The Jordan Harbinger Show - 687: Amy Webb | Changing Lives with Synthetic Biology

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Amy Webb (@amywebb) is an author and the founder and CEO of The Future Today Institute -- a leading foresight and strategy firm that helps leaders and their organizations prepare for complex futures. Her latest book is The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology. What We Discuss with Amy Webb: Synthetic biology will change the world in three key areas: medicine, food, and the environment. How pandemics might be wiped out by engineering immunity to deadly diseases on demand before they have a chance to take hold. (Alternatively, how pandemics might be created by engineering new diseases against which we have no defense.) Forget waiting your turn on the donor list: we'll be able to print new vital, life-sustaining organs from scratch instead of relying on unpredictable supply. When we have the ability to resurrect extinct species, will we possess the wisdom to prudently decide what lives again and what stays dead forever? How meat can be grown from cells in labs without slaughtering animals and consuming the resources necessary to sustain them. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/687 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.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. There are the much more real potential problems of things like cyber bio-malware. The way that it's in Biowworks is you still need computers, you're developing code. You have to write the code, you edit the code, you send the code to a printer, you send it to a manufacturer. And it's been proven more than once that there are vulnerabilities in that system. And you could create totally benign biological code. But you could inject malware in the process, meaning you could send off a benign sample and get back a deadly virus. Now, luckily, that hasn't happened yet, but there are, you know, it's not like human scientists are standing with a pipette, you know, an individual test tubes.

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These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topics. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. topics like persuasion and influence, disinformation in cyber warfare, investing in financial crimes, China and North Korea, abnormal psychology, and more. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking with futurist author and CEO Amy Webb. We'll discuss synthetic biology and how it'll change the world in three specific areas, medicine, food, and the environment.

We will see major advances in how we live and the quality. of our lives, how we eat, and even how we humans engineer ourselves to get rid of or be immune to certain diseases or ailments, we're going to be able to print new organs, you heard me, bring extinct animals back to life, Jurassic Park anyone, and possibly kill ourselves off in the process by creating new and horrible diseases or just dinosaurs that eat us, who the hell knows? Well, actually, she knows. She is just brilliant. Y'all are going to love this conversation, and it will open your mind to what's coming down the pipeline in terms of biological technological both inside and outside of our lifetimes, and probably a lot sooner than you think.

Now, here we go with Amy Webb. I've heard you say that we could mix Neanderthal DNA in human DNA to make stronger bones for people who would otherwise get osteoporosis. That was sort of the intro soundbite that I got for the book, and I was like, I'm sold, because I want to know how to make myself more caveman to make myself more resilient. On the other hand, it sounds incredibly dangerous and probably like it's a terrible idea. So first of all, that's not entirely my idea. So George Church, who's a preeminent geneticist scientist at Harvard, really, like, pushes his thinking to the very edge of plausibility in a way that I think is incredibly profound and beneficial.

And one of those edge cases is we've got human DNA, but like, is this the best we can do? There are derivatives at some point we forked. Is there something about those who were living near us, around us? You know, is there some other part of our evolution that we might be able to tap into? And if so, would that make us more resilient? The bottom line is we are facing existential crises on this planet, right? And it has to do with climate change and food security and all kinds of things. And in fact, this morning, Noah announced in New York City, which was kind of a weird place to make an announcement about hurricanes, that this is going to be the worst hurricane season on.

They're expecting four significant storms. There's this weird phenomenon where there's this like very hot pool of water that's going to hang out around the Gulf and just add more energy to the atmosphere. The planet is changing. Our bodies aren't evolving as quickly. So what if one way for us to prepare for the future was to make our skin a little thicker for there to be more collagen? Like literally thicker skin, not a metaphor for something.

No, no, no. Although Jordan, I like where you're going with that. I also think we should have thicker skins, generally speaking. Like Twitter doesn't even bother me anymore, thanks to this Neanderthal DNA that I've injected. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Can you imagine what a better world we'd live in if Twitter didn't matter so much to everybody? Yeah.

Anyways. But yeah, both metaphorically and literally, if we had thicker skin, could we withstand the elements a little bit better? Now, people will say that's a terrible idea because it's tinkering with what God made. It's just tinkering with life and also doesn't solve the climate issue. And what I would say is, hey, doesn't this get a lot of it? give us optionality. And let's just explore and see where we get. It doesn't necessarily mean monsters. So, you know, Neanderthals had much more collagen. They had thicker bone, better bone

density. They had some things going for them that we don't. This is so interesting because it dovetails nicely with other episodes I've done on technology augmenting the brain. And it's like, hey, let's skip the wires and just figure out how to change our actual body into, I don't know, what you would call this, like meat hardware, right? Like, I don't need night vision goggles. I can literally live with night vision that I can use at any time. And it's in there. Yeah, and again, I would put to rest immediately ideas that this tech is ready tomorrow. Right. We're talking about long horizon technology. But yeah, so you're right. We keep coming up with hardware solutions to things that might someday be wetware solutions. Wetware, yeah.

And again, if you allow your mind to wander productively, think about some of the conversations we're having about space and becoming a multi-planet species and specifically Mars. At the moment, we are not in our current form, in our current containers, humans aren't really designed to survive on Mars. It would take a lot. You know, it would take a lot of infrastructure and building, right? And even if we did that, you've still got radiation. You've got all of these other issues to contend with. Well, what if we augmented ourselves so that we could live on Mars? You know, there's another way to start thinking these things through.

And again, not tomorrow technology, further in the future tech. But you have to start thinking about these things today and not being constrained by reality as it exists at this moment. Yeah, I've heard we need to be sort of like you said, radiation proof, maybe use less water and food because it's going to be hard to come by when you're flying to and living on. on Mars, there was a lot of concern, or not concerns, a lot of different ideas about what we would need to be concerned about if we ended up living on a planet like Mars. It kind of sounds horrible, but there's people that are up for that as long as they don't die on the way slash the second they land, right? Yeah, there's something called the paradox of the present. So I'm a quantitative futurist, and my job, when I'm not writing books, is to use data and

build models to identify plausible next order impacts. And so most of the time I'm doing this for large companies who are trying to figure out where's their next big bet, what's the next big strategy, or what's the huge risk that's coming and how do they mitigate it? But the same principles apply to thinking about yourself and your own personal development and just, you know, thinking in a more profound way about your own life and how life itself evolves. And as a it relates to Mars, I think we get stuck in in this thing called the paradox of the present. And that happens all the time, actually, business, you know, individuals. The paradox of the present is taking what you know to be true today and assuming that the future is that but more or that

but faster. Yeah. Right. And what we tend not to do is explore uncertainty with an open mind and agree that there's any number of variables that are potentially in play. So we could become a multi-planet species by augmenting our genetics so that we can withstand greater radiation. That's not plausible at the moment, but it's absolutely plausible, you know, sometime in that relative near future. So just because we're not doing it today doesn't mean that we can't do it tomorrow. So when you hear scientists very validly talk about why life on Mars is implausible and whatever, it's because they're using today's constraints. It's the paradox of the present. That does make sense. I mean, it's hard to take, I mean, this is your job, so it's easier for you, but it's hard for someone like me to go,

oh, yeah, all we need to do is just put a bunch of solar panels up there. Oh, there's not enough sun that gets to Mars. Oh, well, that idea is never going to work. And it's like, well, wait a minute. If solar panels are getting better, then you can create more energy with less light. And so you'll have these solar panels that are a thousand times more sensitive than what you'd ever use on Earth. and then your concern that you have now is moot and not even really worth thinking about, right? That kind of idea? Yeah. And again, it's sometimes people get frustrated when they have conversations with me because my answer to a lot of things is maybe.

Well, yeah. Lawyers do that too. Don't worry. You're not alone. Yeah. Yeah. So I dropped out of law school before. I made a last minute decision.

You're a lawyer. I made a last minute decision not to go. I think I would have been a disaster in law school. Well, yeah. Like me. as well. Anyways, solar panels make sense to some degree on this planet. There are lots of different options for energy.

We have to come up with the right solution when we start thinking about off-planet living. Again, we always are hamstrung by constraints, our own mental constraints. And we also want answers. Most people are not comfortable with uncertainty. Certainty drives much of the daily decision-making that we all make. And that is fine, but it creates a lot of problems. Can we define synthetic biology, the topic of your recent book and most of what I talk about or what I have to talk with you about today is going to be synthetic biology.

But most people don't know what that is. And people who've been listening for a long time have heard my episode with Rob Reed about printable diseases that I'll touch on later. But otherwise, it doesn't really mean anything to the uninitiated. Yeah, totally. And actually, if you're a regular listener of the show, believe it or or not, you've already been hearing about it, you just haven't had the vocabulary to describe it. So synthetic biology is a relatively new interdisciplinary field of science. It combines design,

computer science, biology, engineering, and the goal is to redesign or design organisms on a molecular level to have new purposes. And that makes those organisms more adaptable to different surroundings or programmable so that they do things that you want them to do. This field is really intent on seeing how we can make life in an organic way programmable. So if you think about computers, you have different levels of permission. You've got read access to files. You've got edit access and write access. Well, the same is true in biology. We had read access. That was when Watson and Crick, not stole, but like, use somebody else's work without giving her credit. That would be Rosal and Franklin. And they could see, you know, the double helix. And eventually that laid the foundation to sort of read what was there.

CRISPR is edit access. So that's being able to go in with sort of molecular scissors and making snips. Synthetic biology is write access. And by that I mean there are scientists writing new genetic code and booting cells up from scratch. Wow. Those cells that are alive technically have computers as parents, not other organisms. That's a really awesome explanation and makes it a thousand times more interesting than I've ever heard this explained before. Because the idea that we can create new organisms that are not just, because right now we breed things, right? If you want a turtle that's albino or something, you've got to find, I don't know, two albino turtles and breathe them. I don't know how it works, but you've got to do something like that. This is like, actually, I want turtles that glow in the dark so that they can be used for some weird, I don't know, creepy purpose.

Yeah, no, you're right. You're totally right. Glowing things, by the way, is the sort of hello world of a synthetic biology. So when people get started, a lot of their early projects are like, make things glow. There's glowfish. Somebody made like glow in the dark beer. So glow in the dark albano turtles, like Jordan, that's an awesome project you could work on. Yeah.

It doesn't seem very useful, and they would get eaten right away by whatever eats turtles, but it's fine. Maybe you want to bio-illuminate a restaurant, so you make all the things in the fish tank glow, which also sounds mean, but whatever. The idea is I have no idea what kind of example to make other than that, because the possibilities are so endless that my mind is truly blown by this. And we could create all kinds of, the idea that I've had for a long time that I have, of course, no idea how to implement is some kind of organism that, you know, eats plastic, right? Because we have all this plastic in the ocean. We have all this crap in the dump. What if something like a worm eats it and then it just grows big and dies and then becomes fertilizer? And it's like the plastic that we bury or that we throw in the ocean is just gone now. That would be amazing. Yeah. So actually, you're on to something important. And enzyme eating plastic is

definitely something that it's research that's underway. Plastic eating enzyme, right? Sorry, yes. Yes. Other way around. Yeah. Plastic eating enzyme. Is there an organism? that would eat plastic and excrete something that wasn't dangerous, for example. So that's one set of experiments. Another one is, well, maybe could we just use less plastic to begin with? So plastic is made out of petroleum. And the problem with that, as we all know, is it's not great for the environment. We also have supply chain issues, as evidenced by what's happening in Ukraine right now. And part of, you know, where the global supply of petroleum comes from, there's a really cool company that is making skis out of algae.

So skis, if anybody's ever, I ski very badly, but you don't want your skis to be like super floppy. I know that much. Yeah. So like if you had skis or snowboards that had the rigidity that you need, but only, let's say, 30% of the plastic and the rest was made out of algae that is totally biodegradable, you haven't totally solved the plastic problem,

but you're using a lot less plastic. And also, when you make skis and snowboards, they use forms, but then they have to cut around it. So you wind up with a ton of waste. So this reduces some of that waste. There's also nylon. A lot of the cool stuff happening in this space is not designer babies. It's redesigning stuff that is pretty toxic. So nylon is in just about everything that we use to some degree.

And again, this is a product that requires petroleum. Well, now researchers have figured out how to make the same molecules. but out of like fermented sugars instead. Oh, wow. And yeah, so you can have biosynthetic nylon, which is just as strong and durable, but again, not as problematic when it comes to supply chains and geopolitics and obviously climate change. I read in your book about the leather that's made from spider silk. It's obviously not really leather, but it's just like some sort of analogous compound that's

maybe really hard to tell what it is. And it's like, hey, this didn't require torturing an animal. and all the other things that go with raising an animal in the first place, just for the skin. Yeah. So, again, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in the space, and there's a company that is making silk out of different compounds. There's also a company making leather out of mycelium. So this is like the complex underground sort of fibrous root structure connecting mushrooms to each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's a pair of Adidas that are coming out sometime soon that they may have already come out that are made out of this stuff. Like, to the average person, you would think they were leather shoes, but they're actually made out of mushrooms. That's so incredible.

Mushrooms are themselves just incredible. Like, talk to each other somehow. I mean, it's just really like alien level technology somehow. Yeah. That's a whole different show. The idea that synthetic biology could upgrade humans and other species is interesting. I don't want to delve too far into the sci-fi, but a lot of what I read in your book was not even sci-fi. Like, it was really totally on the roadmap, maybe a long time in the future, but still totally on the roadmap.

but things like nuts and crops that need less water and have higher yields to feed more people or can maybe grow indoors with less sunlight or at different elevations or whatever. This stuff is not super far away, correct? No. And of all the things we wrote about in this book, there's a lot of, I think, controversial concepts and ideas, the future of agriculture was not the part of the book that I thought was going to set off a firestorm of public debate and have a lot of like calls to cancel. me online. And yet, that's kind of what happens.

Are you kidding? That's like the most, I am not. I pick that is like a softball to ease into the other stuff. Yeah. No, no, the multi-parent future, not so much, but like messing with agriculture. So a couple of things. There are already gigantic warehouse scale indoor plant farms, indoor plant factories operating in Europe. They're called greenhouses, if memories, like, right? I mean, they're not. Well, not really. I mean, it's the difference between a traditional greenhouse which is a little smaller and what we're talking about, which is inside of a huge warehouse, to some degree is light. So there's fiber optic light, not direct sunlight. The conditions are different. There are plant factories that are operating underground, effectively, that are growing

enough produce to supply local, like many local grocery stores throughout Europe. Now, why would you go through the process of growing things indoors if it requires modifying the DNA of the organism, which immediately makes people think GMO, there's a lot of reasons. First of all, genetically modified is not tantamount to some kind of like Franken tomato, right? Franken, monster, horrible piece of produce. It just means that in a responsible way, somebody has tweaked the organism so that it is more resilient in different conditions. It doesn't necessarily have to do with fertilizer or something like that, you know, using some brands fertilizer. If you can very slightly tweak the genetic code of organisms to grow indoors, that gives you control.

You don't have to worry about extreme weather events or hurricanes. You use significantly less water. It is much less taxing. It's actually, in some cases, better for the planet than other ways of raising produce. You get less variability. So it's actually a good thing. But it's very controversial because it is not the way that things have traditionally been done. But the other way to frame this is agriculture, as we know it today, really hasn't changed in like 14,000 years. It hasn't. We've got big tractors, but we're basically doing the same stuff. There hasn't been huge innovation. So there's that. There's also this unlocks new ways to get meat proteins. If you have four grams of beef muscle tissue, you can produce, you know, 28 billion pounds of beef, which is more than enough to feed

the United States and how much we consume. Why is that it? Four grams. Wait, how does that work out? I guess I missed that. Right. So there's no company doing it at scale yet because at the moment it's still cheaper to produce beef by raising livestock. But you get what's called a bioreactor. So imagine like a gigantic pressure cooker. And you start with tissue cells, which you can extract from an animal without harming the animal at all. And then you feed it amino acids. You control the temperature and everything else. And you wind up with edible tissue.

Wow. Yeah. I can give you a crazy example of a place where it's already been on sale if that's useful. Yeah, please do. By the way, four grams, that's like an earlobe worth of tissue. Right. So if you want a giant earlobe, you could take one of mine. and grow it and you can eat for a week off of the results. Well, I mean, here's maybe a way to think

about this. I love that, by the way, that the earlob. That's a wonderful analogy. Yeah, feel free to use that one. It's pretty gross. It's pretty gross and pretty awesome. But sourdough bread, right? To make sourdough bread, you have to have a sourdough starter. And one sourdough starter over time, right, becomes this huge yield if you keep it working. So it's another way to sort of wrap your head around how some of this works. I don't know if you know this, but in third, February every year, the entire country shuts down for a single event, an event where the men take the ball and they move the ball down the field for the points. Are you familiar with this event? Okay. Yeah. I don't watch it, but I have heard of, I have heard of it.

I don't watch it here. This is a Super Bowl. And I think those who are not playing football in the Super Bowl are constitutionally mandated to eat chicken wings. my point being Americans on a single day on the Super Bowl consume 1.5 billion with a B chicken wings. And that requires 725 chickens that we consume on a single day. So think about what that requires, a massive cold chain. 725 million chickens. Right. To get to 1.5 billion chicken wings. I could have done that in my head, I think, but I didn't try.

Yeah, that makes sense. Wow. Think about what it takes to get that to happen. You need a global supply chain with a cold chain. So this is what makes it possible to transport things that have to be preserved. You need to grow chickens fast. Today's chickens that you buy are really, they're like monster chickens. They're like pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, very different from chickens 100 years ago. This process is not great for us. It's definitely not good for the planet. It's really not good for the chickens. Isn't there another way to think about this. So again, this is where synthetic biology comes into play. If you start with the tissue, the muscle tissue, you ferment it over time, you can have delicious, wonderful chicken meat that never had any of the hormones, wasn't engineered to grow super fast. And you could create that at scale. We could have three billion chicken wings for dinner. Now, you're not going to get the bone yet. So it's going to be like a chicken wing sort of type of thing. I mean, you can put it on a

stick, I think people will survive. That's barely an adjustment, right? So, I mean, the economics don't work out right now that you're not going to go to 10 cent chicken wing night. I don't know if those exist anymore. They did when I was in college. Probably 25 cents now, but yeah. Probably more. So it's going to take a while, but this chicken has already gone on sale in Singapore. It took two years to get through a regulatory process, but you can buy it and you can eat it there now. If you stop and think about the profound implications here, what's really cool is we could actually have significantly more meat than we have today, but we could also have significantly different meat. You could eat panda steak and feel totally fine about it because no pandas were harmed

in the process. You could have lion just to see what it's like. Yeah, Cocker Spaniel Cababs, right? Yeah, it still sounds gross. It still sounds gross. I would absolutely eat Cocker Spaniel kebabs and feel totally fine about it. When I read about this, I was like, it sounds gross when I say it loud, but I was going to ask about lab-grown tissue for consumption, just like you brought up organically here. And then I thought, okay, I have to clarify that I don't mean growing human brain tissue so I can eat brain sashimi or something. Yeah.

I was thinking more like lab-grown fish could prevent overfishing and destructive trawling and things like that. Lab-grown meat would eliminate the factory farms that we talk about the pollution going there. But also, and I think you mentioned this in the book, you could grow, if we want to call it growing, You could grow sushi in Nebraska instead of shipping it in from the coast with an airplane or a cold truck. You could be eating fresh sushi that's grown in the restaurant where you eat it in Turkmenistan or Sudan or something like that. That's absolutely right. So I grew up in the Midwest on the south side of Chicago.

Are you from the Chicagoland area? Michigan. Yeah. Yeah, north of Detroit. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Anyway, so yeah. So, yeah, so I don't know if you grew up eating Lake Perch at all.

And now that I'm, I think about it, that Lake Perch was probably not super. healthy given the industrial area. I'm sure that I grew up eating a lot of stuff that was caught in the Great Lakes that had lead in it from, I mean, for GM and all the automakers, they just dumped everything into the Rouge River, which flows, God knows where into those lakes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, every now and then I have a taste for Lake Perch, which is what I grew up eating. And it's actually kind of hard to find where I am now. So yeah, like I could have a little fermenter or I could open up a restaurant with a little fermenter, and I could ferment and grow Lake Perch, healthy Lake Perch, without all the heavy metals in it from Lake Michigan. And, you know, again, like, it's just a

different way of thinking. And what we're talking about right now is so contradictory to what exists today that it's just really hard for people to conceptualize what that could look like. And then it becomes scary because this, what we're talking about, invites a lot of disruption in the economy. I think it also invites a lot of opportunity to. grow in a better way, but it means change. And change can be scary. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Amy Webb. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I manage to book these folks for the show, and many of you do ask, it's always about my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at

Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, this course is naturally about improving your networking and connection skills, but also about inspiring other people to develop personal and professional relationships with you. It'll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker. That's Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on our show already subscribe and contribute to this course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now back to Amy Webb. What about, okay, if we can grow, let's say, rib meat or chicken wing meat, how far away are we from being able to grow an actual functional organ? Right? Like, what if I get poisoned by Vladimir Putin asking for a friend, and I need new kidneys and a liver. How far away are we

from being able to grow something that's not just like muscle tissue that's edible? So that is one key area of this research. As with everything, is there a way we can grow something or engineer something to fix a problem? And then is there a way to just engineer a fix to the problem? So let me address the second one first, which is organ growing. So I'm sure listeners to the show heard about the artificial heart that was grown inside of a pig. Yeah. That was, yeah, transplanted. They gave it to a guy and he passed away a few months later or a few weeks later, right? Unfortunately, he did. The growth and the surgery itself were huge milestones, very successful. Turns out that there's a virus that gets carried, and I think what happened was he kind

got infected with that virus. Pigs and humans are much more closely related than we like to think. So tweaking the genomes is one tiny little baby step. But ideally, we don't want to have to sort of grow millions of pigs for their organs. Ideally, it would be just like to grow the organs. So that is definitely on the roadmap. And right now, there are lots of projects growing what are called organoids. So these are teeny tiny little blobs of tissue that you can connect on almost like what looks like a clear domino. So picture like a clear piece of plastic about the size of a domino where you've got like a respiratory system with real cells, real tissue. Wait, this is like a small and scale respiratory system? Yeah. Or you could have a tiny little endocrine system or a reproductive system. And it's called a body on a chip.

And you might say, why in the hell is anybody doing this? Yeah, like what's the use? But I mean, it's also just really freaking cool. It's like a micro machine except it works if people. remember those toys from the 80s and 90s. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Well, there's a real good reason why. We have this new virus, SARS-CoV-2, and we need to test different therapeutics and try to understand it. We don't really want to do that on a real person, but we also need to do it fast on a some type of simulated real person, otherwise we don't get to answers. So bodies on a chip are ways to test, run experiments, test therapeutics, test different products, to see how the organs respond. And it's just really, I mean, you can actually Google this and you can find like circulatory systems on what looks like a translucent domino that are functioning human organoids that, you know, you can learn from and watch. That is beyond fascinating. So we can really just grow these tissues or these systems, these whole systems in a lab and then I guess infect them and say like, hey, we try and then we try a tiny dose of a drug in that same thing. We say like, okay, that didn't work.

next, and you can just do that tens of thousands or millions of times until you find something that really, you can do all sorts of things that would be completely unethical, like, eh, we're just going to microwave it. You can't do that with a patient, right? Right, right, right. Wow. And again, like, so these are teeny, tiny little organs, but this is kind of the magic of what we're talking about. It just gives us optionality. It also gives us the ability to program tiny little organs, tiny little blobs of tissue. So there are some researchers that got some cells from an African clawed toad. think is what it's called. And they used those, edited them, and created an organism that they can

control by moving it around. I don't remember the exact technical... Like a remote control, frog? Yeah. So these are, it's called a xenobot. I'm sure you've heard of lots of people talking about programmable like nanobots. Yeah, sure. I'm waiting for them to be able to brush my teeth because I freaking hate doing that every single thing in my life. Yeah. I'm brushing my teeth. Part of the reason why I'm a little playing with my teeth a little bit. I just had to get invisiline. Oh, I had that. So I'm, oh my gosh. I never had orthodontia, so I'm just brushing my teeth constantly now. Yeah, and they hurt kind of, because they're slightly moved out of plot. It's so irritating. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. I'm a big baby. I sympathize. Yeah, like first world problems. Oh, this really

almost painless, convenient solution I ordered in the mail to make my teeth perfect kind of hurts. Oops. Yeah. Anyways. But yeah, there's programmable blobs of tissue. There's an AI system. Somebody just developed to play tic-tac-toe. It's actually living organisms that played tick-tac-toe, and they were programmed to, like, win the game. It's a new type of neural net, but made out of, you know, biology or at least-actual neurons. Yeah, that's why, what? How do they keep it alive? They just spray it with water every few minutes. How does that even work? That part I don't know. That part I don't know. But what I do know is that we have to come around to the idea that hardware and wetware are kind of becoming the same thing, right?

That really and truly biology and computers and technology, they're starting to intersect, to meld. Yeah, this is like the most cyberpunk thing I've ever heard. I thought that was so far away, and here we are. Yeah, I mean, again, I think people always expect walking, talking robots. You know, the future is here. The famous line that the future is here, it's not just not evenly distributed. You know, what I would say is the future is here.

It just didn't show up the way that we all expected. And therefore, we miss it. We miss the developments in real time. They don't meet the expectations that we had. They don't have the shape or the form factor that we were expecting. So we miss things until they reach a level of maturity. And then it's like, well, shit, how do we miss all of this? And we get really upset and we freak out and we feel like things are moving fast.

And then we want to rein things in. That's sort of every time I have any sort of medical procedure or hear about a new one, I'm always like, this is incredible that this exists. So I had Lasic in the 90s. You know what that is where they like laser your eyes? Oh, yeah. So I had Lasic in the 90s. That's early days.

Early. And I was really scared to do it. But it was like the guy had a great reputation. I don't know. Who knows? I should probably Google it. But anyway, I'm 42. I have better than 2020 vision.

I've never needed glasses except before Lasic. No contacts, nothing. And I couldn't believe it existed at the time. And you're telling me that in, I don't know, whatever timeline we're on, at some point, I might just get new eyes that are not infected with like glaucoma or whatever disease that I might end up with when I'm older, hopefully not. So I love that analogy for a couple of reasons. One, there's actually a lot of work being done on site. So my husband's an eye doctor sort of as an aside.

Oh, wow. The eyes are tricky. There are also that a lot of people don't realize this, but this is the direct connection to the brain. It's the only part of our body that is sort of on the outside, directly connected in. and there's not blood. I mean, you can sort of more easily do stuff to manipulate the eye. So that's why some early days synbio work is actually being done to edit things, you know, to make it easier for people to see, things like that.

The other reason I like what you mentioned is because you've already augmented your body. LASIC is just common now. And so we don't think about it as a body mod, but it totally is. Somebody lasered your face. Yeah, and I'd let them do it. They lasered my eyeball. just this isn't like getting a tattoo like in Starship Troopers where they're doing the laser tattoo. This is my, I let somebody laser my eyeball. That's frankly ridiculous. It is ridiculous. Has it

improved your quality of life? Oh yeah. Unbelievable. Right. So it's common now. Like LASIC is not a weird thing. And I guess what I'm trying to, the reason I love what you mentioned was because I really think 10 years from now we're going to be talking about synthetic biology the way that we talk about artificial intelligence today, which is to say everybody's got an opinion. Very, very. Very few people know what they're actually talking about, but it's part of the public dialogue. And then 20 years from now, we're going to have a lot of these applications that seem today to be sci-fi, right? But will be normal 20 years from now. In fact, people 20 years from now will look back at us as barbarians, I think, for having eaten meat from, like, raised animals for their meat for food.

Totally. I'm imagining my grandkids or even my own kids being like, wait, I read in a textbook that they were only able to synthesize lab-grown beef in 2030 for wide consumption. So did you just never eat meat before that? And I'm like, oh, are you going to tell them or am I going to have to do this? And it's like you're just going to have to break it to them that you would take your pig outside and kill it yourself and chop it up and eat it. And they're just going to look at me like, like I'm a horrible evil person. It's just going to be completely backwards.

It's going to be like when you read now about somebody who they bled themselves out to get rid of the black plague or something and you're just like, oh my God, you backwards bastards. What were you thinking? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I absolutely think people are going to, as we all do, right? This is not an original thought.

We always look back. Every generation has done it and marveled at how people got by when things were so challenging and tough for like, why would they do these barbaric things? That will happen to us too. But I also think there's an opportunity for people to look back to this moment in time and say, man, that was an interesting time and exciting time to be alive because they were the beginning of all of this. They were the originators. They were the ones who gave us all of these options, who put humanity on a better course. So I think there's maybe two ways to look at that.

Yeah, at least we were giving it a shot and people were aware of the problem, which in many ways makes it worse that we're still doing it, but also like, hey, we try. Okay, Sin biosynthetic biology is now, in many ways, quite nascent, new, up and coming long horizon, I think is what you'd said. So it'll soon be ubiquitous, or in many ways it already is, but the stuff we're talking about will at some point be ubiquitous and people alive in a few decades won't understand how we lived without it. Okay, but where are we on this curve? Are we on like America, AOL, dial up internet, or are we still at internet only at universities? Or are we even back where the internet was like two guys in a lab and they're like, when I type on this computer, I can make it

go over to that computer. You're not going to believe this. Like, where are we on that sort of curve? Right. So we are not at the metaverse part of the hype cycle yet. So we are like, we are, I don't know how nerdy everybody is, but I would say we're kind of at the TCIP stage, which is my way of saying we've got proof of concept. We've got lots of early, really solid research. We've got products that work. Messenger RNA is a product of what we're talking about. It is in bio. What we don't have yet as scale. So the analogy that I use in the book is the very first phone call that got made in Chickering Hall in New York. On a fateful day, Alexander Graham Bell stands on stage to demonstrate this contraption, this like wooden thing with a like a metal thing

sticking out. Nobody's ever seen anything like this. And he's promised this is back in the day when like demo days were all the rage versus what we have now, which is tech companies showing things that aren't all that interesting anymore. Anyway, so all these people gather, he's like, they're ready to go with the demo, and there's a voice on the other side magically coming through the speaker. And he explains this new device, this telephone, is a way of communicating with people who are not in the same place. They scream bullshit. They're like, this is all made up. They're mad. They demand to see behind the curtain. And this angry mob comes behind the curtain to see that there is no person there, and that in fact, this contraption actually works, completely blows people's minds.

But it would take another 20 years, 30 years, to build all the infrastructure, right? Because you needed power lines, you needed transistors, you know, all these things. And then it would take a few more years for the first paper to sort of posit an intergalactic communications network that builds on all this technology. We'd take more years to get to a satellite. And anyhow, now we are 2022. We're having an internet conversation with audio and video. We're nowhere near each other.

The communications industry is so big. All these economists have tried to calculate the total value of this ecosystem. There's no way to do it. The only way to really calculate the value is to do it in reverse, to see what we would lose. We are at the chickering hall phase right now of synthetic biology, which is to say the technology exists, it works, but it hasn't scaled yet. Now, is it going to take 20 or 30 years to scale? I don't think so. I think we're on a much shorter time horizon. And, you know, I think it's going to wind up ballooning into this enormous, massive, huge economic joggernaut the way that some of our other

core technologies have. That's sort of my next question, right? Is semiconductors, there's Moore's law, right? And I can't remember exactly what it is, but it's like over X number of years these things have in size and cost, right? Do you know that? Do you know? that off the top of your head by any chance? Yeah. So this is Gordon Moore, who was at Intel at the time. And so Moore's Law, again, posits that with time and it's basically been keeping current, that the number of transistors and you can cram more things into a smaller space and get more power out of it and the fees come down. So that has, for the most part, continue to hold. There's a version of that in synthetic biology that a guy named, yeah, Rob Carlson came up with, and those are called

Carlson's curves. But it's the same basic concept. Over time, you're going to have much more compute, much more power, be able to build more things at scale with reduced costs. We're already seeing that happen. Originally, when they sequenced the human genome, it took many years and billions of dollars. You could get a sequence, you know, several years ago for like $1,000. Today, there's now whole genome sequencing. You can go online and basically get your whole genome sequenced for less than the price of a pair of Nike Air Jordans. So it's just time and experience and maturation tends to lead to, you know, scale and reduce prices. When we talked on the phone a while ago, I think one of the questions I asked you was about

DNA sequencing. And we went off on a little bit of a fun tangent about how it's not a great idea to maybe give your DNA to the companies that are doing this. Do you still believe that? Or did I get that right? Yeah, you totally got it right. Yeah. So the number one holder in the world of genetic data, do you know who it is? Or who would you guess? I don't know, 23 and Me or Ancestry.com or something like that? So it's China. China holds the most. That's much scarier in many ways. Yeah. Yes. Hashtag agree. China's the number one followed by. You're absolutely right. Amy and Ancestry.com. Ancestry.com got bought out by BlackRock, I want to say, for a lot of money.

BlackRock was not interested in subscribers, like people who were really interested in looking for their ancestors. What they were buying was all of the stored DNA data. Blackstone, thank you, not BlackRock. I always do that too. Don't worry about it. Yeah. But again, you know, this is a really interesting thing to poke at and really think through.

pre-COVID, I don't think most people were like, yeah, totally, take my DNA and I'll get some, it's like, I don't know, it reminds me a little bit about of being in college and there was always like a credit card vendor giving out a t-shirt ahead of the big football game. Right. To get people to sign up for, you get a t-shirt to take, take more debt. We'll give you this colorful shirt that you can wear. It's like three sizes too big. Yeah. Yeah. So these prices are coming down so much in the. sequencing space, you know, the data are worth so much, so much that at some point, it's likely that these companies will just, you know, give you your data profile for free in exchange for housing your DNA so that they can learn from it. So part of that is like, you know, it's not nefarious

necessarily. It's more like you're being monetized and not getting a share back. Okay. So like companies are like doing all kinds of research to find new therapeutics, learn new insights. And again, I think that's a good thing. I think that should happen. But what's the social contract? Like, it could 23 and me take all of this data and sell it to a third party? Or what's the cybersecurity protocols? What happens if these companies get breached? That's not like somebody stealing your email. Right. Right. So like, what if there was a breach? You know, what if you got biologically doxed? Doxing is when somebody gets a hold of your personal information and publishes it on the web for people to harass you and do whatever else with? Well, what if they publish your genome? There are people like George Church and others who

say, you know, take it. It's fine. Do what you will. But there is a security risk here. And you don't have to create a deadly virus to make somebody's life absolutely miserable, you know. There's also a lot of information that you can tell from somebody's profile. And there's also a lot of possibility for misinformation. There are people who would purport to say, I can tell you based on your DNA, what your cognitive range is, meaning like how smart you are. That's a hotly contested topic because what makes somebody smart and how they express those smarts is like related to many different things. But let's say that you're actually really smart. You're an expressive, creative smart person, but according to some schmo, like your markers, put a probability

in the lower 50 percentile. That kind of stuff matters in the public. And it creates the swirl of totally unnecessary misinformation. So speaking of tangent. No, but it's scary when you think about that plus authoritarian regime, right? So, and we don't have to necessarily even talk about China. We could talk about a fictional country or we can just say, let's say North Korea gets it. And it's widespread. So everybody who is not going to be that smart, not going to be that great of a producer, they can just say, you know what, we don't need these people at all. They're going to be a drain on our limited resources. And they can do that at birth. And it's like, sorry, you can't have this baby. It's not going to be a good citizen. And then that is very dystopian and horrible.

It is. It's actually a story that we've read before, if anybody's familiar with Huxley. But it's true. These are not totally fictional stories here. And some would say that there's evidence that some of this work to understand cognition and potentially enhance cognitive abilities is being done now in China, which I think we should all find ethically concerning. but also is like maybe that's a security issue for a lot of countries. Yeah, let's talk about that because I have heard that China is making genetically engineered. What level of truth is there to that? Or is it?

Because in many ways, it almost sounds like, is that more nonsense? So I can just speak from my own perspective and the research that I've done. I don't think we will ever know. I lived in Hong Kong. So just before the handover, it wasn't technically China at that point. And I went into China a lot. I also lived in Japan. And my take on this is China is very, very cloaked.

They're very opaque. So what's actually happening will be challenging to sort out. What we do know is that there are super pigs. They have been developing pigs in part because the African swine flu that wiped out, I think three quarters of China's population, pig population, and they're very reliant on pork. So they've created new pigs, super pigs, that can grow faster. they have more muscle, meaning fewer resources, you get a bigger animal that you can consume. And they've been engineered to withstand fluctuations in temperature. So they're more resilient.

They've created double or quadruful muscled police dogs. So there's all kinds of experimentation that's already underway with livestock and animals. And of course, we know about the scientist who reportedly edited using CRISPR embryos that results. in a live pregnancy and the birth of twins. Now, depending on who you talk to, this is a pretty polarizing issue. I know people who will argue adamantly that there was full transparency and all of the parents who were involved in the study knew what they were signing up for and that this was altruistic.

And they will quote sources from the Chinese Communist Party, who took them on the tour and showed them, revealed everything to them. Yeah. That's up there with those people that tour Xinjiang for a YouTube video. And they're like, there's no genocide. Look at the people dancing in the street, which is totally normal. Yeah. Right.

I'm, I guess, more skeptical or more jaded or much more of a pragmatist. I don't know. I spent a lot of time there. I lived in the region for many years. And I just think that's implausible. So what actually got published? The study shows that the twins were edited to be HIV-resistant. Now, in China, that is actually a thing.

stigma, the stigma against people infected with HIV is horrific, really bad. In it's 2022, this is a manageable condition. It's a big deal for people who have it, but like it's not like we ostracize people with HIV, but that is not the case in China. So one way to look at this is he was a compassionate scientist who was trying to prevent offspring from having to manage through the stigma of potentially being infected. with HIV, which seems like a big stretch. The other way to look at this is some of that same research was conducted on mice, same parts of the genome, same areas, and that research was being

conducted to see if their cognition could be enhanced. So my question is, was this about reducing susceptibility to HIV AIDS? Was it about that plus cognition enhancement? Or was this about seeing if they could jack up the IQs of people by two points, five points, ten points. And again, like IQ measurement is another like mystical crazy science. However, there are studies that show a few five, seven IQ points is the difference between a kid who takes algebra two and a kid who's taking AP calculus. It does matter. And the truth is, we'll never know what actually happened. We will never know. This is not like the IAEA. It's not like nuclear arms development where you can see from space who's doing what. This is very opaque. We'll never know. What we do know is that there is a

high probability that on this planet right now, there are now enhanced humans and there are analogs like you and me. That is both amazing and incredible and scary in many ways. And not because like, oh no, we don't measure up, but also it just could create such a huge divide over time. It would be truly, let's throw the national security implications out for a second, but it could be, it would be truly unfair in so many ways if we were just doing this, let's say, even inside the United States. It'd be like a, I think in the book you call it a genetic trust fund, only it's much harder to overcome, right?

Because we've seen trust fund kids screw things up. And we'll see enhanced humans screw things up too by throwing away their potential. But it really is something you almost can't squand. It would be very difficult to do, if done correctly, and it would compound seriously over generations. But it really does seem unavoidable. Like, who, back to national security, who doesn't want their country's offspring to have this kind of advantage? It seems like a weird concern. There's so much to be concerned about.

But I think that's a form of bio-escalation. Cyberbiological arms race, right? Yeah, which we really don't want. Because what's going to happen? If it turns out that China is actively experiment, to enhance, you know, what are we going to do, say, that puts the rest of the world in a really tricky position. You know, I could think of a couple of ways that that might play out in the U.S. Maybe there's like a WPA that, you know, like, during FDR, there was a sort of public works

program to sort of get people to volunteer and serve their country. And I could imagine something like that, but serving your country means submitting to enhancement. or agreeing to have your children enhanced to keep pace. You know, if you lived, there was a lot of sort of galvanizing activity around the end of the World War II and the Cold War. I could also see this causing like an all-out civil war in the United States because we're really unlike other places in the world. We can't have conversations with each other about life, where it comes from, what to do with it, how it ends. we really have made that a polarizing issue. And again, it comes down to certainty.

Everybody's so certain of what they believe that they don't make space to listen to what other people believe. And listening doesn't mean you have to agree. It does mean that you're willing to be open-minded. And if you have a change of heart, that that's okay, you know. We're not really set up for that in this country. So if we wind up in a situation where there is a country or a cluster of people or some group of Uber billionaires who go sea stead out in the ocean where laws don't apply to them and they're creating a super race of people. I think that I think that's actually going to divide

the United States not bring us together. So yeah, I don't know. I know I'm describing like an apocalyptic hellscape of doom. Well, I mean, possibly. It also just seems like not only could this be the plot of a Jason Bourne film, but also it just seems really very powerful. possible that there also exists in the United States and it's just very secret and the people who have these enhancements don't even know or so i mean i could be ridiculous i don't know to truly do the types of enhancements that we're talking about this stuff is years off many years off what is likelier to happen in the nearer term is again just optionality in the u.s so one of the things in the book has to do with procreation. There is a way to create a stem cell. There's a way to use a

stem cell and sort of make that become any other type of cell it wants to when it grows up. What that means is you could turn a skin cell into a sperm or an egg. And the implications there are that a single person could create an embryo with just their own genetic material. It wouldn't be a clone. I don't know why that's so sad, but it's somehow that just seems like really sad. Well, yeah, I mean, it does. But I also have a, you know, I've got some friends who wanted to start a family and just didn't have a partner. And they have to go out and find donor material, which is like really hard to do. Yeah, I can see that. It also opens up the possibility that you could have multiple parents, you know, you could have a three parent child or a

10 parent child. If you watched the expanse or read the books, I don't think I'm spoiling anything. This is revealed right away. You know, it's a character that has a whole bunch of parents. It's just different. It's different than how we think of family today. I don't think that's bad. I think it gives us some options. And again, I think... Weren't humans back in the day parented by the whole tribe anyway?

Isn't that kind of a thing? So it's like now you just have genetic material instead of them not knowing who the father is. It's not that different. Yeah, but again, like, it's just constructs. We're just going to have to be comfortably. And I think that's going to be hard. I think it's going to be hard. And if China, if it comes out, and I don't know how to...

how it would. But if it comes out that they are doing enhancement, which we know is happening with animals, it turns out it's people. My concern is that we're not going to be able to come to the table and have a reasonable conversation because politics and arguing is going to get in the way. Which means the military is going to be the only place that this can have some place that can compartmentalize this in a very secret way, which is like a kind of another, not great for science when it's like, okay, we have to keep this really secret and not tell people who might. might not like it and not talk about it publicly. That's just never a good recipe.

That's just like dot, dot, dot, CIA extra, what is it called extraordinary rendition centers? Like that's, you end up with that kind of stuff. Yeah. And again, like, if we step away from the like, what does life look like in the future, there are the much more real potential problems of things like cyber bio malware. So the way that it's in Biowworks is you still need computers or developing code instead of ones and zeros, it's ACTG. You have to write the code, you edit the code, you send the code to a printer, you send it to a manufacturer.

And it's been proven more than once that there are vulnerabilities in that system. And you could create totally benign biological code, get back a blob of, like a blob of something that's not very interesting, right? But you could inject malware in the process, meaning you could send off a benign sample and get back a potent virus. a deadly virus. Now, luckily, that hasn't happened yet, but there are, you know, it's not like human scientists are standing with a pipette, you know, an individual test tubes. All the stuff relies on AI, the cloud, 5G on tech. And tech is insecure. The number of old school fishing email attacks is up like 51% Q1. So there are vulnerabilities that I think are much more pressing that we have to really think through and prioritize. This is the Jordan Harbinger.

show with our guest Amy Webb. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to the show. I love having these conversations as you can hear from the podcast, but it's your support of our advertisers that keeps the lights on around here. All the deals and the discounts and the URLs, they're all in one page. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find it. They're all searchable from the website, and you can search for the sponsors using the search box on the website as well. So please consider supporting those who support us. Now for the rest of my conversation with Amy Webb. This stuff will keep you up in night.

Our episode with Rob Reed, he talks about having DNA printers in high school labs or college labs. And what happens if somebody who knows what they're doing designs super, super, super contagious and also super, super deadly influenza or some other pandemic and then says, and goes kind of the terrorist route and just releases it or even accidentally gets infected with it and spreads it all over the place. That stuff will keep you up at night. It's just the dual-use dilemma.

Right? When good tech ends up being used for bad things like chemical or biological weapons, and sometimes it happens by accident. Right. Now, to be fair, there's a lot of tech in our daily lives that could be dangerous if it's misused. This ruler that I'm holding up is if I stabbed you in the neck with this enough times, it could kill you. And this plastic ruler could therefore be a deadly weapon. So I think we have to approach this with some amount of just common sense. Anything can be misused. I think the trick with this biology stuff is. is that biology tends to be self-sustaining, there's usually not an off-switch. So part of the concern here is that there is research that's been done to try to make things more virulent. So I think it was 2002, some researchers from Stony Brook, University of New York, state of New York at Stony Brook, I think. It was SUNY. It was just a project funded through DARPA. And basically what they were trying to figure out was, could they recreate?

smallpox. Oh, gosh. Was it smallpox or polio? Hang on a second. That's scary. Either one is really scary. Smallpox especially. Yeah, just like using off the shelf materials.

And the answer was, yeah, they were totally able to do that. The point of this was to sort of help the greater research community wake up and be like, hey, maybe we need some controls. But there was a different project done later, about a decade later. And that researcher, who was in Europe, was. working with H5N1, which is the avian bird flu. Before SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID, this was the deadliest virus to hit humanity since the Spanish flu in 1918.

And it was passed between birds. And the experiment that he was doing was, in his words, not mine, to mutate the hell out of this to make it airborne and passable between humans. And it's like, for what purpose? Okay. So this is something called gain of function research, GOF, gain of function. And when I've heard people talk about it, their reason for wanting to do the research is that if they can figure out the worst possible ways that a virus will mutate, that that will allow us to be prepared. And my feeling is, like, we're still living with a deadly virus mutating constantly.

And we were able to sequence SARS-CoV-2 in basically a handful of hours. Yeah, like maybe wait until we have the problem instead of being like, look, I found the most deadly thing ever. It's already ready for when it gets out. And it's like, dude, it didn't exist before you did that. Exactly. Why? Why make it? Right. And like how many possible simulations are you going to be able to build? You don't, there's too many potential factors in play.

So I don't think there's any reason to do this research at all. You know, my concern is that, again, the vast majority of people in this space that are working in CINBio are not, they're not doing any of this, right? They are doing things like, hey, could we make a tomato that doesn't rot, you know, after you pick it for a week? Right. Can we make a leather jacket looking thing out of mushrooms? Can we make beer that doesn't give you a hangover? It's that kind of stuff. There are other researchers who are engineering viruses for a different reason to deliver. medication, right? A virus is just a container for code. So viruses could be created to target cancer, for example, right? But there is the specter of what if, because we've already seen it before, somebody creates a dangerous use for these things. What then? We have to be aware and be thinking about it. I do like the tomato example. That's gain of freshness research, I guess. So dad jokes. Can't help it. Now it's perfect. Perfect. I love that. You can use that one too. So you mentioned that biology

is self-sustaining, okay? That makes sense, right? It's a living thing that you create. We discussed earlier specialized microbes that could eat plastic in water. And I think in the book you mentioned something that could turn wastewater into drinking water, which would be great. What happens if those things escape, right? I guess you have to think about how to make it so they're not always self-sustaining or they have to, they're only active when there's another ingredient nearby. So you're dumping that in the area where you wanted to eat the plastic. I don't know. I guess those are a solution.

Because the last thing you want is, oh, these things are everywhere now. And so now anything that's plastic that's touching water, like hoses and pipes and residential infrastructure is now also getting eaten by these organisms

that we made to get rid of a trash patch in the ocean. Yeah. So this is the sort of law of unintended consequences side of things. Just after the dust bowl, there was an enterprising guy

who was like, we need to rewile these large swaths of the country that have lost vegetation and happened upon this plant that seemed to be pretty drought-resistant and hearty and would help make things green again. This plant is called Kudzu. And initially, it got planted and it was like helping things out. And fast forward to today, you drive anywhere up and down the 95-quarter on the East Coast. It looks like there's some monster in the summer.

It's just vines everywhere choking out. the rest of the vegetation. So, you know, that's a good framing to think through how edits with the best possible intentions could have undesirable consequences. I know that there is research being done into sort of like a biological off switch. And if things did start to grow too much, maybe there would be a way to sort of get them to stop growing that wouldn't involve a weed killer or something like that. Again, this is very early days. And I think what I think is heartening is that I know people are thinking about that and trying to work through it.

The geoengineering stuff kind of freaks me out just because it's so hard to predict, right? Ecosystems look like they're all perfectly balanced because for millions of years ago they weren't and then something got extinct or died. Like people go, oh, well, look how in harmony everything is when humans don't mess with it. It's like, well, yeah, but we had different types, and we know this now, of different types of, are they called hominids? Like, we humans lived in concert with other earlier humans. They just all died. We out-competed them. They're dead now and extinct. And so we don't want to do that to

plants that we use or animals that we need or other things that keep other things in balance because we can easily mess this up. Like, hey, there's no more plastic in the ocean and nowhere else for that matter either. And frankly, you probably shouldn't ingest that because it's going to get to your plastic heart valve and that's going to go now. And it's just like that could go horribly wrong if we aren't careful with it and it's impossible seemingly to think of all the potential outcomes of something like that. So the best thing to be able to do would be to unplug it if you can. Yeah. I mean, again, this is where I wish we could think exponentially and act incrementally all the time. These are sort of opposing forces. But it's what you need to both have a vision of

the future and work toward that North Star of what you're trying to build. What's better for society for the planet for everybody, but be willing to sort of make incremental decisions on the path getting there, which might mean it's sometimes changing course very slightly. When it comes to geoengineering, again, this is a place where China has already moved ahead of a big CCP meeting. They cloud-seated. They made it rain for the purpose of getting the smog out of Beijing. It's going to be challenging to get everybody to the table to make some agreements about some possibilities. On the other hand, do we have a choice? Cop 26 ended. That was the big environmental global meeting without people walking away feeling like they accomplished what they

needed to. And that's because India and China are enormous economies whose economies for the moment rely a lot on coal. And we live in a globalized situation. Globalization forces many countries to rely on India and China. And you can't say to them, hey, let's stop, producing all that CO2 without giving them a solution or changing our price structures or lots of things. Like we want you to still make all our stuff, but you just can't do it using the way that you produce energy now. You have to come up with a new solution. See you guys later. Right. So I'm not trying to be a fatalist here, but the reality is that we're not moving fast enough to deal with the problems we have. So rather than trying to get everybody to agree

to cutting like CO2 emissions, there's a constellation of cool science and tech out there. Can't we try a whole bunch of things while still trying to cut emissions. So that's some of the geoengineering stuff. And small scale experiments, could we engineer a leaf? Could we think of the CO2 that we have as a feedstock that we just have too much of and have like a bargain basement fire sale on all the CO2 and like engineer leaves that can suck more of that CO2 out of the air and excrete beneficial compounds that would help the topsoil. Those experiments are underway, but it makes people feel uneasy. Yeah, you know. Yeah, yeah.

I like the idea of like a grass that grows all over and just hooveres up carbon and shoves it into the ground. Yeah. We did a whole episode on geoengineering, episode 348, and I got a ton of emails about stuff from experts that were like, this, the one thing is really, experts in all these different fields where this guy was positing ideas. And he's like, this is such a bad idea. Here's all the things that could go wrong. So I was up for like three days just not sleeping because I was like, please tell me they're not going to try to do this. Because all, whatever you come up with what sounds like an awesome solution, like that grass solution. solution, somebody who's a, I don't know, horticulturalist is going to go, okay, sounds good,

but here's all the problems with that. And then you go, okay, well, like you said, it's so hard to get it right. Right. Then what you do is the next step. So I think the place that we're, as a society getting stuck is somebody's got an idea. Somebody else says, but, but, but, right? And then that's the, and then there's arguments. What would be better is, I've got this idea. A whole bunch of people say, oh, have you thought about it this way? you could have the butt, but, but people. Or maybe this is the other way to think about it. And that leads to a series of conversations and incremental improvements. We've kind of forgotten about the like, let's argue with each other productively for the purpose of getting those incremental improvements in

the idea. If we were talking about anything else, if we were doing product design, that's what would happen. A normal product design cycle begins with idea. You have a design charrette. You've got people arguing back and forth, and you go through an iterative process until you get a product that people want, aka your iPhone, right? But with this other geoengineering, editing humans, Cocker Spaniel kebabs, we don't go through that iterative process. Instead, what we wind up with is an explosion, an incendiary process, not iterative, where instead of the conversation being productive as it moves along, it becomes like this entrenched supernovae. that at some point, you know, explodes into horrible.

There's another way to do it. There's another way to have the conversation. I invite people to disagree with me vehemently as long as they're willing to do that in service of productive thinking. Disagree. Let's argue. And now let's move on to the next part of this conversation and see where we get. It's an incredible future that's just coming at us seemingly really fast.

And I know you said this is long horizon technology. I get that. But what is the timeline for most of what we discussed today? Are we talking about 30 years from now, or is this going to sneak up on us and be here in like a decade? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. But let me tell you why. We have sort of a model with three horizons, H1, 2, and 3, which describe relative near-term, midterm, and longer term over the next 15 to 20 years. I can tell you, generally speaking, what our model shows and then explain to you why that could all be wrong.

Generally speaking, things like new uses for messenger RNA, new types of vaccines, lots of new diagnostics, whole genome sequencing, nearer term. Things like self-healing paint, stronger materials, nylon, you know, alternative to leather materials, that would be Horizon 2. The third one is synthetic meat at scale, cultured meat at scale, or biofuel has like long been the Holy Grail, which I don't know if it's ever going to happen, but it's a longer horizon stuff. Now, let me tell you why I don't know. The answer is because this is a space where there's a lot of still sort of basic research being done. And there is no way to schedule an R&D breakthrough.

You can't do that on a quarterly schedule. So there's that. A lot of this work sort of is adjacent to what's happening in artificial intelligence. So as computational systems, pattern recognition, deep mind, which is doing all kinds of crazy things under the Google umbrella, is all about advances. That brings SynBio along with it. So that's another piece. Investment is another huge piece. So I don't know if we're going to wind up in a recession or if it's stagnation. I don't know what's happening on the horizon exactly. But I do know that in the investment sector, there's a lot of very concerned venture capital types who are confused and feeling less certain about their investments and some limited partners are calling back their investments. That creates a level of

uncertainty. And at the same time, there are some companies, there's a company called Altos Lab, which has huge names attached. What they're trying to do is to figure out how to reverse aging using some of this technology, reprogramming life, right? They've raised $3 billion. Wow. I don't even know what a valuation on three. They don't have a product out. They've just got a collection of very smart people. So there's so much volatility and there's so much impact that for me to give you an accurate prediction at this point of when the inflections are, that is not a model that I would be able to build. So it's fine. We don't have to know exactly when. We just have to be ready to observe those inflections as they're happening. But generally speaking, because I know this is what

people want to know, you know, sometime in the next 10 years. I mean, that's so fast. That's so fast. That's really incredible. Because I think people, when they hear about this stuff, the reason I asked is they're like, oh, yeah, 50 years from now when I'm dead, we might have the ability to, no, this is, you're going to see this crap in the supermarket in 10 or 15 years potentially, right? And maybe the other way to think about it is you won't be dead in 15 years. Hopefully not. Or 50 years.

A lot of the excitement around this technology is, you know, there's some research into looking at cells as like biological DVRs. If you can sort of record and watch what's happening in a cell, can you figure out at what point you can reverse the aging process? There's all this work being done to reprogram cells so that they age slower or not at all or some of the sort of zombie material that floats around that's not quite dead and causes some problems that that doesn't happen anymore. I think we're going to have some optionality on how long our lives are and that's coming too. it would be interesting to think about living very long lives where you are relatively healthy and with it and you have a very long, happy life and like one really bad day at the end, right, versus what we have now, which is, you know, power in youth and then suffering for a lot of,

a lot of people. Yeah, that stuff, the cognitive decline and all that stuff is, it really freaks me out. It's just really, really so awful to see up close with your own family and think like, oh, my God, I'm going to end up like that possibly. that's horrible. Do you have time to tell me about personalized bio-weapons because that crap is, speaking of things that keep you up at night is so interesting. Yeah. So if you had somebody's whole genome, you could figure out ways to tinker with it. Not that it kills the person, but just makes them super uncomfortable or inhibits them in some way or just gives them chronic diarrhea,

stuff like that. Okay. And at the World Economic Forum in Davos, this was two years ago, there was an artist collective that shortly after created a website and auctioned off items, like used coffee cups and forks and things from the people who were there. Oh, that's so weird. To anybody who wanted them. Now, you know, they could have been making all of this up. But having been there myself, it's very hard to get into the sort of inner circle of what's happening. and staff are very well screened, but there's always a possibility that you've got some leak somewhere, and yeah, you leave stuff all over the place.

You know, I'm constantly drinking coffee and, like, I drink my coffee, I put my coffee cup down and somebody takes it. I don't know who's taking it. So it is possible to scrape somebody's DNA from Detreus. If you were able to do that and you could sequence the person, then what might you be able to do?

Well, again, like, you could create a virus somebody could have created a virus that gave a president, just chronic stomach cramps, diarrhea, some type of problem. It doesn't kill them, but it makes it hard for them to lead, hard for them to make decisions. And again, this may not seem so catastrophic except that if this happens to a CEO or a board of directors member, there's a fiduciary responsibility. It could have an economic consequence. It unlocks a new, a fresh new hell where biological ransomware exists. You're going to have diarrhea for the rest of your life unless you pay me some of that doge coin, Elon. Yeah, exactly.

Or like, I will make your hair fallout celebrity. Again. Pick your celebrity. Yeah. Yeah. Unless I guess it was bad, Elon. Try the second time. This time you can't put it back in.

Yeah. I mean, again, like, is it totally improbable? No. Is it around the corner? Probably not. But, like, did Emmanuel Macron tell Putin? I'm not doing a COVID sample for you, bro, because it's you. You know, like, why would I want you to have my DNA?

That's interesting. Yeah. So, and if it had been pre-COVID, I think we would be much more comfortable saying, yeah, I'm never giving my DNA to somebody, you know, obviously. But we live in COVID times. And like a couple of weeks ago, I had to have a PCR. I just proved that I was PCR negative. I had to go to a guy in a van in Dumbo, like in Brooklyn.

Just like literally a guy in a white van, I show up and he's like, okay, let me take your sample. And I'm like, who are you? I have a latex allergy. Are those latex gloves? He doesn't even know what I'm talking about. The security protocols is what I'm trying to say here are quite squishy. Leave something to be desired. Yeah.

Exactly. But we've arrived at this point in time when we're like, yeah, I'll go to a, like, I need to get into this event. hey Schmo, guy in the van by the river. Yeah, shove that thing up my nose and take my DNA. God, that is incredibly disturbing. I mean, he, in all likelihood, just threw it away after getting the test results. But there's just no way to know. There's just no way to know.

No, but the point is, the bigger point that I'm making here is that we're all becoming desensitized to being skeptical. I mean, and we should take tests. I'm not saying don't take tests. I'm not saying don't, you know, practice good, safe health habits. What I am saying is it's okay to take the test and also say, hey, by the way, where is this going? Who's got the data? How are they being stored?

The tech is not going to know that, you know, those answers. But we should be asking them. It's okay to ask questions like that. I mean, they might know if they throw it in an incinerator right after they take the results for you. I mean, that's possible. And they should know something else. Somebody there should know something like that. The guy in the van maybe not.

He probably just dropped it off somewhere. but everybody else. Yeah, well, either way, your point is well taken. Amy Webb, thank you so much. Really, really interesting stuff. I wish we had two more hours, but this was incredible. There's so much in the book like this. And, of course, I'll link to that in the show notes as well.

Thank you so much. It was a fun conversation. Fun and scary. That's the best kind of fun. Yeah, fun and scary. That's the best kind of fun. By the way, y'all, as we mentioned during the show, here is a trailer for our episode with Rob Reed,

also on synthetic biology, but a little bit more dark than this one. The terrifying thing is COVID is how. pretty damn benign compared to what could have easily happened this time around or what could very easily happen next time around, particularly if the next bug is maliciously designed. Society produces a certain small but terrifying percentage of people every year who, for whatever reason, go to such a dark place that they become suicidal mass murderers, and their death toll is limited only by the weapons that they have. Technology is the force multibular. The 1918 flu virus, which killed at a much, much, much greater scale than COVID, and the smallpox genome.

Both of those are online, and anybody could find them within a short number of minutes. The time would soon come where somebody could take that and reanimate that. And something which scares the bejesus out of me, which is an influenza virus, not a coronavirus, is H5N1 flu that kills 50 to 60% of the people that it infects. Two independent research groups, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, took it upon themselves, and they basically made it capable of aerosolized transmission through the breath. No lab is secure enough to keep this stuff. Right.

And this is a pathogen that could quite literally topple civilization if it's contagious enough. If the lights shut off on a countrywide basis, after a shockingly small number of days, civilization starts to teeter and eventually topple. That was episode 244. Rob Reed, synthetic biology for medicine and for murder. So these kinds of conversations, I love having these because they bring up all sorts of new questions that we have never seen before.

Who will own new forms of life that are created? Are we going to patent them? Should we edit our children? Should we bring back extinct animals? Is that going to be Jurassic Park style? I mean, humans have destroyed over a million species. Do we bring back just the ones we destroyed or do we bring back ones that died a few hundred thousand or millions of years before we got here?

I don't know. Doesn't sound like a great idea, but who knows what's really going to happen here, right? Also, those DNA printers, we did an episode with Rob Reed, I think that was episode 244. Those can be used to counter bioweapons in the field. We can print vaccines or medications right on the spot for quick manufacturing and distribution. Rob, of course, talked about the dark side of this, printable pandemics, diseases. Episode 244, that is the trailer you just heard, by the way. Also, regular medicineists, as opposed to vaccines and other treatments, bespoke treatments,

based on your condition and also based on your genetic makeup. Devices that can monitor us in real time, something implanted, something we swallow, ingestable units that beam health info to systems, something on your phone perhaps, that can analyze our gut biome, make health recommendations, what you're supposed to eat today, what you're not supposed to eat that day. Of course, they can also detect internal conditions such as bleeding, stomach acid, make sure your medication is on track. And unfortunately, this device or your insurance company, can spy on you, or you could just

make sure you're adhering to your diet. Speaking of which, maybe I do want some human brain sashimi. Don't knock it till you tried it, right? Also, CRISPR opens up a whole heck of a lot of options. We could prevent or even correct genetic diseases that may be lethal or at least very inconvenient, and we would have no side effects like we do with medication. We'd be really getting to the root cause of a disease, as in we're just going to turn this gene off.

So you never even get Parkinson's or whatever. You won't have to worry about mitigating it, catching it early. You're just never going to get it in the first place. That is absolutely incredible. All of this cognitive decline stuff, I don't know about you guys, that stuff terrifies me, right? I work with my brain, I read, I write, that's why when I hear about brain fog with COVID

or getting older and having that type of thing happen, it just scares the crap out of me. It's one major reason why I started working on my sleep and my fitness so much over the past few years just to try and stave that stuff off. But imagine knowing that you're not going to get it because you turned that gene off in your body years ago. Unbelievable.

Also, what about little nanobots that can do CRISPR and gene editing inside the body to replace cells and organs like eyes that are needed for sight? What if you just changed something or created something inside your body that was never there when you were born or broken some way or injured? Unfortunately, of course, we can also have real-life chimeras. We could splice human genes into that of apes or monkeys and create super intelligent species. Almost literally like Planet of the Apes. Not sure how ethical that is would be pretty rough, but is definitely going to be possible on the horizon.

Or what if we do this to ourselves? What if we splice hummingbird genes into human genes? and we could create humans that can see like hummingbirds. Superhuman senses are right on the horizon with this as well. We talked about that with David Eagleman, episode 655. That was just recent. David talked about adding technology to humans to make us have super senses, like the ability to feel data that's collected from the internet.

That's sort of cybernetic, but this, when we're editing our own genes, this would be like a piece of biotechnology that's added into us, maybe even at birth or possibly even beforehand. This is truly X-Men territory. By the way, I know we talked about China, and people have been emailing me lately, like, oh, come on, man, you can't do one episode

without throwing shade on the Chinese Communist Party. And on that note, I recommend checking out the YouTube channels of Lauai 86 and ADV China for lots of great info on China and the Chinese Communist Party and why we should all be paying attention

to what they are doing. Look, I am obviously against a lot of those policies and authoritarianism in general. I especially enjoyed Lawa's recent video on the CCP attempting to pay him to post propaganda on his YouTube channel. Really insightful, gives you a look behind the curtain, quite a bit of scary stuff in there as well. We'll link to that in the show notes for this episode, of course. Big thank you once again to Amy Webb.

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