been traditionally one of the big opponents of gain-of-function research and And they said, you're going to, you have the danger of realizing the thing that you're trying to prevent. So there were academic papers that, I mean, this is going to be, sound crazy, that said, oh, hey, it is possible to make

coronaviruses more able to infect human cells. Like that was, I guess, it's useful information. Now we have lots of evidence that coronaviruses can mutate in ways that make them more able to infect human cells. We have hundreds of millions of examples and more than 100 million examples. But was there any research on how to combat that? So that was what they were trying to do. But I think that they made progress in identifying the problem. As far as I know, there wasn't any significant, like, were we that far ahead in developing vaccines? No. Were we that far ahead in developing treatments? No. And that's why I'm a little more sympathetic to the people who are critics of this aggressive

gain-of-function research than to the people who are its proponents, like Peter Daszak and other scientists at University of North Carolina named Ralph Baric and others, because I just think that there are almost an infinite number of viruses that can threaten us. If we are going to try to push these viruses to make them more dangerous, I mean, we have to question, is that the right thing to do? And if we do it, we just need to make sure, do we have all of the safeguards in place? And that seems to me as an international question. I mean, if China, with all of its problems and all of its If China, with all of its problems and all of its insufficient safeguards and this culture of pushing science ahead as a vehicle for national greatness, if they're just making their own decisions about safety for these viruses that have the potential to kill as many people as they've potentially now killed,

that's not just a Chinese issue. That's an everybody issue. potentially now killed. That's not just a Chinese issue. That's an everybody issue. Also, no accountability in terms of like, hey, show us what you were doing to try to stop this virus. Show us what you were trying to do when you were examining these viruses and doing experiments on them. What progress did you make in terms of how to stop a pandemic or how to combat these viruses? Where is the work? No, it's exactly right. And let's just say there's work. That's why in the earliest days of the pandemic, the right response from the Chinese would be to say, all right, this terrible thing has happened. It started in Wuhan. At Wuhan, we have the world's leading center for studying bat coronaviruses with the largest collection of bat coronaviruses.

We are going to make everything open right now because let's get to the bottom of this. But instead, they did the exact opposite. They removed access to all of the viral databases. So still to this day, nobody knows what viruses they had. They gagged all of the viral databases. So still to this day, nobody knows what viruses they had. They gagged all of the scientists. There could be scientists in China who actually have known a lot from the beginning about this virus, how it functions, how we might respond to it. Those people have no access to the international community. And that's why there are these pathologies of the Chinese state, which are bad enough if you're living in China. But we why there are these pathologies of the Chinese state, which

are bad enough if you're living in China. But we're all, whatever the origins of the pandemic, we're all, I think, being victimized by those pathologies now. And has China offered any information about how to combat the virus? Have they contributed to the development of the mRNA viruses or vaccines? Yeah. So, well, first in terms of a public health response, I mentioned that China was absolutely atrocious, particularly in the first month or two of the virus. They also mounted the most aggressive and in many ways highly successful response, public health response, to containing it. And so certainly China has been helpful in sharing the lessons. I mean, not everybody has that kind of authoritarian system. But when there's a story that helps

China, China has been more helpful. And now even with this idea of, well, where does the virus come from? So China has been very aggressive trying to look for animal hosts. They haven't found any. There's no evidence of it. They've been even more aggressive with this, in my view, somewhat nutty, but maybe worthy of exploration idea, that it came from frozen foods shipped from someplace else. I mean, there's absolutely no evidence that that's the case, but not helpful with this, and certainly not helpful with providing access to the scientists who've been studying, just to your point, who've been studying this for years. I mean, the access to those people has mostly

vanished. So they didn those people has mostly vanished. So they didn't really contribute to treatments. They basically figured out a way to lock people in their homes and isolate. They had more power over the population in terms of stopping their movement. But in treatments, they also have their own vaccine. When did they develop their vaccine? They actually developed it a little faster than ours. But when the first tests came back, it only had about a 50% efficacy rate.

So it was a bad vaccine. But they had the first vaccine. They're now working to develop an mRNA vaccine like the Pfizer and Moderna. What was their vaccine? Their vaccine was a... An inert? It was inert, yeah. It was their vaccine? Their vaccine was a... An inert? It was inert, yeah. It was an attenuated virus vaccine.

But it wasn't very effective. It wasn't very effective. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is quite a bit less effective. Yes. It's a one shot. Yes. And so that one, it's called a Trojan horse vaccine. And basically, you get a virus that is basically a non-harmful virus.

You kind of neutralize it by taking out its kind of delivery package and then put the gene that's delivered through that other virus into the body. Whereas the mRNA vaccine, what that's doing, it's hijacking the machinery of your cells. And saying, hey, cells, here's like the mRNA is the messenger, messenger RNA. We kind of hijack and say, here's a new message. And we say the message is cells make this spike protein, which is something it's not part of normal human body, but we make this little protein. And then our body says, our immunological system says, hey, this is an alien thing, and it mounts a response. And that's what gives us our immunity. And the problem that I'm reading about the Johnson-Johnson virus is there's religious opposition to it. Yeah, exactly. Because

it was made from cell lines that were derived from aborted fetal tissue. Yeah, aborted fetal tissue in the 1980s. So I just want to be clear that all of these vaccines, certainly the American ones, I think are very effective, great vaccines, and everybody should be happy to take whatever ones they have access to. There were some Catholic bishops, and the Vatican was not fully this way, who said that because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was derived in part, in small part, from a cell line taken from an aborted fetus in the 1980s, if you have a choice, you should avoid that. I think, in my view, that was an unfortunate statement. I mean, we are in a crisis here. I think this is about health and safety. If anybody has access to a

vaccine, it's my view that they should take it, not just for themselves, or they should do it for themselves. But it's also the faster we can reach herd immunity, the more the people who can't take vaccines will be protected, whether it's people in chemotherapy and other things. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, since it's less effective, does it have less side effects? No. No. All of these vaccines have, at least the American ones and pretty much all of the vaccines have very, very minimal side effects, as far as we know. I mean, these are all vaccines that have been rushed, but I see no reason to,

I don't think there's some kind of hidden thing that two years from now, we're going to find out that these vaccines are more dangerous than we thought. No, not saying that, but the side effects were some people have been pretty extreme. Like Ben Stein was just on television talking about, or on the internet rather, talking about side effects that he experienced. Yeah. It was pretty ruthless. And I think people are.

I mean, this is what we're doing is we're getting our body, like if your body, if there's, it's just some kind of alien invasion. That's what we've evolved for. And that's why every time you get a fever or whatever, it's your body's fighting something. But in that fight, your body is getting stronger. So I definitely think that there are, I wouldn't even, I mean, maybe you can call them side effects, but it's like your body

is mounting this kind of response. It's not a side effect, it's a consequence. It's a consequence. That's exactly right. Let's talk about, I want to talk, because we got into a little bit about China and genetics. And there was an article that I read recently where there was some sort of a program to try to make Chinese men more manly, that the government was instituting some sort of a program. And I read that. And see if you can find it, because it was a weird article. They were doing these manly exercises and shit. Like, what are manly exercises? That's a good question.

I guess aggressive weightlifting or something along those lines. But the real ethical dilemma, and this is your area of expertise, right, in terms of genetic engineering, there's many ethical area of expertise, right, in terms of genetic engineering, the ethical, there's many ethical dilemmas, right? One of them is the haves and the have-nots. That's the big one to me. It's like if really, really wealthy people can figure out how to genetically manipulate their children and their bodies before it's available to anyone else, they'll have such

a massive advantage that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots will grow ever wider. I mean, that's a real possibility. China promotes education drive to make boys more manly. So you see these boys. What are they doing there? I don't know if that's hilarious. Yeah, I don't think that has anything to do with genetics, but it seems like whatever they're doing. They're flexing.

Yeah. The middle guys got some good chest muscles. Yeah. What does it say here? Chinese government... What does it say? Oh. Oh, the proposal to prevent the feminization of male adolescents.

I guess they don't want Chinese men to become too metro. Well, is metro feminization? I thought metro was just style. That's what I think, but I don't know. Feminization seems like a different take. Yeah, so I don't think this is genetics. I think it's culture. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. But my question is, when does it lead to genetics? It says, while Chinese government has signaled concern that the country's most popular male role models are no longer strong athletic figures like, in quotes, army heroes. If I had to guess, I do a lot with Korea. And in Asia, there's a thing called Korean Wave. And it's Korean culture.

I just wonder if you can pull up Korean Wave on this screen. But there's like the Korean pop stars and these movie stars, they have a little bit of a feminine look and I think that style has spread certainly across Asia and Japan

and there you go. So my guess is that... That's feminine? That guy looks jacked. Yeah, well— Look at the guy in the middle. That's not feminine at all. All right, okay, fair enough. That guy gets all the ladies. Anyway, we welcome all Koreans on Twitter to give us your thoughts.

But my guess is that Chinese modern history, it all comes out of this mythology of the Long March, this kind of fake history that the Chinese government has that they fought and defeated the Japanese, where in fact, the nationalists were the ones who actually fought the Japanese. So my guess is that with this story, is they're afraid of kind of their society becoming, quote unquote, soft, like they maybe see the Koreans, the Japanese, and us. That's interesting that they, well, us, really? Americans? Are we feminizing as well? Jamie, any thoughts on that? I don't know whether we are, but my guess is they see us as softening and weakening. Yeah, well, a lot of people do. My question is, do you think that there's a real possibility of some sort of a government program to manipulate genetics?

And now that we understand that CRISPR is a real tool and it's viable and we can— they've used CRISPR on living humans, not just on fetuses, right? In China. Can you explain how they do that? Yeah, yeah. So it's really an incredible story. And if you don't mind, I'll just go back a little bit. So last year, 2020, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

went to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier, who are scientists who developed the tool that you just mentioned called CRISPR. In 2012, they had their famous paper came out, which was essentially describing a basic science tool, something that you would do in a lab. Six years later, in 2018, the world's first three genetically modified CRISPR babies were born in China as a result of highly, in my view, unethical human experimentation by a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui.

As a matter of fact, the World Health Organization committee on which I serve was created in the aftermath of that. So what He Jiankui was doing and trying to do was to change one gene to try to give these two, and then it became three,, greater resistance to HIV later in life. It doesn't look like he succeeded. But we've entered the era of genetically modified humans. And it's just in this little way. And more broadly, we're entering this period where our species has the increasing ability

to read, write, and hack the code of life. has the increasing ability to read, write, and hack the code of life. Wasn't there some sort of, because they were trying to give them resistance to HIV, didn't it impart some sort of cognitive benefit? Well, there were stories that it may have from some experiments that were done in mice, and there was some analysis that was later partly debunked from the UK biobank that had suggested that. But the short answer is nobody really knows. And that was why it was so unethical to do these human experimentations, because the outcomes were so unknown. Having said that, even though this was a terrible first step, it's my absolute expectation that in the future, and whether that future is 10 years from now or 20 years from now or 5 years from now or 50 years from now, we will begin a process of genetic modification of humans that will start very small. We'll certainly start with changing single mutations that would otherwise condemn a child

to die of a terrible, deadly genetic disorder. That will be the starting point. But over time, as we increasingly understand the complexity, not just of the human genome, but of systems biology more broadly, we will move from that smaller bit of engineering to bigger. We'll also use tools of embryo selection. Right now, an average woman going through IVF has about 15 eggs extracted. Let's say you have 10 viable pre-implanted embryos in in vitro fertilization.

So now you can screen each one of those 10 embryos and you can rank order them roughly in tallest, likely tallest to likely shortest in a small number of years, likely highest genetic component to likely lowest genetic component of IQ. I mean, it's all highly, highly controversial stuff, but this is where we're going.

So I do think that it will be possible that we'll have embryo selection and then very likely we'll be able to use stem cell technology called induced pluripotent stem cells to turn adult cells into stem cells. So just to make it practical, like let's say a woman has a skin graft, and there's millions of skin cells. You induce those skin cells into stem cells, stem cells into egg precursor cells, egg precursor cells into eggs. Now let's say you have 10,000 eggs and average male ejaculation has hundreds of millions

or sometimes low billions of sperm. You fertilize those 10,000 eggs, use high throughput screening to extract a few cells and sequence them from each. And now you have 10,000 options. And then you have real possibilities and you don't even need to use genome editing. Our ancestors took chickens laying one egg a month and turned them into chickens laying one egg a day, not knowing anything about genetics, but just through this kind of selection.

And what does it mean for humans, for agriculture, for so many other things, when we are the drivers of that evolutionary process? That's where people get really uncomfortable, right? Because now we're entering into what many people would consider eugenics. Yeah. Right? You're engineering the human race for the most favorable outcomes. And maybe this is an unpopular opinion,

but sometimes less favorable outcomes create a different strength. Oh, absolutely. I think that is such a wise point. And it's essential because you talked earlier about equity as being one of the issues. But an equally big issue is your point, and it's essential because you talked earlier about equity as being one of the issues. But an equally big issue is your point, diversity. And so if you gave everybody a choice, what kind of kid would you want? Maybe everyone would say, I want- The Rock. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I want my kid to be like The Rock. Everybody would say that.

Yeah, no, I want The Rock with the mind of Einstein and whatever. And it's not wrong. It's just within the context of our society, those seem like good ideas. Just like if you were a dinosaur and someone asked a T-Rex, what kind of kid do you want? The T-Rex is like, F yeah, I want a kid. I want a big tail. I want sharp fangs. But then the asteroid hits, and being

a cockroach was actually the right answer. Or being a crocodile. Yeah, exactly. A lot of rotten meat. Exactly. That's true, but it's overcooked. So we don't know what the future holds, and our evolutionary diversity, in a Darwinian sense, we talk of random mutation. That's just diversity. That means that something that seems really good now, like being a big T-Rex, in some future environment is actually a disadvantage. And so if we start making even well-intentioned decisions, even to eliminate terrible diseases,

it may be that we limit not just our diversity, but through our diversity, our resilience as a species. But there's also human beings tend to, we like to innovate, right? And the more time people spend on innovation and the construction of new methods, technology, new things, the more time they spend on that, the better they're going to get at that. If they're more sexually viable, if they're more aggressive, if they're more athletic, there's going to be less time being spent on those things. Now, it's like, it's the weird balance.

You don't get no knock on the rock, but he's not out there inventing CRISPR. You know what I'm saying? It's like we need... We need a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I just think we're fucking around with the way the universe works and the way biology works in a weird way where I don't necessarily think we understand the consequences

of each individual action. And right now it hasn't become a factor because there's a couple babies in China and there's a few experiments done in America. But once it actually starts happening, that you can pick what kind of child you have. And not just what kind, but if we go forward 100 years or 200 years from now, there might be some super sophisticated methods of engineering the type of person. So we might be able to create people that, as of right now, don't even exist. People with extraordinary vision, bulletproof skin. I mean, we might be changing the human race.

And maybe that's good. I mean, maybe if you grabbed a monkey or Australopithecus and said, hey, man, one day you're going to be flying in a plane and you're going to be floating around in a boat. And I think Australopithecus would say, well, I want to sit in business class. I want free orange juice. I think Australopithecus would be like, fuck that. I'm going to stay what I'm doing. I don't want to change. I'm going to lose all my hair.

What do I do? I'm cold. Are you going to get clothes? I don't want clothes. I have hair. I'm good. No, no, that's such a point. And the hard part is, yes, we can imagine some earlier time where our ancestors like

Australopithecus. We were just animals. There were other animals. We kind of lived like animals. We've left that world. It's now of all the species that have ever lived are one little group of monkeys. We're not just taking over. We are reshaping all of life on this planet and we're reshaping our own biology. So yeah, it's scary. It should be scary. And that's the work that our World Health Organization committee is trying to grapple with is how do we try to create a governance system that can try to prevent terrible abuses?

Because it's clear we can identify what feel like, at least for now, terrible abuses. And we can identify some things where we think, well, that seems pretty good. I mean, if someone's kid is going to die of a terrible genetic disorder and we have the ability to prevent that, well, let's do it. And there's a lot of gray area in between. And our sense of what's okay and not okay changes over time. And that's why it's a dynamic process. Just like you were saying before on politics, if we kind of force ourselves into one extreme or another, we'll end up with the wrong answer. But the challenge is, how do we negotiate this part in the middle that helps us advance the beneficial science but prevent abuses? And that's why the ethics are so important. But we can't,

it's really hard to define what the abuses are because people think differently about things. And we also don't really know what the consequences of each individual decision will be, and how they'll lead to more. And if we have ethics, these ethics are not going to be globally accepted. There's going to be people that, or countries, that go, you know, we don't like our standing in terms of the world market. And this is one way to really elevate our entire nation is to engineer a completely new kind of human. Well, it's exactly right that countries just like in the in the United States in the Second World War, and immediately after that, we had all these wise people like Vannevar Bush and

others, who said American leadership in science and technology is the foundation of American power. Right now, that's what the Chinese government is saying. When I went to the Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI, which is not in Beijing, it's in Shenzhen, and I saw they have the world's largest collection of sequencing machines, there was a Chinese flag on every one of those sequencing machines. When Ho-Jong Kuei, the scientist who I mentioned before, manipulated these embryos for the first CRISPR babies, when he did his application, it was all about bringing glory to the Chinese state. So we are in that environment. And that's one of the

problems that we face is that human beings, we've become this species with a global reach that just like we're seeing with the virus and so many other things, small numbers of us are doing things that have big implications for everybody. But we don't have a system, a global way of solving these kinds of problems. There's a really dangerous mismatch. Yeah, that's the concern, right? The concern is that other countries are going to do what we would consider to be unethical, but through those decisions, they're going to gain some sort of an advantage, whether it's an advantage in terms of intelligence, an advantage in terms of athletics. I mean, we already know that countries manipulate people's bodies in order to win the Olympics. Have you seen the documentary Icarus? Have you seen that? It's amazing, right?

Well, we know Russia will go balls to the wall to try to win the Olympics. They did, and they got caught, and they've been eliminated from the Olympics. Yeah, but they're clawing their way. So it's exactly right. In my book, Hacking Darwin, I have a whole chapter on this, which is called The Arms Race of the Human Race. And I play out some of those scenarios. So imagine you are a country that your population has decided, you know, this stuff, it's too scary.

This feels like we're playing God. It's ethically uncomfortable. And there's another country that has made a different decision. And let's just say that you start to see evidence and maybe it won't work. I mean, maybe you just do nothing and it turns out that these guys are taking too big of a risk and then they've got some kind of big problem. Or maybe it actually starts to work. So then what do you do?

Do you just say, all right, we're sticking to our guns and we recognize that maybe we'll be less competitive than them in the future and that's a price that we're willing to our guns and we recognize that maybe we'll be less competitive than them in the future, and that's a price that we're willing to pay? Or do you try to stop them? And maybe you can, maybe you can't. If it's a big, powerful country, you probably can't. And if you can't stop them and you don't want to pay the price of not doing it, do you feel that you have to match them? And just like in the Olympics, I mean, there are different societies that make different decisions of how they're going to do Olympics.

Some say, well, just going to let a bunch of kids play sports and the best ones will emerge. Some say we're going to measure all these kids and test them when they're five years old and put them. And then we have a way of measuring those outcomes, which is gold medals. And maybe it's the case that these different collections of societal decisions will lead to different outcomes. I mean, there's nothing that's set in stone of why we in the United States have a higher standard of living than people in Venezuela or whatever, but if there's like a lot of little decisions that add up to

these things called national competitiveness and the application of revolutionary science is one of them. The concern for a lot of people is that we're going to get to some situation where in order to become more competitive, people are going to do things that are very questionable or very unethical and ultimately very dangerous, right? Isn't that the question? We're already seeing it. I don't know. Maybe there's a guy named Josiah Zahner who's become kind of infamous for these do-it-yourself experiments on himself. What is he doing? on himself. What is he doing? It's like these quote-unquote genome, DIY biology, giving people the tools to try to do gene therapies on themselves. He does it on himself? He does it

on himself. What kind of therapies is he doing? Yeah, I think that, so he's done some, he injected himself at a science conference. There's a whole series on HBO called Unnatural Selection, which is all about this kind of stuff. And so, yeah, so we are going to... Yep, here he is. Is that him? Yeah. He looks like the kind of guy that would inject himself. Yeah, I don't know who Rick is, but... This guy's the first person to attempt editing his DNA with CRISPR. So he's like the guy from The Fly. Exactly, yeah, exactly, yeah. remember how that worked i remember it i remember it so um i want to live in a world where people get drunk and instead of giving themselves tattoos they're like i'm drunk i'm gonna crisper myself this guy's an asshole yeah no i say don't

crisper yourself bro exactly no no i mean what we're talking about here, and coming back to earlier, there's billions of years, almost four billions of years of biology got us from little single cell organisms to this. And so there's a lot of evolutionary lessons, tradeoffs that are us. I'm not saying we shouldn't change things. We must change things. We don't want to live like our ancestors did, dying of all these terrible preventable diseases. But that doesn't mean that we should just do anything. There shouldn't be regulation. We need to find the right balance. And if you wanted to look at biological life objectively, you would imagine that there's some sort of, there's these competing elements, right? You have disease and you have immune systems that fight off the disease.

And through this sort of selection and natural selection and mutations, some people develop and continue to breed and advance their lines and other genetic lines die off because they weren't able to compete or to handle these environmental stressors or these viruses or these various things. And on one side, you would say, I don't ever want to see someone suffer and die from a disease. But on the other side, you say, how many people do we need on this planet? And that's where people get scared with eugenics.

scared with eugenics. When you say, you know, what we need is the strongest, most healthy, most disease-free version of humanity. So does that mean people with diabetes should not be allowed to breed? You know what I'm saying? People get real weird when it comes to that. And they should. Rightly so. So the whole history of eugenics is a terrible one. I mean, I think everybody recognizes the horrors of Nazi eugenics, but the Nazis actually learned a lot from the eugenicists here in the United States, who in the early 20th century didn't present themselves, oh, we're a bunch of racist radicals. They actually presented themselves as these progressives wanting to create a better society.

So we must derive extreme caution from that history. Having said that, we won't always frame these questions as eugenics, yes or no. I lecture a lot about this stuff and about the future of biology and reproduction. And a lot of people say things like what you've just said, or even say things like, well, you're saying that in the future, there'll be far less incidents of Down syndrome. I have a kid who's Down syndrome, who has Downs. Are you saying that kid has a lesser justification to live than somebody else? And what I always say is I would never say that it's not what I believe. But that's not how the question's going to be framed.

It's going to be framed, all right, you're having it, you decide to have a child. You're having a child through IVF and embryo selection. You have your, extract your eggs, fertilize them. You have these 10 pre-implanted embryos fertilized eggs and you know that one of them has down syndrome will you pick that embryo to implant in the mother or will you pick an embryo that doesn't have down syndrome to implant in them some people have just a huge problem with the idea of picking embryos yeah right that Right? That this, we're playing God. Maybe a better analysis or a better analogy rather would be if you gave a person an option

and all you have to do is check a box and your child wouldn't have leukemia. Yeah. Wouldn't you do that? Yeah. You would, right? Well, we can do that. We can go in there and edit the genes and make sure that the child doesn't have this incurable disease. Yeah. And so, you know, I always struggle when people use that term,

playing God. I mean, without sounding disrespectful, I feel like if God were playing God, we wouldn't have to do it. But if you think that, all right, I believe in God, God is making decisions about my children, and God has for some reason decided that my kid is going to have a deadly genetic disorder, I'd say, well, I'm not down for that. But that's why we can't pretend like we don't have these powers that we increasingly have, and that's why I call these powers godlike powers in biology and AI and in many other areas. It's inevitable that as if we survive and we don't blow ourselves up or there's some sort of, not some sort of a natural disaster, that human beings are going to get better at virtually everything that we do currently. We're going to figure out more innovative ways to do things. We're going to invent better technology and we're going to figure out ways. I mean, we already have figured out if you look at what people die of today versus what people died of 200 years ago, there's a radical difference in a very, very short, but biologically speaking, a very tiny frame of time, but a radical increase in lifespan and a radical increase in the possibility of

surviving infection, disease, injury, where we're already playing God. Yeah, no, for sure. And the rate of that increase is accelerating. When people talk about exponential change, that's what they mean. But one of the ways of thinking about that is about 100 years ago, there were 2 billion people on Earth and roughly a 20% literacy rate. That's about 400 million people who are able to contribute to the world of knowledge. Now we're approaching 7 billion people, 85% literacy rate. We're all connected to each other through the internet systems. Many of us are. And so that means that if you're kind of solving any problem, one, you have access to the whole world of knowledge. And two, once you solve that problem, nobody else on earth has to solve it

again. And then we have, it's not just these individual tools like the computers and AI and the new CRISPR and other biology tools. There's a super convergence of all of these technologies. So everything is getting faster and the rate of change is accelerating. And that's why I totally agree with you. It's like that we are our ability to kind of solve new problems, to create new realities that feel like science fiction today, but will just become our normal tomorrow. I mean, that's what's happening now is that our brains came of age on the African savannas. And so our brains aren't really designed to deal with this incredible rate of change that we're experiencing. Do you ever stop and think, do you ever just sit alone by yourself and wonder where this is going to lead?

Yeah, all the time. There's a video that I put on my Instagram yesterday that my friend Eddie sent to me. It's Walter Cronkite from like the 1950s. And he's talking about the future. And it's amazing. It talking about the future and it's amazing it's really interesting because it's a short video we can play it real quick but it's Walter Cronkite talking about the the household of the future and what technology would be available to us and it's so dead-on it's really I

had never seen this before because most of the time when people talk about the future they talk about jet packs and flying cars and time machines. But in the 1950s, it's – see if we can pull it up because it's pretty wild. But I want to apply the same sort of thinking. Yeah, I will make a plug while we're pulling it up. I think Walter Conkright is born in my hometown of, my original hometown of Kansas City. All right. Shout out to Kansas City.

The United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule. A lot of this new free time will be spent at home. And this console controls a full array of equipment to inform, instruct and entertain the family of the future. We could watch a football game or a movie shown in full color on our big 3D television screen. This console provides a summary of news relayed by satellite from all over the world. I might check the latest weather. A telephone is this instrument here. If I want to see the people I'm talking with, I just turn the button and there they are. With equipment like this in the home of the future, we may not have to go to work.

The work would come to us. One government reporter. It's interesting, he's kind of right. The pandemic kind of made the work come to us. Yeah. That is one thing that did happen, which I think one of the very few positive silver linings of this pandemic is a lot of people realize like hey i don't have to go to an office to work so this all this hour plus time commuting we can eliminate all that i can be more efficient i can be more productive just working from home zoom calls like uh i have a friend who lives out here who's a writer on a hollywood show but he lives in, but he lives in Austin. The writers meeting is through Zoom. trends that would have played out over 10, 20, however many years, suddenly crashed in, and it's in weeks and months. And it's not just virtualization. And I think it's here to stay.

What I said at the start is this isn't a snow day. Whatever happens with the vaccines, it's not like we just go back to our old lives. Our lives are going to be a hybrid of the kind of physical and virtual lives, but also in the realm that we were discussing with the biotech revolution. I mean, this mRNA platform isn't just about vaccines. It's going to be a whole new delivery mechanism for all kinds of health interventions. And the genetics revolution isn't just about human health care. It's going to fundamentally transform agriculture and how we think about materials. I know you've talked about this precision fermentation, where it's basically the way that we brew beer. We're going to be brewing all sorts of things, this cellular meat, plastics, energy. And so it's really really i think we're going to look back at this moment as a

quantum leap and some of those um changes will think as negative but some of them will actually i think end up being feeling pretty positive well that's oftentimes what happens in history right there's an event and through that event a lot of innovation and a lot of change springs out of it in as an adjustment or as a reaction. Yeah, for sure. Like World War II, I mean, it was a terrible experience, but the technology of rockets and electronics and space travel were just massively pushed forward.

I was actually telling somebody the other day when their microwave broke, like, do you know that the microwave comes out of this crash MIT effort to build the radar in the Second World War, and the microwave technology was just a side effect? So the exact what World War II was to electronics and space travel, I think that this pandemic will be to the genetics and biotech revolutions. When we were talking before, I showed you the Walter Cronkite clip. Do you sit alone sometime and think about this, all this genetic engineering and the possibility of manipulating human beings

and wonder what the human of three, four, 500 years from now is going to be like? Yeah, all the time. I mean, I'm also a sci-fi writer, so I spend a lot of my time kind of imagining. And one of the things, it's just what you said before about Australopithecus. I mean, it's 500 years, given what I said about exponential change, particularly if we don't blow ourselves up. That's a long, long time from now. And I think we're going to think very differently about how all kinds of

biological systems work, about what makes a human, about how we interact with the environment. Certainly, we aren't all going to be living on the surface of this planet 500 years from now. You think 500 years from now, we'll be traveling to other planets? Oh, for sure. I mean, traveling to other planets, for sure. Living in space. I mean, my guess is we'll have space colonies where people live their whole lives there. And those people will need to be a little bit biologically different from us because we are designed for the surface of this planet. That's why when you do scuba diving, you need equipment. And when you go in, when you fly, you need to be inside of a plane or have equipment. you need equipment. And when you fly, you need to be inside of a plane or have equipment. There's actually plans for a space hotel that's going to launch, they think, around 2027,

which is probably way off. They always say shit like that to get funding. Well, we already have a space hotel with international space stations. So it's not like we need that much. We have rockets. We have the International Space Station. So all you have to do is put in a gym and a sauna and you're there.

Well, there's a big difference between the type of people that are allowed to go to the International Space Station. They have a lot of training and preparation. And this is they're talking about consumers. They're talking about just average person like me and Jamie flying to the space hotel. They have an image of this thing. I was trying to get to the website. Yeah, but we already have. Look at that.

But how about that thing? The space carousel. You know, fly up there and dock. Yeah. And we already have, I mean, I don't want to call them regular people, but like Anushka, whatever her last name is,

the first space tourist. I mean, she didn't know anything about space. She just could afford to buy the ticket. So she was the first space tourist? Yeah. How much did that cost? I don't know. It was like $10 million to the Russians.

That seems a little pricey. Where did she get that cash? Yeah. I don't know. But you get lots of frequent flyer miles. Yeah, I guess. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Yeah, I guess.

But this space hotel thing, if you see it, Jamie, it looks like what happens is some sort of shuttle-looking thing docks at the end of each one of those little ports. And you let people out. Look at this. Look how that works. Yeah. I mean, to tell you the truth, that doesn't look that crazy. That's crazy as fuck, Jamie Metzl. How dare you well i mean sometimes you see a thing where you think like how are they going to do that i mean with looking at that

there's no technology there that you think well that whole technology needs to be invented in order to make this vision real like we have pretty much every one of those technologies i wonder why it's spinning i mean they can't recreate artificial gravity by spinning like that i don't know but my guess is it has something my guess and i'm not a physicist but something to do with uh gravity and holding a position in space but i really just don't know this is freaking me out just looking at it oh they got a lot of these little docking ports yeah well there's gonna be a lot of people up there. They got to make that cheddar.

If you're going to put a big, giant hotel in space, you want to stay in there. What's that? You just got to stay in that little room? Yeah, stay in your room, bro. You can walk around? No, you can walk around. You're like a hamster as that thing turns around.

Well, it looks pretty goddamn big, so it looks like you'd be in a giant building. So it would be like if we were staying at the the encore at the win or something like that just picturing my head so but the thing is with this i mean so like i was saying before i think that technology is fully realizable but what we learn from the kelly brothers i don't know if you've had one or both of them on the on the show is that there are biological changes that happens to changes that happen to humans when we're in space for a long time. And so let's just say that future generations are going to live their entire lives in that

space. So we may need to think about, well, what are some biological differences that could be engineered to make that possible? There's a guy named Chris Mason at Cornell who's studying this. You've had my friend, our mutual friend, David Sinclair, on the show, who's thinking about what are the kind of interventions that could be made to reduce the threat of radiation. So I think that building this infrastructure is possible. Changing who we are to make living there for our full lives possible, I think that's more advanced. And the same thing with, I know you recently had Elon Musk on again,

and I think that's the same thing with Mars. Our human bodies aren't built for Mars. Maybe we can be there for a while. If we want to stay, we may need to think differently about how we're constructed. Well, that's where it gets spooky because what if you make a commitment

to adapt your body to the environment of Mars, but then you can't go back to Earth and survive because the gravity is stronger and the radiation. Yeah, and it may be, and if I had to guess, it will be that some humans live their entire lives in space, that they will have a different, slightly at first, biology than us. And that if there are generations of people over many, many millennia who are living in space, eventually our biology will become more different. That's the real problem, because then we'll go to war with them, because they're not even us

anymore. If we behave, if all we have that's guiding us is kind of our brains like when we were the Australia Pythagoras. It may be the case, but we also have these millennia to continue to develop ethical systems because culture is part of our evolutionary inheritance as much or even more than our genetics. So we have these technologies and the technologies are advancing exponentially. And the challenge for us is, can we grow and develop our ethical systems so we can manage these technologies wisely? Right.

So we have to figure out a way to evolve past biological competitiveness, like the primate DNA that we have that wants to dominate and control things and that makes someone want to be the governor of New York, right? Like that kind of stuff. Well, I think we need to balance it out because we want, that's, like when you say, well, why is it that humans are always pushing? Why are we always wanting to climb mountains

or solve problems? There's a little bit of this just competitiveness that we have with ourselves and with each other, and that's healthy. But unbridled, it has the potential to be not healthy but isn't there other motivations of this outside of competitiveness just curiosity and just the need to challenge oneself it doesn't necessarily have to be competitive in terms of competing with other people be

competitive in terms of like working together to try to achieve a goal that's difficult to get to like we like humans like puzzles we like problems we like to solve things i think it's part of what made us who we are today and i think there's these ancient reward systems that are sort of ingrained in our biology that make it very satisfying yeah i mean that's why people like rubik's cubes yeah right no i totally agree but i also think that we're, I'm just looking down at this little, I don't know if it's a chimpanzee skull or whatever it is. Isn't that cool? I love it. This is made with Zildjian symbols. Wow. Yeah. So it's got the Zildjian thing in the back of it. Wow. I love it. And so, so when you

think of, all right, so chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives. And what is it when you see chimpanzees in a community? I mean, part of it is curiosity and part of it is this kind of jostling. And I think that both of them are part of the story. So if we just had jostling without the essential impulse of curiosity and learning that you've mentioned, I think that would be bad. If we just had that curiosity and there wasn't that competitive drive that made us want to be the fastest runner in the world or win the Nobel Prize, would that take away some of our edge? I don't know, but my hunch is maybe. Maybe. But there's some people that aren't competitive in terms of like, they don't enjoy competition, but they do enjoy puzzles and they do enjoy innovation. They do enjoy

personal challenges to try to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. Yeah. And then that comes back to your diversity point is that we have all these different kinds of people and we need them. If we were only people who were trying to be the alpha chimpanzee, I think our societies would fall apart. And so I think that we need those kinds of people. I want to say this is my biggest fear, but one of the things that I think about in terms of humans is that one day we're going to realize that one of the things that holds us back is these animal drives to reproduce and that there's this uh sort of our our built-in sexual selection and then emotions and ego and all these different things that have served us well over the millennia to get to 2021 that ultimately we're going to realize

like these are a bottleneck to progress and then we're going to turn ourselves into one of these little guys well at least uh these guys um this is from uh yeah travis walton do you know who he is he's like one of the most famous uh ufo abduction cases well the good news is when everybody looks like that, nobody has hair. And so it's like we're all on the equal footing. We all have giant heads too and no one has any advantages physically because they're all like basically the same thing. But when you look at primates, if you look at a chimp and their small skull and small

brains versus our large skull and large brains and you go extrapolate, you look at the future and you look at like, well, where's this trend? Where's it going? It seems like the heads are getting bigger. It seems like the bodies are getting smaller and more frail. You know, we're far less strength. We have far less strength pound for pound than chimpanzees do. Yeah.

And a grown chimp is like a 400-pound man. Yeah. You know, and they're 150 pounds. And as we continue to quote quote unquote, evolve or change, I wonder if that's what, when we see this, you know, human beings have this iconic image of an alien, right? They're really, I don't know why they have that image. I don't know what that is. But all these people that have supposedly experienced alien abductions or sightings. It's always the same thing for the most part.

There's just some variation, but there's a lot of this one thing, which is a small body with a large head. And you look at like what humans are now versus what ancient primates used to be. If you keep going, that's what happens. Well, it could. And there's, again, I write science fiction, so I try to think a lot about these kinds of things. And that's certainly one possibility. Or you could say, well,

maybe we're going to supplement our brain function through technology. And so I know you talked with Elon Musk about this, of whether there's some kind of brain-machine interface so that not all of the activity happens in your brain. And certainly, that's one possibility. And maybe the sexual competition and sexual reproduction will be a driver, and maybe it won't. We have lots of experience in the past from societies that have tried to restructure the family, restructure the way men and women interact,

and in most cases it hasn't gone well. But one of the key points, and I think why this moment in history is just so interesting and it's so pregnant, is that for our entire history as a species and in our earlier incarnations, about 3.8 billion years, we've evolved through the Darwinian principles of random mutation and natural selection. And so all of these decisions weren't decisions. They just kind of happened, and you're born with a certain set of attributes. Now we have the ability to actually make decisions about our evolution that could push us and will push us in one direction or another. And then the big question is, do we have the wisdom to make those kinds of decisions wisely? What do you think? You're a guy who writes science fiction. Yeah. I don't think we have the pure wisdom, but I think that we have pieces of it. I mean,

we have ethical traditions that have evolved over many thousands of years, and they're applicable. You talked about the Catholic Church and the vaccines. I've been a critic of the Catholic Church on a lot of things, but I was certainly honored just before the pandemic, I was invited to the Vatican to give a talk on the future of human genetic engineering. And I had really amazing conversations with cardinals and others, and then they commissioned a report from me, which I wrote for them. It's also on my jamiemetzel.com website, about these kinds of trade-offs. And what I said is, we have these ancient traditions. That doesn't mean that just applying one-to-one, which is why I'm a critic of a number of things that the

Catholic Church has done, including this recent statement on the vaccines. But we can't jettison these ancient traditions traditions because there's a lot of wisdom in there, not just in organized religions and in all of these traditions. And the question is, can we apply them? And my guess is we won't do it perfectly. We're going to make big mistakes. I mean, certainly with human genetic engineering, the first three CRISPR babies was a massive, terrible mistake. But there is a process of learning and growing. And so I think we'll always be one step behind. But I do have hope. And I guess part of the reason is that whatever happens, humans so far have just survived. I mean,

75,000 years ago, there were maybe 1,000 humans left just in the southern tip of Africa. But it was terrible. And yet we kind of made it back. That's from the super volcano, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we made it back. So I think that our species will survive in one form or another. Maybe it'll be on those space stations like that, and the Earth won't exist.

Eventually, that's going to happen. But I think it's a race between exponentially evolving technology and our ability to develop ethical and governance systems. When you say that the three CRISPR babies were kind of a disaster, how was it a disaster? So here's the ideal scenario of how I would have liked to see, because I'm not opposed to using genome editing tools on pre-implanted human embryos in principle. It's just it needs to be done safely, addressing a very real need that can't be addressed in any other way. And so the reason was, one, it wasn't transparent. Two, it wasn't trying to address a need.

I mean, these were otherwise perfectly healthy babies, or to be babies. And the engineering was to try to confer on them an increased resistance to something that they may or may not be exposed to in the future HIV. How did they do that? So there's a gene called CCR5. And when people, mostly Northern Europeans, who have a disrupted CCR5 gene, on average, have greater resistance to HIV. And so they basically was trying to make this, it was a one single letter mutation with the goal of conferring that advantage. But again, that's very different from saying, all right, this is a kid, this is an, I'm sorry, a pre-implanted embryo that is carrying a single mutation that is almost certain to cause a deadly,

single mutation that is almost certain to cause a deadly, untreatable genetic disorder. And so if these parents want to have their own biological child and their genetics dictate that either all of the embryos have that same mutation or they just have one embryo that has it, this one intervention will change a child's trajectory from dying young of a terrible disorder to living a full life. If that had been the first story, then I think it would have said, all right, how can we build on that? It was gonzo science, unregulated, sloppy science, non-transparent, and not addressing a need that couldn't be addressed in some other

way, like condoms. Well, not just condoms, just medical treatments too, right? The death rate for people who have HIV is radically dropped. Yeah, but these kids wouldn't have had HIV. They just had a father who had it. Oh, okay. Now, when you say transparency, do you mean like with the entire scientific community to let them know what they're doing and how they're doing it? Oh, yeah. So our World Health Organization Advisory Committee, one of the things that we're doing is created calling for a registry because nobody knew that this, I mean, other than a very small number of people, including some scientists at Stanford and elsewhere. But nobody knew that this was even happening. So it was in 2008 in November.

I remember this really well. All of a sudden, this story just emerged out of nowhere. And most everyone had no idea. And if you had asked me, I was doing a bunch of interviews then. And someone said, well, when will the world's first genome-edited babies be born? everyone had no idea. And if you had asked me, I was doing a bunch of interviews then, and someone said, well, when will the world's first genome-edited babies be born? I would have said in 2018. I'd say maybe about 10 years from now, not because it wasn't possible, because we were already doing it. Scientists were already doing it in animals. But to go from something that works in animals

to humans that are especially embryos that are being brought to term, you need to be really careful because otherwise it's like Nuremberg-style human experimentation, which is what I think this was. And, you know, it's funny, 2008 seems like it's recently. Oh, 2018. I'm sorry, it was 2018. It was just three years ago. Sorry if I misspoke. That's okay. It was 2018.

It was just three years ago. Sorry if I misspoke. That's okay. So even so, 2018, you've got to think they're still doing that. So that we don't know. So in our committee, our WHO committee, we were already meeting. And then there was a report that this scientist, Denis Reprikov in in Russia was planning on doing it. And so we issued a statement, and Dr. Tedros, I don't know him, the WHO Director General, he issued a statement, and then apparently they backed off. But it could be. It could be done in China. It could be done in Russia. It could be

done somewhere else. And again, that's why there are a lot of things that could be done, like even now using synthetic biology to create a pathogen more deadly than SARS-CoV-2. It's possible. But that's why we kind of want to try to create cultures and regulations to decrease the likelihood. But you're absolutely right. For all we know, there are more than three CRISPR babies in this world. They have to be. You're talking about a culture that's willing to take the

Uyghur Muslims and ship them off into these concentration camps. You're talking about a culture that... a country that gets rid of journalists that criticize the government. Their ethic, like when they buried that train that crashed with people on board, right?

I don't think there were any living people in the train. Dead people, though. They just buried them in the train. That I don't know, but they certainly buried the train. Yeah. Well, imagine that these people are going to go, well, editing genes to make superior people is just taking it a little too far.

Well, what I can say is that when the news came out in November 2018 about these first CRISPR babies, in the first hours, there was a lot of crowing in the Chinese media, including state media, saying this is showing that China is leading the world. And then there was a massive international backlash. And then China flipped because they realized that if they became a pariah state, especially within the application of this kind of revolutionary science, they would lose more than they would gain. How so?

Well, I think that China really sees itself as being the world leader. And so for them, with this science, they don't want to be seen as some kind of rogue bad actor. They want to be seen as the leading cutting edge science power, like the United States has been since the Second World War. So then they actually created a pretty strong law. And then they actually imprisoned He Jiankui by retroactively applying a law that didn't really exist. They punished him by putting him in jail for doing the thing that they said they were leading the way in. 100%. So not only that, they had a thing where they were funding, and still are, funding scientists,

especially scientists who were trained outside of China, to come back. And they're giving them grants to do revolutionary science in all kinds of areas. And there's a very strong cultural pressure, as I was mentioning before, to really push those limits. And that brings us back to our original conversation about the origins of COVID, because let's just say that the lab leak hypothesis is right. And then let's say, well, how is the lab leak story connected to the CRISPR baby story? And you could say, all right, well,

so you have this kind of young power. China is an ancient civilization, but a young power, and they basically destroyed their whole base in the cultural revolution. They now have these incredibly powerful tools, but they don't have, and they have a lot of nationalists and other pressures to drive science and scientists to cut corners and leap to the head of the line, but they don't have the governance systems. They don't have the culture of care. So it could easily be the case that these scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology may be in the lab of the famous bat woman, Dr. Shi, but but maybe in Chinese military that was doing or commissioning work in the same

facility. And we don't even know the full extent. But I think it's extremely likely, even whatever the origins of the pandemic, that there was all kinds of really aggressive science that's happening there. And I think that's happening across the board in AI, in genomics, in many, many different areas. Yeah, that's where it gets spooky, right? Yeah. And this doctor, is he still in jail now? Yes, Ho-Chunk Wei, yes. Wow.

You got to think they gave him authorization to do that. Oh, no, for sure. I mean, not for sure. It streams extremely likely to me that somebody knew that he was doing it. I mean, not for sure. It streams extremely likely to me that somebody knew that he was doing it. I mean, this is China. The government, as we were talking about earlier, plays a really central role in everything. So somebody knew about it. And I think they thought, just as he in his application, he thought that he was going to win the Nobel Prize and his heroes were the British and American scientists who developed IVF, Steptoe and Roberts, and he was going to be like

them and bring glory to China. But then, so I think that was something that was supported among the small number of people who knew about it. And then it went wrong. And then I think China realized they had a PR problem and they had a legal problem. So they wrote a stronger law and then they imprisoned this guy, to make a point. When you say they had a legal problem, who's the legal problem with? Well, it was that there wasn't sufficient regulation about whether what Hu Jankui did was okay or not okay. And so that was what created the space for him to do this. And then I think they realized that this was really revolutionary science and that the state wanted to have more control. That doesn't mean that the state is against, in principle, human genome editing.

I don't think ultimately they will be. But it does mean that they wanted to have control over what did and didn't happen, which I think they've probably reasserted. Wouldn't you think that would be really stifling to the scientific community in China if Hu Zhongkui is imprisoned for something that they most likely asked him to do? Or at least authorized him to do? It's really an interesting thing because China, there are two different messages. One message is to scientists and to entrepreneurs, race forward as fast as you can. The world is a highly competitive place. China, the government, has set a goal of being the world's leading power by 2049. Science and technology are a big piece of how we're going to get there. Race forward. But there's another message that's also being delivered

that if you do something that pisses us off, you're going to be punished. And we're not going to tell you exactly what that is. So you may think that you are the richest man in China. You may think that you're Jack Ma. But if we decide that we don't like something you're doing, you're going to disappear for a while, and then you're going to come back, and you're going to have to apologize. You may think that you're the most famous actress in China, but you're just going to

disappear one day and then months later reemerge and apologize and basically assert, oh, the government is control of everything. Is that what happened with an actress as well? Yeah, yeah. The most famous actress in China. I don't know who the equivalent here, but just imagine some beautiful… Jennifer Aniston type person. Jennifer Aniston. So imagine Jennifer Aniston. All of a sudden, vanishes. Nobody knows where she is. The media isn't allowed to say what's happening with Jennifer Aniston because people have a pretty good sense. And then three months later, Jennifer Aniston reemerges and says,

I've realized I was wrong in some little minor infraction, and I pledge my support to the Chinese government, essentially. And so that's the system. And it's confusing for people because when I went to North Korea, it's like this is an authoritarian system. It's a totalitarian system. Everywhere you look, everyone's got the pin. It's clear. China, it's not like the Soviet Union.

This is like a really scientifically advanced society. It's a sophisticated place. But there's this level of control that people have really internalized. I talked earlier about the Chinese government setting a narrative. When you go to Tiananmen Square, what do you see? You see this big portrait of Mao. If you didn't know anything about Chinese history, it's, oh, isn't that great? Mao, it's, oh, isn't that great,

Mao? It's like they're George Washington. But if you know anything about Chinese history, you know that through the purges after the Civil War and the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution, Mao was responsible for the deaths of about 47 million Chinese people. That's more than Hitler and Stalin combined. And yet the story has been recast as this is the father of the nation. And the reason is because the Communist Party is still in charge. And so if you get rid of Mao, what's the origin story of the communist? But they've recast that whole story. And so when you're in China, people do have private thoughts, but there's a narrative. If you're on the side of the dominant narrative, you're in good shape. If you're on the other side, you're in trouble. And I'll just say personally, I have an acquaintance of mine who I knew very years, he was kind of like the Lou Dobbs of China.

He had a China CCTV, China Central Television, nightly business show. And he was on, everybody in China knew this guy. In average nightly broadcasts, let's say you have kind of the entire equivalent of the entire population of the United States watching this guy every night. Suddenly disappears. And the reason is he was said to have some connection to a former security chief who got on the wrong side of Xi. And so this acquaintance of mine hasn't been seen in years and just vanishes. And I think it's complicated because you look at the pictures of Shanghai, you see Beijing, and you see a really sophisticated place, and it is. But if you're on the wrong side of the Chinese government, you're in trouble. And that's why, as I said before,

I am extremely confident there are many people in China right now who have highly relevant information about the origins of the pandemic, and they don't dare speak up. That's terrifying. It's terrifying that that can coexist with what we deal with today in America, which is, you know, we complain about small infringements upon our freedoms. And we think that, you know, our rights are being stripped away, which, you know, there's arguments that we are and that we have had some, particularly during the pandemic when governors have grasped massive amounts of power, often without legislative control. But they, what we're doing is nothing in comparison to what's happening in China. Yeah, that's for sure.

And it also makes us realize that we have to fight for what we have. I mean, the freedoms that we have, they don't just exist. Our parents and grandparents and ancestors fought for them. And we have to fight for them. And it comes back to your earlier point about divisions. And we need to fight for them with a vision of the whole. And the vision of the whole that includes everybody,

including the people with whom we may not agree. That's why the freedom of information and the freedom of expression are so important. And free speech, it's so important. It's not just speech that you agree with. Because as soon as you decide that someone can dictate what someone can and can't say, just because you think it's right, you open up the door to censorship. And censorship leads to what you're seeing right now in China. Yeah, I completely agree. It's just hard for people to extrapolate. I think that's exactly right.

And though there's another thing of how do we find a common sense of reality and truth? Because it used to be, and you showed Walter Cronkite, it used to be everybody in the United States, you watch Walter Cronkite or one of those other guys, and you have a kind of a story of the world. Now, it's not just that we have, that we live in different stories. We live in a world with entirely different factual foundations. And so I don't know the answer to this question is how do you avoid the kind of total relativism that they have in China where the government can just create a whole fake reality and then more than a billion people are forced to live in that reality? So how do you avoid that? How do you have the kind of openness?

But how can you have a center of gravity so that there can be a space where people can find common ground? I think we have to really clearly establish the narrative of how dangerous tribalism is and how human beings are inherently tribal because this is how we evolved. We evolved to find a tight-knit group of people that you can trust and you stick with them in these small villages and you fight against intruders. And this tribalism now is extended to 350 million people or whatever we have here. And it's terrible. It's terrible. We're supposed to be a community. And that's the best version of what the United States is, is a large continental community. And that's what it should be. That's what we really should be. It's possible

to do that. We just have to establish in young people this narrative, and we have to avoid the short-term success of silencing the opposition and silencing the people that you don't agree with. There's a short-term success in that that leads to long-term imprisonment of our values. It's a terrible idea. Yeah, I completely agree. And then that's, I mean, that's what America is. I mean, it's all these different people who have, I mean, it's the genius of America. I mean, I think our ancestors come from Europe where it was like, yeah, we're on this hill. We hate those guys on that hill. And this was this place where, you know, I live in New York.

You show up in New York for five days and you're a New Yorker. No one says, oh, where are you from? It's just like you're what New Yorker. No one says, oh, where are you from? It's just like, you're what New Yorkers look like. And it's totally normal and healthy that we'll have our differences. But if we don't have a space where we can interact with each other and share ideas and be convinced to do something even just a little bit differently, then I think you're absolutely right. This tribalism is going to harm us. And winning for your tribe, in most cases, is losing for yourself and for your community. Yeah, I think we have to reject leaders who enforce tribalism. And I think the real hope of that is young people, young people recognizing this message that censorship is inherently dangerous and that there's so much reward. People are so

often rewarded for tribalism online. They're rewarded by the likes of the people that agree with you. I think people need to reject that. They need to reject that kind of communication, that polarizing communication. They need to recognize that there's a lot of people that are legitimately mentally ill because of social media. Legitimately mentally ill. It's a bad way to communicate. And people are addicted to it and it becomes impulsive. It becomes this thing that they search and check all day long to see like how their messages are being

responded to and what arguments they're in with people and is there division in their clan or is everybody united in this front even if the front is illogical and foolish as long as it's tribal and there's reinforcement from the other people in the tribe like whether whatever it is whether it's the election was stolen or whether it's the the virus came from a bat these these these narratives that people are so assured of that don't make any sense that's you should be able to talk about stuff you should be able to and then we should reward this kind of free discourse where people are being polite and people are being inquisitive and people are genuinely trying to find out what the actual facts are without any bias and without

any need to flavor things to fit the narrative that their tribe holds on to that we got to abandon all that shit because that's the only way we're going to get past this weird state we're in now where you got a bunch of fucking morons storming Capitol Hill because they really think like that, you know, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, I totally get it. And it's like we're all, if we're not careful, we enter into our own self-referential realities. I mentioned it earlier in the show, even with me,

with our community calling for a full investigation. But by definition, we're all sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis. But we're all kind of in a world with each other, and you get more and more affirmation. But you also mentioned something I think is really essential about the role of young people in getting us out of this. And for one, I actually have a lot of hope. In the earliest days of the pandemic, I gave a talk about these kinds of problems and how the only way we're going to solve these problems is by recognizing that we have to come together to do it. And all of these young people around the world

rallied around that call. And we've now come together and we've founded an organization called One Shared World, is about finding that common space, solving common problems. It's oneshared.world, if anyone wants to go to the website and learn about it. But I think there is a lot of hope in these young people, but we all exist in this context, and the superstructure is pushing us in a certain way. And I think that while we have to focus on our individual behaviors, we don't look at the superstructure and say, well, what are all the incentives? And it's what this social dilemma film was about. How are these incentives pushing us toward a certain set of behaviors? It's going to be really difficult to get out of them. So there's a lot of

hope, but we also have a lot of work to do. Yeah, that's where we have a lot of work to do. These algorithms that have been created and they're generating enormous amounts of money for these social media companies. And so they have a vested interest in continuing to sort of, this divide is very valuable. Like the divide between us, the more they can find things that piss us off, it turns out that's the stuff that we engage with. Yeah. And so the algorithms are favoring things that are inflammatory and favoring arguments that divide people.

And, you know, um, I had Tristan Harris on the podcast to talk about it and he paints a very scary picture. Yeah. It's, It's really weird. It's really weird when you consider where this is all going and how there's no breaks. Yeah. And so that's the thing is that I think there was a time, as I was talking about this

with somebody earlier today, there was a time in the early days of the internet where I think a lot of us, we had this theology, oh, the open systems are going to win. And so let days of the internet, where I think a lot of us, we had this theology, oh, the open systems are going to win. And so let's let the internet is going to bring freedom to the world. And we've learned out, what we learned is that no technology comes with its own built-in value system. Every technology, you think, oh, a stirrup, that seems like a good idea. Well, yeah, the Mongols used it and conquered the world and killed a lot of people. The plow, every technology can be used for good or for bad. And these technologies are just the same, but they're so powerful that if we don't really try to establish frameworks for how they can be used ethically, we'll just be pushed into all these kinds of behaviors that are antithetical to who we would at least like to be. Yeah. Now, to get back to China and that famous actress, do you remember what she said? That she really said, you know, I don't know if she said anything, but it was more that she,

I think there's a Chinese saying, which I can't remember, but it's something like, think. There's a Chinese saying, which I can't remember, but it's something like, kill the chickens to scare the something or other, some farm. But I think that this was someone who was becoming very powerful with a massive social media following, who was a high-profile person. And the government was making a statement, no matter who you are, it's the same Jack Ma statement. You could be the richest man in China, you could be the most famous actress in China, you are below the government. And if you dare, and then that's why I think that message has been spread across China. And that means that there are a lot of other people like these scientists, possibly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere, who know what the system is. And I think it was a way of delivering a

message that everybody in China would hear. So it encourages self-policing. Self-policing is the name of the game. And now you're seeing that spread to Hong Kong. I mean, Hong Kong is a place I've been visiting for many, many decades, and it was this thriving intellectual community. And it's slowly being strangled, and the world is not doing anything. Yeah. What can the world do, though? So this is the challenge, is that China is becoming more powerful.

COVID, even if COVID started with an accidental lab leak, as I believe it most likely did, has in many ways made China relatively more powerful because they got a handle on it. They've seen the chaos here. The United States antagonized until recently all of our friends and allies. And so I think, frankly, it's going to take the rest of the world coming together to balance China and the rest of the world coming together in spite of our differences and saying, here is a vision of the world in which we would like to live. It's a world where human rights are respected, where we're able to investigate accidents with the kind of free and open access, where there aren't shameful land grabs in the South China Sea or in the Himalayas. It's where

people are free to express their views of how they would like to live and how they'd like to be governed. And if you, China, would like to be part of that world, we will welcome you. But here are the rules. If you don't want to be part of that world, here are the consequences. There's a cost to that because all of our supply chains run through China. There's huge amounts of economic growth that happen in China. Many big issues like climate change can't be solved without China. But a world where we integrate with China with no standards of behavior, and not just for them, but also for ourselves, which is why what's happened here in these past years in the United States was such a heartbreak for many people, myself included. A world that's not based

on standards of ethical behavior is a world that is going to decay. And there's nothing that says that we will have the kind of security and stability in the next 76 years that we've had in the last 76 years since the end of the Second World War. But when you see all these companies just sort of caving into China because of the amount of money that China generates them, even the NBA caved into China. It was painful to watch. Weird, right? Yeah. Well, it wasn't weird. I understood it. It was just painful.

But it's spooky. It's spooky because they have so much money to be made. And China, the Chinese government does a great job of using that kind of pressure. But there's no way that any individual company can stand up to China on its own. I have an acquaintance of mine who years ago was on the board for GE. And you think, oh, GE, that's a big company. And so somebody in China, this was years ago, went to their representative in China and said, look, you have two big businesses in China. One is wind turbines, and the other is medical equipment. We're going to steal your wind turbine business. We're going to steal all the technology. We're going to copy it.

your wind turbine business. We're going to steal all the technology. We're going to copy it. We don't want you to complain. If you don't complain, you get to keep your medical equipment business. If you do complain, we'll also steal your medical equipment business. And so there's no way that GE on its own could stand up to China. And so when it's an individual company, including Apple, our most powerful companies, or the NBA, and it's them versus the Chinese government, this company is going to lose. And that's why we need to, the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, others, we need to come together and have a united front and to establish standards. And that's why we're going to have to compromise with each other in order to make that kind of balancing possible. But if we're all competing with each other

for access to China, then they're going to play both sides against the middle. I just think with the massive amount of control they have over the population, why would they adjust? Well, the only reason that they'll adjust is if they face an environment where the benefit of adjusting outweighs the harm of doing what they're doing. And I think that we have to try, whether it's possible or not, maybe it's too late, we have to try to make that happen. Your friend who is the journalist, the Lou Dobbs of China, what did he do that got them angry? He was connected. There was a former security chief who was probably one of, if not the most

powerful people in China. And when Xi Jinping, the current leader, was coming up. That guy represented a different power center. So it's like a, and so my acquaintance was connected to that guy through some kind of patronage system that I don't, I don't fully understand. And so when that guy at the top of the pyramid got taken out, everybody else who was within his patronage pyramid, they were all in trouble. And that's the thing is China, the government, the system, it's a patronage system with loyalties. So in our system, how do you get to power? You kind of get elected, you need some funders and things like that. In China, you have a patronage system of all the people who support

you, and you kind of do favors for them, and they do favors for you. And the people who are in your patronage pyramid, you expect from them total loyalty. And in exchange for that loyalty, they get rewards. And as you go up the system, you have a bigger patronage pyramid. But sometimes there are different people with different patronage pyramids. And that's what's happening now with Xi Jinping. Actually, right now, they're doing a major purge of the intelligence service. And so there are all these people who are being kicked out. It's not because they're corrupt, because basically the entire system is corrupt. It's because they are corrupt in service of somebody who is deemed not loyal

to Xi Jinping. And when you say they're being kicked out, they're not just being kicked out. Like your friend was vanished. Yeah. I mean, in some cases, you lose your job. In some cases, you lose your life. In some cases, you lose your liberty. And in some cases, you lose your job. In some cases, you lose your life. In some cases, you lose your liberty. And in some cases, you lose your life. I think that the number of people who are straight out executed is probably, I mean, it used to be tons. It used to be millions. Now it's much, much less.

But certainly- Well, what happens to them? So you can lose your job. You can be under house arrest, under constant surveillance. You can be put in prison, as some people are. But you certainly know that if you speak up, you're going to be in trouble. As a matter of fact, I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with somebody I know who's a professor at a, I won't mention the school, but who's an expert in how this whole system works and in touch with

all of the Chinese dissidents from the old days from Tiananmen Square. And I was asking him, let's just say that there's somebody in China who has some really important information about the origins of the pandemic. How could they get that information out? And he thought about it for a while. And certainly, maybe they could send an encrypted email, but they think it would be a super high risk. And the only thing he could come up with was maybe they could get in touch with somebody from the U.S. embassy and try to sneak in the door and then be able to speak freely once they got there. I mean, this was like the world's expert in how people in China who had really highly sensitive information could get that information out in a way

that they would not think that they and their family were at risk. And you have no idea what happened to your friend, the Lou Dobbs of China. So I'm sure he's still in prison. His name's Rui Chenggang, I'll mention it now. Yeah, and I'm sure he's in prison. He hasn't, I mean, maybe he'll reappear. And as a result of this, this was, I don't know, six, five, six years ago. Maybe he'll reappear. And maybe as a result of this podcast, he's out there and we'll get pictures online of him, you know, living it up. But I certainly haven't heard anything.

I know he just one day to the next vanished. Just was in the wrong circle. Wrong circle. And the Jack Ma billionaire guy, he criticized China openly. Yeah, he did. But he had this special role for many years as this high profile. He was basically the face of Chinese business. Yeah.

And he could speak openly and honestly. And he was this great Chinese success story. And I think they wanted him to be the face of the new Chinese entrepreneur. And he had this great story of how he was just this little local guy, and he heard about the internet, and he had this kind of folksy wisdom

that made him really popular. And then they grew and they started these different, Alibaba started these different financial firms like Ant Financial, and they grew. And all of a sudden, there was an institution that had power that was really relevant. And the government said, hey, wait a second, we don't want that. And unlike in another country where they could say, well, how can we think about regulation? The whole point was, we want to deliver a message that even the wealthiest person in China is not free from control. And the other point, and this is, it's a broader point connected to what we were talking about, about international competition.

And that is, when we think of a company here in the United States, whoever they are, Apple, we don't really think of them as a state actor. When Apple is going and doing deals somewhere else. But in China, if you're a big company, you don't have the ability to buck the Chinese government. I mean, the Chinese government mandates that there be a communist party cell in all of these big, big companies. And that doesn't mean that every day you have

the local political boss telling you, do this, do that. But you know that if you do something that is not to the liking of the government, or if the government says you must do this particular thing, and whether it's Huawei making their computer code accessible or anybody else, the companies aren't in a position on important things to say no to the government. And that's why when we interact with Chinese companies, especially the big ones, we need to recognize they aren't companies like the way our companies are companies, like the way most European companies. These are quasi-state actors. That's terrifying. It's just terrifying that a company or that a country rather as big as China with over a billion people can operate like that with such an iron fist in this information age in 2021. That they have their internet locked down, that they have their population completely under control, and they could even expand that to Hong Kong.

Yeah. And so it is scary. And the scary thing, I mean, is that they're actually really good at it. North Korea, they have their population completely under control, and they're just bad at it. There's no good outcome. China, their economy is growing, even in spite of the pandemic. The country is getting stronger. They're eradicating poverty. I mean, they're doing a lot of things. And there's a trade-off between the government and the people. And the people don't have a choice,

so they have to accept it. And it's scary that it's happening, but it's also scary that they're really good at it. And that's the challenge to us. I mean, in retrospect, the Soviet Union was kind of doomed from the start. How could that system have worked? And you see the old movies and there's like the fat guy with the sweaty hair and the bad suit making decisions, thinking, oh, that was never going to work. These guys, I mean, they have developed a highly competitive system. And they're competing with us. And they have the goal of being the world's leading country by 2049.

I'm afraid of living in that world, a world that is defined by China's norms. And so that's why for me, the lesson for us is we better make us the best version of ourselves that we possibly can be. And that means, like you were mentioning, to think about how do we want to build our culture and our society? How do we make sure that our businesses are as competitive as possible? How do we build alliances with our partners around the world because we need them? And I think this is the real lesson. We can't act like

nothing matters. And I feel like one of the tragedies of these Trump years is that we've acted like nothing matters. We have such a head start over the rest of the world that we don't need to focus every day about how do we strengthen ourselves? How do we improve our society? How do we deepen the connections between us and our friends and partners around the world? And now I think we're getting back to that, but that's what we have to do. And we have to make sure that we don't become them to beat them. That's what's scary to me. And that people are embracing this idea of the government having more control over people. I mean, you go to Washington DC now and there's armed guards surrounding the Capitol now and there's green zone, and there's barbed wire and the whole deal.

It's like, what are we doing? Yeah, I agree. And that's this tragedy. And that's why I hope that we can have a renaissance here in the country, because we've certainly taken a bad turn, but maybe there's a positive way. But I also think we need to ask, what can we learn from them? Because there are things that China is actually doing well. What do you think they're doing well that we can learn from? One is they've made huge progress in eradicating poverty. It's been a national priority, and they are achieving it. What have they done?

Well, they've brought 700 million people out of abject poverty. Our poverty problem isn't as bad as theirs is, but they've really put a focus on that. But what did they do to do that? It was through agricultural policy, which wasn't all perfect, but they had a series of policies, especially to increase the livelihood, to improve the livelihoods of rural people through greater access. I mean,

they basically opened up a highly restrictive agricultural sector. And they were, this is something, they had industrial policies. They were very smart of thinking, how do they develop through the different stages of development? So they started with this high labor manufacturing. of development. So they started with this high labor manufacturing. So when I compare a country like China, where they had kind of no manufacturing, and then all of a sudden, all this low quality crap was suddenly made in China. And because of that, though, they brought all of these really poor people into the lower middle class. And then on top of that, they started to build more of a market economy and they could lever up. India, another country that's roughly the same size population, they didn't do that.

And so India in a way has missed that level of high employment manufacturing. And that's why India is stuck with these hundreds of millions of people who are still in abject poverty. And then industrial policy. I mean, we used to have industrial policy in the United States in the war years and post-war years. And we thought, well, it's government and academia and business need to work together. Then we went all the way to the other end of the spectrum. We think, well, government needs to stay out of the way. It's just a bunch of kids in their garage, and they're going to do everything. And now, I think in response to the China threat, even people like Marco Rubio are starting to say, well, what's the right relationship

between government, business, and academia? And I think that we would, if we just said everything that we do is the best and nobody else is, no one else can compete, I think that is going to be a losing hand for us. But we also need to say, what are the stuff that we're great at and how can we be better? Oof, this is not a rosy picture you're painting.

I don't see with our current climate, with so much there there's so much chaos involved uh with us socially and politically and so little trust in the actual government and particularly like look what they say they're going to do versus what they actually do who you vote in you vote in people based on promises that are rarely, rarely ever achieved. Yeah, I know. There's a real danger. And that's why so many people are looking to the history of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, where there were these things that you have like this big civilization and it grows and it's strong and then it starts to fall apart and then people are trying to fix it and then it falls apart.

Well, that's the analogy that they're making about us right now. Yeah. And that's, there is one possible future for us that really sucks. And the way I say that, I spent a lot of time, I'm a big fan of Mongolia. And if you're in Mongolia in the 14th century, you think, well, yeah, we've had a couple of bad decades, but we're the Mongols. We were the biggest land empire in the world. Of course, we're going to get everything back. And now Mongolia, it's a big place with very few people, but the whole empire was gone. Not that we need to have an empire. It'd be more shocking if that doesn't happen to us, right? Historically. Well, I mean, there's no natural floor and there's no natural ceiling. So

everything that we have is up for grabs every day. And if we want to climb higher, we have to get to work climbing higher. And if we want to fall lower, we just let go and stop climbing and just assume that everything we have now, we'll always have. Because we're living off of the hard work of past generations. And we have to be adding credit, not taking credit. And we've done the worst thing ever is we've given children a sense of entitlement. That they're entitled to success and they're entitled to all these things. And it's being denied them. You know, I would have said that a year ago.

But as I was saying before, I have been so inspired by these young people who I've worked very closely with over the last year through our community of One Shared World, OneShared.World. And now we have a partnership that we're doing with Model United Nations called MUN Impact. And it's kind of this crazy thing that we're doing, but we're having, at the end of March, we're having 10 different debates all around the world in English, French, Spanish, and Russian. And the goal of every one of these debates is to negotiate a model United Nations resolution guaranteeing clean water, basic sanitation and hygiene, and essential pandemic protection for everyone on Earth by 2030.

Then we have a small team of experts that are going to take these resolutions negotiated by these kids and turn it into a resolution that looks every bit as professional as a resolution passed by the United Nations. Then we're going to have a global advocacy campaign saying, all right, a bunch of kids can negotiate an answer to help not just protect the most vulnerable people on Earth, but to recognize if the poorest people on Earth don't have water and sanitation, guess what? The virus is going to mutate there and our vaccines won't make a difference. And then we're going to call on world leaders to actually pass a real resolution and try to actually solve this

problem. So there's hope, but we need to be creative in how to harness this hope and turn it into something real. Well, you're talking about a group of people that sound very promising, but how large are their numbers? So it's not huge. I mean, these communities are in the, I would say, total is a thousand. Oh, Jesus. No, I know, but the reason why programs like this have so much impact is that I do think there's a lot of hope. I do think young people, you know, a year and a half ago were sitting at home posting pictures of lasagna on Instagram and thinking that was life.

And I do think that a lot of young generation people have realized that the world that our generation has left them is broken in so many ways, and that if they don't rally to fix it, the future is going to look like this. So there's a huge amount of danger, but I also feel hope. I think the polarization, though, is stronger now than ever before. And I think the problems that people are focusing on in in terms of like in comparison to the threat that we're experiencing we discussed for the last couple hours about china is relatively trivial and that we need to stop all that shit and work together and even then we're behind the curve because china's government has massive influence and control over their people and complete control over their business. Yeah, so we are behind the curve, but we are not out for the count.

My father came to this country as a refugee. I love this country. I believe in this country. But we have to fight for it to be its best. And I think this is one of those moments. And I couldn't agree more with you. I wonder if someone said that exact same thing in Rome one day.

For sure. No, for sure. I believe in Rome. We're going to be rocking deep in the 1900s. It's so true. So there's a better path and a worse path, and the question is, what can each of us and all of us do

to fight for the better path? Well, for sure, one of the most important things is our ability to communicate openly and freely so that we understand these problems and we realize that our differences are far smaller than the things that we have in common. We tend to highlight our differences, and which is part of the problem with today's social media algorithms is it enhances those differences. It makes those differences seem like they're the only thing that matters. And that's really, it's really the first time ever in my life that it seems like that, that people are concentrating more

on our differences than on what we have in common. Yeah, I agree. And the sad thing is, you would say, like in some abstract way, well, maybe if like hostile Martians show up, we'll realize, oh, geez, we're all humans. That's Reagan's speech, right? I know. But right now, we have hostile Martians. We have this terrible vaccine that's killing so many people. You mean virus. I'm sorry.

You are so right. Terrible virus. Wonderful vaccine. Yeah. Terrible virus that's killing all these people. I think, well, now is the time to rally. And that's why it's been a heartbreak that we've kind of fought over these things. But I still think that there's an opportunity to come together. But to do it, we have to do it. And it seems so big and abstract for people and say like i'll

come together it's like yeah sure kumbaya but maybe if we kind of break it down and everybody can like maybe if everyone who's listening to this podcast can have like one nice tweet right now that's some issue how about this just stay the fuck off twitter yeah just live your life go out and meet people if you go out in the rest of the world, in most of the world at least, well, the problem is in a lot of cities, the world has become like Twitter. That's the problem. In terms of the pandemic

has exacerbated a lot of the financial struggle and crime has risen radically, particularly violent crime and it's become like I don't have a lot of hope for like Los Angeles. When I go back to Los Angeles, and I see where I used to live, I'm like, this is not going to get better. Well, my good friend is the mayor, Eric Garcetti, and he's in this really

tough position, because it really, it's exactly what you say, things are pulling apart. The wealthy have gotten wealthier, which is insane over the course of the pandemic. The poor have gotten poorer. And we don't have this sense of common responsibility to solve problems. Well, they've also handled it horribly. They've managed the pandemic in Los Angeles as bad as could possibly be. Well, all I can say is just before the pandemic, I was in Los Angeles, and I was giving a talk at the LA Public Library, and I was just staying at a hotel right there. And I thought, all right, this is a nice morning.

I'm going to go for a run. And I went running, and I was like a few blocks away. And literally, I mean, I've lived in a lot of rough places I've been to. I lived in Cambodia for two years. I've been in Afghanistan. I've been in a lot of rough places I've been to. I lived in Cambodia for two years. I've been in Afghanistan. I've been in war zones. I don't know if I've seen conditions as really just desperate as these blocks and blocks of these homeless shantytowns. In America.

In Los Angeles. In Los Angeles. I couldn't believe it. Well, there's a great documentary on that hotel where that woman died. It's on Netflix, the Cecil Hotel. And it documents, there's a guy on there that I'd love to talk to who's a historian on Skid Row. And they've sort of engineered Skid Row. They took all these people that were homeless and drug addicts and criminals and they kept them in Skid Row.

They released them there and they kept them there. And they put the homeless shelters there and the food kitchens. It's terrible. And it's way worse than people imagine. If you have this idea of what Los Angeles is and you've never been to Skid Row, you have no idea. It's fucking insane. And it was like that when I was filming Fear Factor back in the early 2000s. So we're talking about like 2003, 2004. It was just horrible. Like I couldn't believe how bad

it was and no one was talking about it. Yeah. Because it's contained into this one area. But now it's expanding and it's all throughout downtown. It's not just Skid Row anymore. Yeah. And that's coming back to what we were saying before about what can we learn from China? But China has set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty, and they're working toward it. We may disagree with a lot of things that they're doing. We should do that. And we're not doing it the way we should be. I mean, certainly some of the early decisions—

Well, what can they do? Talk to your boy, Eric Garcetti. Yeah. What can he do about Los Angeles that he hasn't done? And they do. Talk to your boy, Eric Garcetti. What can he do about Los Angeles that he hasn't done? It was certainly one of the challenges that he has is like Chicago has a strong mayor system where the mayor has the responsibility and the power. Los Angeles has a weak mayor system where there's the nominal responsibility, but not all of the power. But I certainly think that in our society more generally, unless we recognize that we're all in this together, that if we want to address the problems of the poorest people, I mean, there's certain things, I mean, certainly housing, health care, mental health, sanitation,

I mean, some of the zoning things like you mentioned. There are a lot of things that could be done, but we need to really solve these problems systemically. I mean, the new Biden stimulus bill has some things certainly which are welcome to help poorer people, but it has to happen at the federal government, at the state, at the city, and also at the personal level. I mean, I think people need to be empowered to solve their own problems. And I think that these are holistic things. And like I said, I mean, I'm not the world's genius on how to solve all of Los Angeles's problems, but I do know that we are the society that we put people on the moon, we've done all of these things. If we decided that it was a national priority to massively reduce extreme poverty,

for sure, I think it would be achievable. It would be wonderful if we put an effort into that. But there's also a massive resistance to doing anything like that because people consider it a form of socialism. And I don't, I mean, I am a capitalist, but I think there are elements of socialism that are desirable. Well, there's elements of socialism we embrace, right? Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is-

The fire department. Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, I mean, again, that's what this virus is showing us, is we're all connected and the economics are just the same. I mean, it's, or even connecting this to genetics. I mean, when I was in that horrible shantytown in Los Angeles, or when I was in refugee camps all around the world, you know, I always think, well, let's just imagine if we could do a genome sequencing of every single person there. And we have a little more knowledge of how to understand

genome sequencing. Like, could we, you know, 20 years from now say, like, you see this kid here who's born in this totally crappy place with no access to quality education? That person has the ability to be a Mozart, the potential to be a Mozart, to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. We see other people in our own society and we don't see potential. It's not just a crime, it's anti-competitive. Coming back to this China point, if we want to compete with China, let's empower, let's educate everybody in America so that everybody can be part of this engine of making our society better and stronger.

Well, I've always said that the one way if you want to make America great again is to have less losers. Like, how do you have less losers? Well, you've got to take all these areas that have historically been impoverished, like, you know, places like South Side of Chicago that for decades have been riddled in crime and gangs and do something about it. And if we put the kind of effort that, remember the economic stimulus that they first did when the pandemic first hit? Because we've got to save these businesses. Well, how come they don't do that about these? I mean, $2 trillion now, we're up at almost $5 trillion. Imagine someone said, all right, here's $5 trillion. We're just going to take $1 trillion and we're going to try to solve this problem, not just by spending money, but by having a

systemic approach. And then the other thing that we could do that I've always said that we should do is we should tell every embassy in the world, every US embassy in the world, we've got a new job for you. We're going to give you, and just pick a number, let's say 500 green cards a year, 1,000 green cards a year. And your mission is to search this country for the smartest, most creative, most ambitious people you can find, give them a green card, and say, we want you to move to the United States to help build our country. We could just, I mean, this is such a great country. We could just, I mean, this is such a great country. We could just have all these people.

Instead, what we're doing is keeping people out, or some of those people are coming here, they're getting educated here, and then we kick them out after they graduate. So I think that if we really want to grow our economy, our competitiveness, we should do it. In one of my novels, I have a thing called the Department of National Competitiveness. And it was in the story. That sounds so Orwellian. You know, it does. But here's the basic premise is that the two parties can't agree with each other. And so finally, there's a breakthrough

and they create this Department of National Competitiveness that comes out and says, all right, if the United States wants to be the most competitive country in the world, here are the things that we're going to do. And then everybody has to vote on it, kind of like with the old base closings in an up or down vote.

But I do think it doesn't have to be the government. Like we should say, well, what do we have to do to make America the most vibrant, most competitive country in the world, as we've been for the better part of a century? And I think we need to come together around building that. I think the way you're looking at it, though, is looking at it like a country. And most people look at it like, how can I get ahead? They don't, and that's historically been very beneficial. If you look at it as a country, well, you're not going to fix this thing on your own.

You put all your effort into fixing that, you're going to wind up broke and fucked up and angry and bitter. And I should have just concentrated on myself. Yeah. So it's not unhealthy for people to prioritize their thing. I mean, you want people to say, well, I'm going to build a great business and that's going to help a country, but it can't be all or nothing. I think we need to say, well, my mission in life is to do X or whatever it is,

but some piece of that has to be connected to a sense of the commons. And I still, I don't think that that hope has expired. I mean, like I said before, I'm from Kansas City. And even in places like Kansas City, there are people who have a really strong sense of community, but somehow community has stopped being the whole country. It's been a little piece of the country. And I don't know how we get that back. I mean, but again, this is a country that has civil war, and somehow we came back together. So there's that possibility, but you're right, it's going to be hard. I'm not totally pessimistic. I'm generally an optimistic person. But my worry is that by the time we recognize what's happening, it's going to be too late.

China already has the biggest navy. China has this – they had a massive show of force the other day where they showed over the last – I forget how many years. They've built their navy to be the largest force in the ocean in the world. And they're doing that with everything. And we're not. And so we're not. We're still well ahead of China. But they are advancing and we are stuck in this place.

And we are embracing censorship. We're embracing these organizations controlling the flow of information. these organizations controlling the flow of information. We're embracing a lot of the things that are the antithesis of what makes America great. We are, and there's some progress and hope, and certainly we just came through a hard-fought election, and there are little seeds being planted. Will they grow? I don't know. But I definitely think, I mean, I don't talk about this stuff about China just to scare people. What I really want people to hear is there's a competition in the world. And that competition is to define what are the norms under which we all live. One of the reasons why it was great that America, with our allies, won the Second World War is we set the rules for a big part of the world and then more of the world, and all of our lives have played out in the context of those rules. Now people don't like globalization, but the ideas of international law and all those things that allow us, have allowed us to live as we have were in many ways

created by the United States. We thought we had a peer competitor in the Soviet Union, and then it turned out that they were less of a peer than we thought. China really is a peer competitor. They have a very different vision of the world than what we have. If we don't want to live in a world that is defined by China's rules, now is the time to start strengthening our society, building our relationships, doubling down on our best values, whether it's democracy, inclusion, human rights, because it won't be that we just don't do enough. We languish. We don't take our democracy seriously. We don't think about how we'd like the world to be organized. And then 10 years from now, 20 years from now, or two years

from now, there's some moment and we realize, oh, now it's too late. Now we've already lost. That's the worry, right? Yeah. We're not – and it needs to be universally recognized by both parties across the entire country. Yes. And that's probably part of the problem too, that we do only have two parties.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Everybody solves the last problem and then you get the new problem. So there's a stability that comes. Yeah, well, there's a stability that comes with the two party system that was a reaction in some ways against the this thing over there was like the era where it was the political party system. And so all the parties were fighting each other. and pathologies over time. And if we don't have some kind of process of rejuvenation and renewal, we become kind of caricaturish versions of ourselves and our systems become so dysfunctional. And that was one of the reasons why we had such a hard time under President Trump is that previous presidents had said, well, all right, the system is breaking down. Let's put more power into the presidency so the president can rule by executive order, essentially by decree. And then when we had presidents from both parties who we see, well, he seems like a

reasonable person and they're making executive orders to fix problems that Congress couldn't solve. It's like, all right, that's okay. Then all of a sudden, we have somebody else who's making executive orders that maybe some of us didn't agree with. And so it seems like the right answer is to think, well, how can we build a system that works better? And that's the challenge that we're facing now as I see it. Jamie, thank you very much. You scared the shit out of me. It made me very gloomy.

I'm going to be bummed out for the rest of the day. Awesome. My great pleasure to join you, Joe. I'm not really that bummed out, but I am concerned. And I think rightly so. And I think you highlighted a lot of really important stuff. Awesome. Thank you.

Really my great pleasure. Thanks for being here and your book, Hacking Darwin. It's available Awesome. Thank you. Really my great pleasure. Thanks for being here and your book Hacking Darwin. It's available everywhere. Go get it. It's excellent. Appreciate you man. Thank you very much for being here.

Thanks Joe. Goodbye everybody.