The Jordan Harbinger Show - 253: Jamie Metzl | Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) is a technology futurist and geopolitical expert, entrepreneur, media commentator, Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, and author of Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. What We Discuss with Jamie Metzl: Why the speed at which genetic engineering is progressing is akin to Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon just six years after the first flight of the Wright brothers. Why the genetic traits that seem universally beneficial to us today may turn out to be as ephemeral (and useful to humanity) as powdered wigs and skinny jeans. The danger our species faces when we're able to selectively edit out genes that cause disorders without fully understanding their potential benefits or evolutionary purpose (e.g., recessive sickle cell disease carriers' resistance to malaria). Why China — run by a government that values the good of the country over the rights and privacy of its citizens — is better poised than the US and other Western countries to excel in the application of genetic science. Why addressing the values of equity and diversity today is important for avoiding genetic stagnation and greater friction between the haves and have-nots of tomorrow. And much more… Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/253 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFillopo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. If we brought a baby from a thousand years ago in a time machine to today, it would largely be the same. But if we brought a baby from a thousand years in the future, or even 100 years in the future, back to now, it would have outlier traits and genetic disease resistance that we've never even seen. This is because gene editing technology is about to change our lives and the world in the next few decades. The upside of being able to alter physical and mental traits, such as appearance and IQ, is just too good to pass up.

But who gets to make these important decisions that will affect the entire human gene pool? Is it the government? Is it corporations? Is it the Chinese Communist Party? these all seem like bad options that could lead to bad outcomes. What will AI and big data do to speed up this process? And what are the limits of human capability? We're about to find out in what many experts believe might be the next arms race using stem cells instead of nukes. Today on the show, Jamie Metzell will help us understand what we're getting ourselves into

here as us humans begin to hack our own DNA and what it means to be human in the first place. If you want to know how I meet all these fascinating souls like Jamie Metzell, well, it's about systems. It's about tiny habits for outreach and keeping in touch. And I'm teaching you how to do that for free, for personal or professional reasons. That's all over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in good company.

Now let's get after with Jamie Metzell. We were talking before the show and we were kind of going, oh, you know, hyperbole, this, hyperbole, that. I am not a guy who typically engages in hyperbole, but when you say we're headed for a genetic revolution, it might not be hyperbole in this case, right? This is happening. Well, this is it. I mean, we've been evolving for about four billion years since we started as a single cell organism. And for four billion years, we've evolved by the random mutation and natural selection, Darwinian evolution. And now we are amassing these incredibly powerful tools that are allowing us to shape life, shape life on earth and shape our own life. And these are the early days, but we are developing the

capabilities to read, write, and hack all of our genetics, including our own. And the future is going to be very, very different from the past. And we need to open our minds to what is coming. And it's coming sooner rather than later. Okay. So when we talk about hacking genetics, this is something that sci-fi is sort of taken and run with, there's a lot of other people that are like, oh, we're going to be able to choose using CRISPR and all this stuff. We'll get into that in a second, but you illustrate this really well in hacking Darwin where you say, if we brought a baby from a thousand years ago in a time machine and we brought him back to today, it would be pretty much the same organism, right? Yep. But if we bring a baby from a thousand years in the future, and I'm thinking probably more like 100 or 200 years

in the future, I don't know where you're thinking, but from your book, that's what it looks like. If we bring that baby from the future back to now, it's going to have a lot of outlier traits in terms of intelligence and athletic prowess, genetic disease resistance, things we have never seen in one human. So what's going on here? Why is this the case? Well, it's the case because, one, we over the last 50 plus years have learned to understand to read the genome. That's what we call genome sequencing. We have the ability to select embryos. So we've changed the way. We've changed the way that we're doing human procreation from inside the body, the old-fashioned way of sex, to outside of the body where we're extracting eggs from the woman, from the prospective mother

through in vitro fertilization or IVF, fertilize those eggs and outside of the body. And then what we're able to do is sequence cells from each of those unimplanted embryos. And we're able to select in a process called pre-implantation genetic testing, which of those early stage embryos to implant. So that's already revolutionary. And the more people who get their genome sequence through the transformation of our healthcare, the more we're going to have these data pools of billions of people. And with those data sets of genetic information and information about how those genes are expressed over the course of people's lives, we're going to increasingly crack the code of complex biology and genetics. And so we're going to be able to select embryos,

not just based on who's going to have simple genetic diseases where there's just one single gene mutation, like an on-off switch, but for very complex diseases, disorders, and traits. And then we're going to be able to make not just 10 or 15 eggs, which are extracted from a woman in traditional IVF, but 10,000, 100,000 eggs from each parent, particularly each woman. And we're going to do that through stem cell technologies. And then there's a whole range of other technologies, gene editing tools like CRISPR, that are already allowing scientists. And it's way, way early, but to go into these pre-implanted embryos and make a small number of genetic changes. And so this world is just, it's changing so, so fast. And we're at the beginning.

But you can just see from here where we're going and the rate of change is speeding up massively. So you said a lot right there. I'm going to parse this a little bit because I think people just went, what the hell are we even talking about? Yeah, all right. Slow it down. Good. No, it's all good.

It's all good. There's a lot to discuss here. When we say a thousand eggs, a lot of people are going, well, wait a minute. Women don't have a thousand eggs. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, men have, we got plenty of, what are they called, zygotes. I got zygotes for days. Yeah.

Well, you may not have zygotes, but you have sperm cells. Average male ejaculation has about a billion sperm cells. Those aren't zygotes. It's been a while. Yeah, no, Zygote are very early, age embryos. Oh, okay, no. So I have zero zygote's, right? I had one earlier, but now it's a baby. Yeah, now I've got it. Yep. Yeah, now I've got a baby. Okay, so the way that we would do this is we won't need sperm cells and eggs from women in the future. We're going to be able to use

stem cells that are what sort of brought from my skin or whatever. Where do we get these? Yeah, yeah. Sorry, so for sperm, it's just so damn easy to get that we may as well get it from men. I mean, like I mean, I talk about, we're throwing it away. Seriously. I talk about this in the book. You know, I went to the fertility clinic to freeze my sperm and it's actually pretty easy. They walk you in the back. They, you know, there's no fancy science. They have like a little thing. It used to be a broom closet. You know, they got a video recorder and some ratty old magazines and they give you a plastic cup and that's that. And you get, you know, however somebody chooses to do it, you get about a billion sperm cells in average. So, so you don't need science.

We have old tried and true method. That's right. I've been trying to get rid of my sperm since 93, right? Exactly. A lot of kids have set up these things. It's kind of like a lemonade stand. And if you drop the price, I'm sure somebody will take it. That's right.

But all right. So the more complicated issue is our human eggs because your average woman going through human egg production is limited over the course of a woman's, life. It's just how human biology works. And so average woman who's going through IVF, and what IVF means is you have your eggs extracted from the body. So rather than having a baby through sex, the eggs are taken out of the woman's body through a small surgical procedure. And so like I said before, there's about 10 or 15 eggs are extracted in average IVF. But with stem cell technology, you do it an entirely different way. And you could use any adult cell, but the easiest way would be you take a skin graft. So if you take a little skin graft, that's millions of cells. You use a process called technical name doesn't really matter. It's called Induce Pluripotent stem cell process, IPS. A Shinya Yamanaka, who's a Japanese scientist, won the 2012 Nobel Prize for this. And what you do is you use these four genes to transform these adult cells into stem cells. So a stem cell,

as you know, is a cell that can be any other type of cell. Like when your father's sperm fertilized your mother's egg, that was a single cell, but that cell had the ability to grow into everything into you. And so now we have stem cells. And let's say we have a million of these skin cells that we've induced into becoming stem cells. Then we induced those stem cells into becoming egg precursor cells. So it's in the process of becoming an egg. And then the next step is turning those egg precursor cells into eggs. Now we have one million eggs, which are all the quote unquote natural eggs of that same mother. So we've basically expanded our ability to create eggs for women at the same level or nearing the same level as we have to create sperm for men. And the reason that is that the

reason that's important is that if you have, let's call it a million or 10,000, whatever the number is, eggs, and you fertilize those eggs with your billion sperm cells, now you have 10,000 options. And so you have those 10,000 pre-implanter, unimplanted, early stage embryos, and use an automated process that doesn't yet fully exist, but it is in the process of being created. So they grow for about five days, you extract a few cells from each of these, let's call them 10,000 early stage embryos. And these are cells that would have gone on to become part of the placenta if any one of these embryos were to continue growing. And then you sequence the cells from each one of those embryos and the cost of sequencing cost about a billion dollars in 2003. And it's about $600 now.

and it's going towards essentially zero or close to zero within a decade. So now you sequence these 10,000 fertilized eggs. And now you have real options because just imagine how much variation there's going to be among 10,000 different embryos, pre-implanted embryos. Right. Okay, so what I can do is go, look, I want a kid that is over six feet tall and is going to be, I don't know, a certain level of intelligence or something like that and has blue eyes and whatever sort of combination. And you go, well, the first 9,000, he's all under six feet tall. So we got a thousand

different embryos now. Okay, these are all over six feet tall and then like a few hundred of blue eyes. And out of those few hundred, here's the one that has the best shot at a high IQ. Let's pick that one. That one is the one that we put in the womb and gestate or whatever. Yeah, that's exactly. And so the way will work is you will have to establish your, priority list of these are the things that are most important to me and then on down from there. There are always tradeoffs. I mean, that in all of us, there are tradeoffs. We're more one thing. We're less another thing. But again, when you're choosing from 10,000, you have real options. So let's just say you were to come in and say, well, here is my list. And again, this isn't

something that is fully doable now, but it is well on the way. It is, in my view, certainly coming that there's no science that I write about or talk about that is like, something, and I also write science fiction that is some kind of imaginary thing. This is very real science that will develop and it just needs to grow at even a slower rate than it's already growing and we will get there. So, but let's just say you say, well, here's my list. Most important for me is health. I want to have a kid who's not going to die young of some terrible genetic disease. I also value health span. So I want a kid who's going to live a long and healthy life. And there are a few things like that, which feel at least to people like they're a little bit more universal. But then you get

to these very human attributes like height, I mean, certain like the appearance issues, hair color, eye color, even skin color. And then there are all of these issues like higher or lower genetic component of IQ and IQ isn't entirely genetic, taller or shorter, which is, again, that's something where we understand the genetics of height pretty well right now. Personality style, more outgoing, less outgoing. I mean, it's what we're really doing is looking under the hood of what it means to be a human being. And that's something that's really going to be a shock to the system for all of us who've grown up on mythologies or just on a set of observations and experiences that are very different. We're just going to look so bizarrely ancient to this new superhuman. I can just picture my

great-grandson or maybe not even that far off going, wait, wait, wait, let me get this straight. just rolled the dice and whatever came out was you? And we're like, yeah. And they go, that's ridiculous. Didn't people come out too short and have one ear or they're missing a finger? Or they had some sort of other genetic issue or learning disability or they were to this or that or not enough of this and that. And it's like, yeah, all the time, human variance.

It was totally normal and it wasn't a big deal. And then it's just like they're living in Gattaca where it's like, wow, you're natural. That's so weird. Yeah. And I think that is one possible outcome, and it could even be a likely outcome, but we need to also take it all with a grain of salt because all of these things that we think are good, are good within the context of the world that we know. I mean, there's not good and bad in evolution. There's just better or worse suited for a given environment. If you're the white moth in the winter, you're kind of screwed in the summer.

So we have all of these things. like there are certain types of intelligence that we measure with things like IQ that we value in the world that we know, but the world could change. I mean, imagine right now there's a Russian scientist who's saying that he has five parents lined up who want to have their future children gene edited as embryos to eliminate a mutation that will cause hereditary deafness. But people in the deaf community would say, hey, deafness is not a. disability. And in our kind of day-to-day world, it's hard to be deaf. But imagine there was some UFO visited and this UFO was making this screeching noise that drowned out all sound on earth.

It would turn out that those deaf people who had learned lip reading and sign language, they were the superheroes with superpowers. And so, yes, I mean, we really need to be careful about this stuff. But where we are going is we are going to have, whether it's children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren, and they're going to say, wait a second, you guys died from viruses? Like, we are immune to all viruses. And you guys, you thought it was normal to get dementia when you were in your 90s? Like, we're not getting dementia until we're 110. And that is certainly what's coming. And it's just a very, very different way of thinking about life itself than what we have come to in the past.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Jamie Metzel. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode, so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Jamie Metzell. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Jamie Metzell. So is there a Moore's Law? Moore's Law is this sort of technology curve where like 64 kilobits of RAM in 1989 or something is like a thousand bucks. And now your iPhone has, I don't know, a thousand times or whatever, you know, way more than that.

And then the price goes down, the ability to put these little transistors or whatever semiconductors goes up. So is there a Moore's Law curve for biology? You know, is this? Yes. I can't remember what it's called. My friend Rob Reed mentioned this. It's not a curve, though. It's more like it goes down and then it really drops crazily.

Exponentially. Yeah. So basically, certainly for genome sequencing. So Moore's Law, the computing power roughly doubles every two years for the same price. is kind of the shorthand for it. And so if you applied Moore's law to genome sequencing and you started at a billion dollars in 2003, we wouldn't be close to the $600 today. And we wouldn't be close to the close to zero. It's going to be well within a decade. So the cost of sequencing is advancing at a rate far faster than Moore's law would suggest. I talk a lot and write about in the book this

concept of exponential change, which I think is what Rob also talks about, is that, that anything that becomes digitized gets on this curve, kind of like a Moore's Law curve. But with the whole world networked, nobody has to solve a problem that's already been solved by somebody else. And so we have more people who are educated, more people who are working on these incredible thorny problems. And every time something gets solved, I mean, different parts of the world figured out copper and bronze thousands of years different from each other. But imagine if, you know, the first civilization that discovered bronze was able just to send an email to everybody else. And our, hey, we just discovered bronze.

Here's the formula. That means, all right, great. We're 2,000 years ahead developmentally. And that's what's happening every day. So that's why our imagination about the speed of change is often too conservative because we're looking in the rearview mirror rather than imagining what exponential change is going to look like going forward. And then we look at these timeframes. I mean, so I was on a panel here in New York a couple of months ago with this amazing woman, Jennifer Doudna, who's one of the inventors of the CRISPR cast-9 gene editing system, which I know we'll talk about. So this CRISPR gene editing was invented in 2012, seven years ago. The first CRISPR gene-edited babies were born six years later in 2018. So this connection between when basic science comes up with a concept and when that science,

Science begins to be applied in ways that are changing our world. It's just so fast. And so that's why this is so difficult as an issue because we had time. I mean, the industrial age was very, very difficult to adjust to. But it happened over, you know, at least decades, in some cases, centuries. I mean, this is happening over years. Yeah, that's almost like saying, hey, you know, we can make gunpowder shoot these little fireworks. And then someone's like, well, that means we can go to space.

It's like, whoa, hang on a second. Exactly. And this is like, hey, look, we might theoretically be able to edit genes using this crazy, gigantic, multibillion dollar machine. And then someone half a decade later is like, we just made a baby using a machine the size of a microwave to edit the gene. I mean, not the, didn't make the baby with the microwave, but we edited the gene. The baby's alive.

It wasn't this crazy theoretical thing that existed for three decades beforehand. It just, the same team could have done this. Yeah, that's the amazing things. were people alive. Now we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. There were people alive at the time of the moon landing who had also been alive at the time when the Wright brothers had the first flight. But just imagine the Wright brothers having the first flight. And then the moon landing happening six years later. I mean, that's how to think about this pace of change. And it's just in many ways beyond the way our brains normally function. So we have to make our brains

function in ways that can take this in because it's challenging. It's rapid. And that's why this period of revolutionary technology, whether it's genomics or AI or nanotech, that's why it's so difficult for us to internalize. So tell us about what CRISPR is. A lot of people know what it is. A lot of people don't know what it is. But of course, we're for sure going to use CRISPR and other tech to mess with nature in an attempt to perfect it because the upside is just too good. So tell us. What CRISPR is and then, of course, why this is just an inevitability and not like some sort of sci-fi. So CRISPR is a form of gene editing. Let me just give me, go back a little bit.

Everybody I think understands that when you're, we talked about your father's sperm fertilizing your mother's egg, you have that single cell. That single cell has a blueprint for what you are going to be, what you can be. That blueprint is written in the code of your genome. And what CRISPR is is a gene editing tool. So if you just imagine that your genome is made of letters in three billion base pairs, it's like a word processing for genetics. And so basically it's hijacking an immunity process where bacteria has been defending itself against viruses. And I won't go into that because it's a little complicated. But basically, you tell this messenger, it's called a messenger RNA, where on the genome you want to go. And so this little molecular scissors goes there.

And then there's a cutting enzyme, which is called Cas9, and it just cuts out the place where you want to make a change. And you can either cut something and not replace it. And then your genome reattaches. Or you can cut it and place a little piece of genetic information that fits into this gap. and just place it there and your genome will just incorporate it. And so what this means is that we have this ability to rewrite the code of life. And people imagine, people jump from that to thinking, well, we're going to make babies like when you go to the Build a Bear workshop at your local mall, and you'll just say, I'll have one of these, one of those. And it's not going to be like that. But we increasingly will have this ability to rewrite the code of life. And there are limits on what we can do because if you make too many changes, cells can die. And because our genes are doing so many different things simultaneously. It's not that you have a tall gene and a short gene and a smart gene and whatever. Lots of our genes, our genes are multitasking all the time. So it's complicated to make changes, but we're already doing it. And so we already

have gene therapies, which are medical treatments to treat terrible genetic diseases. As a matter of fact, the first application of CRISPR in a human patient is starting now to treat sickle cell disease. But the use of CRISPR and gene editing tools like it, and people often have heard the word CRISPR, so they think that CRISPR is the story. Crisper is just a little piece of the story, and there will be much better and more precise gene editing tools than CRISPR, and I would argue even already are, but this ability to rewrite the code of life, that is where the power is. It's not just going to affect us. It's not going to affect just human health care and human reproduction, but there are these mechanisms called gene dries where we're using these tools of CRISPR where we can

fundamentally transform entire ecosystems doing things like releasing one mosquito. And this one mosquito has this little machine inside of its body so that when it procreates with another mosquito, this little machine transfers sexually from one mosquito one to mosquito two. And let's just say it does something that makes it sterile or changes the way it functions. And then those mosquitoes have babies and all those babies now have this little molecular biological machine inside of them. And so very quickly, through sexual reproduction, you could change an entire species. And that's why this is also powerful.

Wow, that's incredible. And sounds highly dangerous, right? Because we're like, oh, right, we're going to make it so mosquitoes can't carry malaria anymore. And it's like, yay. And then it's like, oh, but by the way, that means they're no longer nutritious enough for these other birds that eat them. So those die or the population dropped significantly.

And then those were the primary food for this other thing. Like these ripple effects in the food chain or just in the ecosystem in general could be irreversible. Because then what? Oh, just kidding. We got to release a whole bunch of malaria infested mosquitoes now. Oh, okay, that's going to go well, right? Stuart Brand, who's this incredible thinker who's been around for decades, has this wonderful quote, which is, we are as gods, so we better start getting good at it.

And we now have this ability to make all of those kinds of changes. And the danger is hubris. Yes, we can eliminate malaria using gene drives. But what if we crash entire ecosystems? And that's the challenge for us. Just because we have this incredible power doesn't mean that it's inevitable. We're going to use it wisely. If we want to use it wisely, we better be having some pretty serious conversations about

how to do it and that's not what's happening now. Yeah, of course. That's definitely not what's most people are going to ignore the ethics. That stuff comes later, right? Like, oh, progress, progress. Yep. And then, hey, should we be doing this? I don't know. It's profitable right now. Let's talk about that later. Yeah. And because the speed issue that I mentioned before, that becomes really dangerous because if we're going from the Wright brothers to the moon landing in six years, we're not going to have time to make sure that we're not having terrible Pinto experiences along the way. But those Pinto experiences are the stuff of life. And we are getting our hands on the levers of life. And that's a really big deal. Where was I recently? I can't remember now. I went to

an island group and they had a pig problem. And I said, how is there a pig problem? And they're like, yeah, if you hunt pigs, the government will pay you to come here and hunt pigs. So a lot of people come here and hunt pigs. And the problem is the boars are really dangerous and aggressive. And so we go and kill and there's alligators everywhere, so that's kind of dangerous to go and hunt because there's alligators everywhere. And I'm just thinking, how in the hell did this happen? How are their pigs, alligators,

and the pigs dig for food. So they cause massive erosion in this wetlands areas as well, these mangroves. And I thought, how the hell did this happen? Oh, back 100 years ago, some Europeans landed here, and they were like, hey, we need pigs

because we like pigs and we eat pigs, and they went, okay, great. And then a couple of them got away or the ship crashed, and they swam to shore. Dot, dot, dot, massive erosion, aggressive animals. Nothing eats them except for alligators,

which are usually in the water. So they're ruining this thing, and there's no way to get rid of them. And you see this in other areas, too, like, oh, hey, we like hunting rabbits. Let's bring rabbits to this area. Okay, well, now there's eight billion rabbits and they eat the birds or something.

Or they need to eat the rabbits, so they bring foxes, and instead of chasing the rabbits, they eat all these flightless birds. I think that was an Australia thing. These problems happened over a long period of time. They cause extinction. But what happens when we do something that affects humans like malaria, mosquitoes,

other types of genetics? I mean, we could crisper our way right into, hey, guess what, nobody's able to fight this thing off anymore. We thought this gene did nothing. Turns out it's the reason we don't get this weird bacteria that lives in caves that's now killed off 10% of humanity. Yeah, and that's why we need to try to avoid hubris. We have to be really careful.

And people who did all these other things probably thought they were doing something good or doing something neutral. But we don't learn the lessons about the implications of our actions often until far after the actions have been taken. And that's the challenge. I mean, we live in an ecosystem that humans have massively transformed. And we are the biggest driver of change pretty much on this entire planet, whether it's realized through climate change or agriculture or urbanization or pollution or anything else.

But we live still in an ecosystem. And if we crash that ecosystem, this could be really, really dangerous. And there's lots of ways that we could do it. We could do it by harming other species. We could do it by trying to engineer things that seem like a good idea, but maybe inadvertently or perhaps by intention, creating synthetic pathogens that our bodies can't defend ourselves against. So there's some really, really serious stuff here that we need to be mindful of and we need to start to lay the foundations to use these technologies as responsibly as

possible. But as you said before, the attraction of using them is going to be so strong. I mean, it's going to be, in my view, impossible for us to say, hey, these technologies are really powerful. Let's not use them in humans for 30 years so we can do a big study and then come out with some global plan about how we can best use them to optimize the benefits and minimize the harms. That might be a good idea. That's not how we operate. Of course, it's not how we operate. It's not how corporations operate. And it's certainly, look, even if the whole world gets together and says, look, we're going to do this, you really think countries like North Korea or China or China in combination with North Korea are going to be like, you know, we signed an agreement not to do

this and it could be a bad idea. Or it could give us this massive advantage. So let's just not do it. I mean, It's so, you can't hold technology back. Once one person or one party gets it, they're going to go hog wild. I mean, that's the whole point. And that's usually a good thing because it gets progress going, but in this case, progress could be the end of us. And look, your last name is Metzell here. You're clearly people of the book, right? You're Jewish. Does that family history give you any pause when you're talking about genetic selection and editing our genetic future? I mean, there's some uncomfortable questions that come up with eugenics, right? My father and grandparents came to the United States in 1948 as refugees from Nazism. So I am deeply and acutely aware in everything that I do,

the connections between talking about our genetic future and recognizing the terrible abuses that have been done in the name of genetics in the past. If you had asked the Nazis what they were doing, they would have said they were implementing the theories of Charles Darwin. That's what they thought they were doing. That was the essence of, of Nazism. And that's a big, big warning for us. I was on a panel a couple of months ago in Berkeley and I spoke alongside a really amazing poet who's the father of a daughter with Down syndrome. And he was talking about how that experience had made him just a better person and a deeper person. And for sure he was right. But it was hard to say in front of him, which I did, that 20 years from now,

seeing a kid with Down syndrome was going to be as rare as seeing a kid with polio today. It's not that it's not natural. It's just that kids won't have Down syndrome. And that's a really big, big deal because even if we're selecting from among 10,000 embryos, we are making normative decisions about what types of people have the opportunity to live and what types of people won't live. And what is the that say about people who may already exist with those kinds of conditions? So this stuff, it's really, really sensitive. And that's why I always say is this is a conversation about science in some ways. But the science is just what gets us to the table. The real conversation, the most important conversation for us, is the conversation about ethics. What are the values

that are going to guide us as we apply these incredibly powerful technologies? Yeah, this stuff gets a little uncomfortable, right? Because you start talking about eugenics and gene editing. And it's like, oh, well, what's undesirable? And that, unfortunately, look, people who are more intelligent, it's hard to argue that's not good. But what happens when everybody's like, well, my kid's seven and a half feet tall? Well, my kid's eight and a half feet tall. I mean, what sort of fashion are we going to succumb to at a certain point where it's, oh, well, everybody wants kids with light eyes. Oh, do they? And what problems is that causing and then why do we need that? That's literally going to be fashionable. I mean, you look at old art. I remember when I was a kid, I was looking at old art and art

appreciation class and I remember someone said, how come everyone in these paintings is all fat? And they're like, oh, that was trendy back then. It was considered beautiful to be not skin on bones because it meant you were wealthy. And so that we risk doing that with our actual genetics, right? Like we risk saying we want everybody to be this color, we want to slightly tan, right? Or we want everybody to have nice, straight, easy to manage hair, or light eyes, or certain height. That could become a huge problem.

Look, getting rid of Down syndrome, it's controversial in that yes, it was inspirational, but I don't think, again, not unpopular opinion, maybe, but it's hard to argue that kids born with that have some sort of advantage, right? They don't. And it doesn't mean there's no advantage or that there's nothing special about it.

That's not what I'm saying at all. But of course, given the choice, I can't really see which parent would say, no, I want my kid to have this challenge. That's unlikely. So this is really challenging. As I said before, there's no good and bad in evolution. There's just particularly suited for a given environment. You said that you thought higher IQ is better than lower IQ. And all of the studies that have analyzed IQ suggests that people with higher IQs, they have more stable families,

they have better health outcomes, they're wealthier. I mean, all the kinds of things that a parent would want for their child, many of them correlate with IQ. But there are different types of intelligence that are valuable in different contexts. And if everybody had the same type of intelligence, we as a species, we wouldn't be smarter. We would be in danger because diversity isn't just a nice to have thing in evolution. It's the core foundation of our evolution in Darwinian terms. It's random mutation.

And having different ways of being is what confer resilience in any society. So if things change, which they always do, a certain type of intelligence may not be valuable. If you're lost in the jungle and having to survive, you're having Einstein with you may or may not be helpful. If you're in Berlin trying to crack secrets of physics, it's actually, he's a good guy to have around. That's the challenge is because you're exactly right. All of these things that feel eternal are actually part of fashion. And even the things that we feel like are absolute no-brainers, like even eliminating deadly genetic disease, when you look at it aren't as simple as we once thought. Like, for example, sickle cell disease, if you have sickle cell disease, you're very, very likely to die a premature and extremely painful death.

But if you're a recessive carrier of the sickle cell mutation, you actually have increased resistance to malaria, which is why the sickle cell mutation has persisted for so long. But we're all carriers. Everybody is a carrier dominant or recessive of something that has the potential to be harmful. or deadly. Who knows what kind of future challenges or pathogens or other dangers we may face where that kind of diversity that could be harmful today could be beneficial. But how do we defend diversity across the species when people are saying, well, geez, I don't want to be a carrier of some deadly, terrible disease. I don't want to have my kids or grandkids have a risk of dying young because of some genetic disorder or genetic potential that I can just edit out now.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Jamie Metzell. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

If you're listening to us in The Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Jamie Metzel. And I think the counter to this is, well, if we can edit things out and put things in, then if we run into this problem, we can just edit the genome later. And it's like, well, that's great. But for everyone who's alive now, they're dead. You can put it back in, but you've got to birth new children in the meantime.

So there's a process called gene therapy where we can begin. very early stage, it's called somatic changes. So changes into adult cells, where you're different than these changes that go into germline or heritable cells, which are sperm eggs and embryos. But I think people are thinking too much like Legos when we talk about the complexity of genetics. I mean, this is complicated stuff. Our biologies are very complicated. And so it's my view that we're going to be limited in the number of gene edits that we're going to be able to make before we're overwhelmed by the complexity of our own biology. And that's why I think that embryo selection, in my mind, is more of the near-term killer application of the genetics revolution. Because we talked

about before, if you have these 10,000 embryos and you're picking one, that's a lot of power. And you think what our ancestors have done of taking a little weed with a few kernels 8,000 years ago and turning it into corn today or taking a wild chicken laying one egg a month and turning it into a domestic chicken laying one egg a day. And they didn't know anything about genetics. So with the knowledge that we have, I think we're going to be able to push incredible changes. And on top of that, we're going to do gene edits. But we shouldn't have illusions that it's going to be this Lego situation, we just kind of pop it in, pop it out. It does get a little fascinating, but also kind of scary. And look, I don't know if this is sort of universal here, but my gut, whenever I read about

craziness like this is, look, China's going to do it first. China's already done it first. I mean, yeah. Right. I mean, so the first gene edited babies were born last year in China. And my book was already in production when the report came out and I called the publisher. I said, look, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is we have to pull the book out of production so I can include a reference to these kids being born. The good news is in the book, I said, this is going to happen. It's imminent and it's going to happen in China first for these reasons. So we just need to add. And it happened. So China and maybe Russia, but China most importantly is really pushing forward aggressively. Genetics and biotech are part of their national plan where they're seeking to be world technology leaders. This for me is less scary, but I also think, I mean, it should be scary a little bit for everyone because in China, the government can basically mandate human trials and it's like done, right? Or they just go, yeah, we don't want this to be public. And everyone's like, no problem, right? There's no sort of free media that's. going to expose this. And in the U.S., we have to deal with, what do the people think about this? What is this going to look like? Oh, is this safe? Well, we got to do a study. The FDA should be involved in this. The current administration is not a fan of this. Oh, religious people are going wing nuts over this. China just goes, hey, don't tell anyone.

Just do it over here and nobody's going to know. And they have a huge advantage when it comes to things like that. The question, though, is who's going to make big decisions that can affect the entire human gene pool? I'm not sure I want China doing that. I don't really even want the United States doing this because something tells me it'll either fall to corporations or to inept government agencies or both. I mean, can we have the Swedes or the Norwegians do it? I feel like they can be trusted with important shit. Yeah. So it's a really important question because we're all humans. If let's say China is genetically engineering their population and we're not, what are the options? Actually, one of my sci-fi novels is Genesis Code is about exactly this. First, every country

needs to have its own regulatory infrastructure, but we need to have some kind of international system that can at least draw red lines of how far is too far. I'm part of the World Health Organization International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing. We're meeting six times this year in Geneva to try to begin a process of outlining what these guidelines might look like, how we can build a structure to bring the world together. But this is a huge job. It's way bigger than our committee or the World Health Organization or the UN. I mean, this has to be a global priority to bring everybody together. And we've tried things in the past with variable success. The nuclear chemical biological weapons conventions have actually been decent, not perfect.

There was a big effort on climate change. It hasn't succeeded in slowing climate change. But at least there's an infrastructure. We have nothing, nothing on genetics. There really isn't any of this infrastructure. So if we want to have, a global system, we're going to have to start building it in quick. It's exciting because I'm imagining personalized, tailored medicine that's geared to your own genetic code. Theoretically, we can make blood, we can make organs, things like that. It's going to be exciting.

AI is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to testing these embryos or testing the genome and sequencing it and things like that. So that's all exciting. I talked to Kai Fu Lee about who is the president of Google China. And so he talked about, well, the audience might not know. Excuse me, Jamie. No, no, no. Sorry. I forgot. I'm just kidding. I'm having such a nice time talking to Jordan. I thought we were just having a phone conversation. Of course. I know. It's easy to forget that. I to the audience. But he mentioned the sheer amount of data was to China's advantage when it comes to AI. And it's going to be probably the same reason when it comes to personalized medicine. Like, where does the data come from? China has a massive advantage. They have no privacy whatsoever. They have a ton of people. And they're not afraid to literally force them to share.

that data, we are doing that sort of involuntarily here with Google and Facebook and things like that, but there's on a whole different level. So it's very much a situation in which China has a massive advantage. You say we need a global initiative, yes, but like the reality in my gut says that comes as a reaction to China going, hey, look where we are with this. You shit should get your stuff in order. Yeah, that's exactly what's even happening now. I mean, our World Health Organization Committee was created in the aftermath of this announcement last year that the world's first gene-edited human babies had already been born. And you talk about these two issues, healthcare and data pools, and they're connected. So right now we live in a world of generalized

health care based on population averages, which means that if you go to your doctor, you get treated just because you're a human based on just how an average human would respond to a given treatment. It may work for you. It may not. And you find out most cases by trying. And then we're moving to a world of precision medicine where your treatments, as you mentioned, are going to be based on your own individual biology, but your doctor's going to have to know who you are. And so the doctor's going to need to access to your electronic health and life records and your biometric information. But the most important piece of information that they're going to need and have is information about your sequence genome. So everyone is going to increasingly just be sequenced at or before birth.

And then we're going to have the potential for these massive billion plus person genetic data sets. And that's what we're going to use to unlock the secrets of the genome. But China, we in the United States, we have all these restrictions on sharing data. We have HIPAA, which is privacy for medical records. And we have this mishmash of laws. What China is trying to do is to create a national system. So they have more uniform electronic health records. They have big, open data sets, which are accessible to researchers from China.

And that has the potential to be a tremendous competitive advantage for China because in many ways there's this conflict. All of us feel that greater privacy is a virtue. Nobody wants to have, whether it's Facebook or the Russian government or whatever, meddling with our private information. And yet societally, the way we are going to unlock. the secrets of genetics or AI or autonomous vehicles or smart cities, all of that is by these massive data sets. And so privacy may help us individually, but it has a real potential of

harming us nationally if we aren't able to make big accessible data sets that can drive the development of the next generation of our technologies and economies. Yeah, it's a little scary, right? Because you think like, oh, we got to have individual privacy and dot-da-dot America. And it's like, well, if you want America to exist in a generation, you might want to get on this train because this is what's going to be happening in other places where they're a little bit less worried about that. It's a bummer because it seems like a trade-up. I mean, it seems like this could start an arms race of sorts, right? I mean, is that what we're looking at? Yes, I have a chapter in the book called the arms race of the human race, and that's

one of the possibilities. And it's a scary one because what we're talking about is the future of life. And, you know, if somebody changes humans in China or in Russia or in Kazakhstan or whatever, eventually our kids are likely to procreate with their kids. I mean, it's not like that we're going to be able to segregate out people who have been genetically altered and not. So we are, as humans, we all are and should be stakeholders and how this story plays out. And there's some good signs. I mean, China, on one hand, you would expect that China is in just this race to get there first, and they are. But after these first gene edited babies were announced last year, the Chinese government for the first few hours was so proud. There was an editorial in the People's Daily

about this milestone achievement by China. And then the international condemnations poured in. And China very quickly changed. It eliminated those references from the internet. It silenced the pride on social media and became very critical of this work that had been done because China recognized that they had a greater benefit from being seen as a responsible actor in the world of science than being seen as this place where rogue science happens. And so maybe that is a cause of a little bit of hope. But this technology is easily shareable. So you could say like a North Korea saying, well, we don't give a damn about whether we are seen as a responsible actor in the world. we think this technology is pretty cool. And we can do all sorts of things. We can, you know,

make sure our leader has a gazillion kids, or we can gene edit or genetically engineer future generations to be more docile. I mean, there's all kinds of, you don't have to be a science fiction writer to imagine how this technology could be massively abused. Yeah, I think that's a whole sci-fi section at Barnes & Noble when it comes to it for the abuse of this. There's a lot of interesting elements in the book that we probably don't have time to get into all of them, but one thing that you mentioned earlier was breeding chickens from a chicken that laid an egg a month to a domestic chicken that lays an egg every day. That brings up the idea that, look, we can not only breed for certain traits, but there probably wasn't some wild chicken that laid eggs

every day, and they went, oh, that's a good one, let's breed those. They just bred chickens that had laid eggs more frequently, and then after a few generations or several generations, you end up with a chicken that lays an egg every single day. That seems to me to mean that we can take outlier traits of somebody who's got an insanely high IQ, go in there with CRISPR, edit it so the IQ is off the charts, breed that person with somebody else who has a super high IQ and go, oh, look, there's all these other factors

that go into IQ. And then suddenly we're at IQs of 1,000. Yep, yeah, and I write about that in the book. So certainly, let's just say, we talked about having your own 10,000, fertilized eggs. There will be a range. So if you have, let's say, 10 of your unimplanted embryos, on average, there's probably like a 10 or 15 IQ point differential. It's hard to fully test this, but between your potentially highest IQ embryo, a genetic component of IQ embryo and your lowest.

If you have 10,000, that number becomes significantly bigger. So let's say that high genetic component of IQ is your number one priority in making those selections. You can get a very high IQ relative to all of your other options. And let's say somebody else has done the same thing. So then you already are starting from this starting point that from an IQ perspective is beyond most other people. And if you keep doing that, and in the book I talk about a process of breeding embryos with other embryos, which is that's kind of this mind-blowing stuff is so you do that process, you select from among your 10,000, you select your boy embryo, and somebody else does the same thing with two different parents, so you're not genetically related,

and they select their girl, female embryo, and then you extract cells from each of those embryos. So from the male embryo, you do the same induced stem cell process. So you go stem cell to sperm precursor cell to sperm. And from the female embryo, you go from the stem cell to the egg precursor cell to egg. Now my five-day-old embryo and your five-day-old embryo can themselves have a baby. And then you do that same process with somebody else who's done that with two different genetic lines. And so you see where this is going if we could push these chickens from one egg a month to one egg a day, how far can we push some of these other traits? And there are huge,

massive unknowns with all of this because all of our traits have evolved over millions or in some cases billions of years. And so our bodies, our beings are these balances. If we had these super high IQs, would there be other liabilities that we don't yet understand? They're very well could be. But the basic point is that our biology is malleable. And we understand that it's malleable in some abstract way because we know we used to be single-cell organisms and we evolved into those single-cell organisms involved into all of life on Earth. So we know that life can be expressed in many different ways. But we don't know what it would mean for us. And now we have the potential to find out, which is exciting and everyone should feel exciting.

And it's scary and everyone should feel scared as well. There are a lot of considerations with this, legal, ethical, et cetera. One thing, I'd love to wrap with this. What happens if only wealthy people get this technology? Because, of course, I know a lot of people that got iPhones when they first came out. Most of them weren't high school students, right? Most of them weren't people that worked at regular jobs. You know, they started with early adopters.

Same with people who have electric cars right now or Teslas or things like that, right? These are people that have a little bit of extra means. It seems very likely that people who are able to, to edit their kids' IQ, height, eye color, appearance. That's not going to be available to everybody right away. It's going to be early adopters that have the money to pay for this gene therapy. It's a really great and a critically important question. And there are always early adopters for every technology.

And we should want that. I mean, it's impossible to imagine a technology where everybody gets it first. I mean, there was the first guy, maybe it was a woman, to have a plow. And then people looked at that plow and said, hey, that's pretty cool. Maybe I'll have a plow. And every tech, the same with the iPhone and with everything. So we can't aspire to some kind of universal, instantaneous adoption curve, because what that will mean is that we could just never have this technology. But we also can't let the story of the genetics revolution become over time just the story of the haves and the have-nots, because we are all one. species. And it's really, really dangerous for us to think of having that level of difference. We saw what happened in the European colonial period where one group had no significant genetic differences from everybody else, but they just had slightly better technology and they ended up dominating and murdering everybody else. So we have to focus on the values issues of equity and diversity now.

And I speak a lot about this and people are always worried about this. And what I say is there are a couple of things. One is, in some ways, this is a regulatory issue. A country like Israel, where assisted reproduction is part of the national health plan, they have less of these differential access problems that we do in the United States. United Kingdom that has their national health service also has less of a problem than we have here. So we need to make sure that our infrastructure, that our regulatory structures are designed to provide access to the stuff that is going to to be particularly most beneficial to people. And in my mind, that means the things that are going to significantly enhance people's health. But then there's a values issue. And that's really the most

important thing, because what I always tell people is if you are worried about genetic inequality in the future, and you should be, that's a very real worry. We need to be working to avoid that. But the way that we do that is working for equality in the world as it exists today. The average person born in the Central African Republic in the context of their civil war is born with significant brain impairment. So the difference in their kids and our kids is the same as the difference in the future between non-enhanced and enhanced. And so if we just decide that that's not okay today, then we will be able to live those values so that when we get to the future, it will be unacceptable for us that we have these genetic halves and have-nots. But this is a fixable problem

if we have the right values and we build institutions to support those values. Jamie, thank you so much. This is extremely interesting, a little disconcerting, but mostly just fascinating. So I really appreciate your time and your expertise here. Really my great pleasure, Jordan. Big thanks to Jamie Metzell. The book is called Hacking Darwin. We'll throw that in the show notes. We're teaching you how to reach out to great people like Jamie or just keep in touch with your friends, family, colleagues, bosses, and anyone else that might be important to your personal and professional life. I've created a course for you. It's free. Not put in your credit card free, but just free free. It's called six-minute networking, and it's over at Jordan Harbinger.com

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