The Realities of Genetic Engineering Are Here Now | Jamie Metzl on Conversations with Tom

[Music] everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i'm here with jamie metzel jamie i am super excited to talk to you about your book hacking darwin as i said i was completely captivated by that book and what's possible with the human genome and all that good stuff so man welcome to the show thanks tom really happy to be here cool well give the listeners a just super quick thumbnail sketch of what hacking darwin is about and because this is as opposed to some of the science fiction stuff you've done this is all science fact so what was it that made you want to write this book so first question the book i mean if there's just a takeaway for people our ancestors they thought biology was just something that happens you get born somehow now suddenly our one little group of monkeys who climbed down from the trees suddenly we have this ability to read write and hack the code of life like these superpowers that we've imagined are god's having to create life to change life to extend life suddenly we have it and it's going to fundamentally transform so many aspects of our lives not just healthcare but the the way we make babies the nature of the babies that we make and ultimately our evolutionary trajectory is a species and that really scares people because people say like well wait a second i'm a homo sapien i like being a homo sapien but when you kind of imagine the whole range the the the temporal range of human evolution we've only been this for about 300 000 years which is kind of nothing so it was never this was never the end point of our evolution um but i think for a long long time people haven't imagined that we were going to be the drivers of our evolutionary process on a on a biological level and that that's kind of the essence of the moment i mean hacking darwin tells this whole story from beginning to you know there's no end but uh into into the future but but that's essentially what the core message of hacking darwin one thing that i found really interesting about the book is you talk about if we were to reach back into our past a thousand years and bring either an embryo or an infant and then raise them in the modern world we would they'd be indistinguishable from you know who we are today but if we were to reach a thousand years into the future and bring that person back they would essentially be superhuman compared to what we have now and i want to stress again for people that are listening to this what we're about to go into at least this part we may talk about science fiction as well but this is science fact this [ __ ] that is happening right now um what what is it do you think in terms of the person a thousand years in the future even just sort of extrapolating on technology that's real and being used today what would be superhuman about them so lots of of different things and i think it's it's really hard for people to get their mind around this at this point which i write about in the book if you were to go back and kidnap some kid from a thousand years ago and just put them into our lives like we would have no way of i mean they would just be exactly like us in pretty much every way but that kid in a thousand years into the future is going to live longer healthier more robust life they probably weren't born by their parents fornicating um they were probably born because uh through through a process in a lab um almost certainly they were the result of their embryo being selected from among thousands i mean in which right now there is a process of of selection in the sense that that when a man's sperm i mean there's lots of sperm cells more than a billion in some cases you know goes into a woman and then they kind of swim around and they then they find the right egg that there's a form of selection that's happening there but what what these kids a thousand years from now we're going to be born from is a a selection that we are managing we're going to be sequencing the egg and sperm we're going to be sequencing probably many thousands of embryos we're going to be selecting which one and and when you think about embryo selection how did a wild chicken laying one egg a month become a domestic chicken ling one egg a day our ancestors did it not knowing anything about genetics but if we have all of these generations between now and a thousand years from now where we are making informed they may not be wise but informed selections about who about which embryos get implanted in the mother we can really push a lot of evolutionary change and then we're going to go in and we're going to make um edits to our genomes and i don't think even a thousand years from now we're going to be making people from scratch but we are going to be moving around a lot of of the genetics to in order to either prevent bad outcomes or increase the likelihood of things that we consider to be good all right so i think it'll be interesting to go in and tease out some of the phrases that you've said and really talk about what that is so we've got a chicken it's laying one egg a month and over time we're going to turn that into a chicken that's laying um one egg a day basically what they're doing is a the they're looking for the one that lays two eggs a month and then they're trying to breed it with another one and then when that one creates one that's like two and a half eggs a month you breed that one with one that's doing a little bit more and now all of a sudden over generations you get that it becomes very common for them to do one a day same with dogs right it starts with a wolf that's just a little more friendly than the next and then flash forward and i have a pomeranian that you know wants to sit on my lap so you selective breeding i think is the term for that so you're just basically picking traits that you want and then it has sort of a knock-on effect of other traits like the fluffier tail the floppy ears um they weren't necessarily breeding for that they were breeding for temperament but you get this sort of knock-on effect now when we talk about that that's exactly and i think that that people kind of get that that you know our dog that they used to be like a wolf and now they've they've turned into into dogs but people have a hard time internalizing is that we used to be little single cell organisms i mean and i think that there's there's so much there's so much movement so much possibility in all of biology because almost four billion years ago there was just one single cell organism and that grew into all of life and so from this starting point of where we are now there's an unlimited number of possible futures even if we didn't have any of this biology just because that's how biology works things morph there's this constant it's almost like a war of random mutation and natural selection where every new generation of every species is a little bit different from their parents and sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse and over time huge changes happen and now we are are amplifying and magnifying that process yeah that that is the the whole notion of the blind watchmaker right that we've ended up the way that we've ended up through um i mean if you believe in evolution which i certainly do that there wasn't like some desired outcome that was trying to be reached it's your environment changes dramatically sometimes completely without warning what was working in a previous generation and the fittest of that generation now be maybe the least likely to survive and you know whatever adaptation has changed and the fact that we went from oxygen being a poison to now being the very thing that we all need to survive and just the the way that things change like that what becomes so interesting though is when you inject human consciousness into it and it's now no longer a blind watchmaker it is someone with a high degree of intention that is deciding through embryo selection where we're going to go and that that was the thing that really is so interesting in hacking darwin is you keep telling these things like little stories like oh imagine that you go into this you know future near future by the way and they're just asking you hey so instead of you know implanting whatever it is now for ivf like eight or nine or 15 embryos it's a thousand and we're able to screen them for um high probability of certain outcomes whether that's height whether that's beauty whether that's intelligence and now it's like do you want to know what this embryo has a chance of being and if so which of these do you want and then you see how this really starts to become an issue what are what are some of the like when we talk about playing god what are some of the key things that you think people will start selecting from when we're just beginning to dip our toe that are sort of that the non-controversial ones yeah yeah so a lot of people ask about about playing god and what what i always say is whatever your theology if you think that there's this god all-powerful god who's making all kinds of decisions about how we live and that god is deciding yeah i think this little kid should have some deadly genetic disorder and this little kid should get run over it's kind of a sadistic god and so if you believe as i do that that we are just one species among all these other species and that we have just like a lion or a zebra or whatever is trying to think well how do i maximize my chance of survival and well-being that's why we have medicine and health care that's why when a kid is born with a single gene mutation disorder some terrible deadly disease we don't say oh that's god i mean some people do but we don't say oh that's god's will we stay to hell without let's fix it and that's and now that we have more and more of the power to make those kinds of changes so the early the early manifestations tend to be simpler because we know there's a whole category of these what's called single gene mutation disorders or mendelian disorders after after gregor mendel and that's where you have one gene one problem with a single mutation it's one letter that's out of place but if you have that if you have that disruption or whatever it is then you have one of these disorders like sickle cell disease or tay sachs or or whatever and so it's a clearer case we can just fix this one thing and then a kid who was gonna die when they were five all of a sudden has the opportunity to live to 90. um but but life isn't in the old days people used to think oh there's a gene for that a tall g and a short gene but life we're we're really complicated we have our genetics we have our broader systems biology i'm sure your listeners have heard of the of the epigenome and the metabolome and the proteome and all these ohms that are that are part of of who we are and so we're going to need more and more knowledge and more and more sophistication to make smart decisions in this world of complexity um but we're going to get it and the reason we're going to get it is because the complexity of our biology has remained relatively constant for millions of years but the sophistication of our tools is increasing at an exponential rate and just one example in 2012 jennifer doudna at berkeley and and others they developed this system for uh crispr genome editing i think many people have heard of crispr now um six years later 2018 the world's first crispr babies were born so that it took six years to go from just something in a in a lab saying hey this may be an interesting way to edit the genome of a bacteria or the genome of a single cell organism or some kind of simple organism six years later the first human genome edited babies are born so when you kind of take that for people that are flipping out right now are we talking about the twins in china where they did the edit for hiv resistance yeah that's pretty controversial though right it's not like people are like hey no go for it go for the prospect i think it's terrible i think that ho john quay who's the the doctor who did it i mean now we can talk about later now it's like we've had 57 crises since then so people are thinking about it less but i think it was highly irresponsible i mean there was this technology was being used in plants and animals and so the first step with humans needed to be done very very carefully and what he and others working with him were trying to do is just to race forward to try to you know claim some kind of of glory uh and it was it was a very dangerous having said that and and i don't think it was uh you know we don't know fully but it looks like it wasn't even successful um in conferring um any kind of additional hiv resistance um but had he not done it um still you know some years after five years no definitely not more than 10 somebody else would have done it they i'm sure they would have done it or hope they would have done it in a more responsible way with it with a better target yeah i was going to ask what is a responsible way when we start talking about going in and and i think it bears saying for anybody that's new to this so basically they're using bacteria which have an ability to ward off viruses by recognizing a piece of the viral code so the the what atc oh god like whatever the the letters of life are yeah they they recognize a repeating pattern in that and they go i've seen you before and so they've developed the ability to go and cut that and it basically unravels the virus and the virus is done so now once you have the ability to go in and cut a dna sequence you could go into a human dna sequence a plant dna sequence whatever and you can humans can actually program the bacteria and say go look for this sequence which could be uh in this case the susceptibility to hiv maybe they were wrong but that was anyway what they were looking for go and cut that out replace it with something else which you can also tell it to do which is insane and now you have the ability to actually genetically modify a human now you can get into like germline you can you can modify anything and and so what you've described is kind of the traditional crispr but now there are new things base editing other ways where you go and what's that base editing it's instead of cutting you just change the letters because when you cut it's kind of aggressive how do you do that it's it's these are all chemical reactions so you have the same thing you have the guide rna telling you where to go but instead of doing a cut you basically replace one genetic letter with with another and the the key point is this stuff it's getting better it's getting faster it's getting more accurate every day and and and that's why you talked in the beginning about about science versus science fiction um life is is at the boundary between those those two things because real science that's happening now feels like science fiction because we are so we were all by definition wedded to the reality around us and we have brains that are are have developed for practical thinking in the sense that if you're kind of a crazy thinker on the in the african savannah you probably are the guy who got eaten first because the the practical guy he said like oh you know i think i heard a russell in the in the in the in the weeds over there i'm running and the dreamer is kind of like looking up and imagining you know flying spaceships um so we have these very practical brains by design and we have these technologies that are advancing exponentially and it's we really we have to kind of force ourselves to think like science fiction in order to really fathom the implications of the science fact yeah that that's one thing you make a good call for in the book which is hey i'm writing this because we we need to be talking about this which by the way i d humans won't humans will not wake up to this until um there is a problem until people start getting genetically modified and then there's going like the first time you have a debate uh as to whether or not a chinese athlete should be allowed in the olympics who's you know got three times the muscle density of any other human being uh because they manipulated oh god what are the double muscled cows uh i'm forgetting that but this like myostatin yes like there's a real gene that says stop basically producing muscle because muscle is actually dangerous when you think about a famine or something like that because muscles take up so many calories so the body actually has to stop developing muscle so when you have that myostatin inhibition where it doesn't kick in and tell you you get these like you can see pictures of cows that just like look like they live in the [ __ ] gym it is hilarious so when somebody starts making that that edit and we see them roll up to the olympics now people are going to panic that's like in fact the um back in the 70s when we had the first test tube baby that was when people really started to go oh i guess this is really going to be an issue i think it's it's super hard to wake people up it is well the standard keeps changing yeah just in the sense that you know most of us many most any athlete today could beat most any athlete from 100 years ago uh we're all almost all of us are immunized which is this incredible superpower that our ancestors didn't have and you talk about louise brown the first uh the uh the first quote-unquote test dude test tube baby ivf it's always shocking in the beginning and then it's like oh that's the way we do things and you know right now i mean we we have this whole sport called weightlifting or bodybuilding no one of those people could look like that if they were just living the life of our of our ancestors and eating plants and the occasional zebra or uh or whatever so i think that there are these these shock moments of like well that's not normal and then the idea of what's normal shifts and that and so i think you're absolutely right um we are going to have genetically modified athletes and and we're going to want genetically modified athletes and as a matter of fact if we did a full genetic analysis of everybody who's won the olympics in any kind of extreme focused sport like sprinting or marathon running or or whatever my guess is everybody is some kind of genetic outlier we just haven't been able to look under the hood and i think it's going to be a question for us what is natural when the whole concept of natural is is constantly moving and changing that's interesting and then what humans um say they want versus what they end up sort of voting for with their wallets so there was a really interesting movement in bodybuilding probably got in the 70s where you had this whole like steroids were really coming on the scene bodybuilders were getting much bigger way smaller than they are today because steroids are crazy effective and like we're selecting and pushing it farther than ever but in the 70s there was this real moment of like hey should we make this natural or should we go the drug route and so there was a whole natural bodybuilding organization and it just ended up getting its ass handed to it by the people that were on drugs now obviously they don't champion the fact that they're on drugs and and back then certainly most of them would claim no no what do you mean i'm not doing drugs but it's just seeing them get that big seeing them be that sort of peak shifted from what you see walking down the street is so interesting and and it draws people in that that ends up being the one that gets the eyeballs and the most attention so when you first said like we'll want enhanced athletes i was like what why would we want them but putting it in that context of like hey if you've got somebody who can dunk a basketball on a 20-foot hoop is that more interesting i mean i think it's a great example matter of fact i started to write about uh about that in hacking darwin and i got these pictures of these guys who were like the world natural weightlifting or bodybuilding champion and then they were kind of all these puny guys and you couldn't find one example of somebody who was in the kind of natural bodybuilding who looked anything like anybody who was in the the world bodybuilding champion and you're right if if we said oh we're going we're going to handicap everything and and we only want these kind of quote-unquote naturals nobody wants that no people what are what are people watching football here in the united states i mean they want bigger people they want faster people i mean this is a it's a that's what's kind of interesting to us is well what are the limits of what it means to be a human being and certainly there are rules in sports and whatever those rules are i mean they're kind of random but that's what makes a makes a sport you can say well it's cheating if you do something that's not in in the rules but there will be other people who will say well let's make a you know let's make an olympics for people who are enhanced and how many people are going to watch that enhanced olympics i mean some of them some of them will and again i'm not saying this is good or bad because the answer is it's probably both um but i think there are a lot of people say well i know what it means to be natural i know what it means to be a human and that's the line and we can't cross that line but how we define that is very very different from from how our ancestors defined i mean i live in an apartment in new york my ancestors were a bunch of nomads in the african safari if i said oh yeah it's going to be it's like a thing it's a building you have to take the elevator or go up the stairs and there's air conditioning and you know you don't have to hunt you just kind of open the the refrigerator and there's stuff there like that would seem insane and everything always seems unsane and yet in saying it we kind of keep moving and then that's why for me the question the ultimate question is ethics the only question is what are we comfortable with and collectively and how do we make sure that for something that's this sensitive we're moving forward in a thoughtful way together rather than having a bunch of that's why i'm a critic of of hujunkui and chai in china rather than having just a bunch of people making individual decisions because the implications of those individuals decisions are societal i don't think we ever got to the answer of what would be the right way to go about beginning to practice this on humans what does that look like is it just in fact do you have a line is it disease removal purely is there something else like how do we do it well yeah so there's no natural line because a lot of when i talk to people what people feel like they want is well on four therapeutic applications to treat diseases and i'm against enhancement i think most people kind of feel that they that they want that but when you push them of like well where does therapy end and enhancement begins like if your child is going to be born and they're going to be one foot tall like and you have an intervention that can make them six feet tall would you make that intervention i think most people would say well geez one foot tall like that's going to be really hard to uh hard to to live although somebody could like put you in their purse and carry them around carry you around um and but then if you they say well i definitely want that and then you say all right how about two feet and they say yeah well two feet is still too short and at some point you kind of get to five feet and they say well you know five feet that's within the realm of normal lots of people who are five feet tall and you use there's no natural line between those things but for your question i'm part of the world health organization international advisory committee on human genome editing and that's what we're trying to do is at least to lay out what could be just some basic guidelines and and parameters and i think the the core the two core principles one needs to be cost benefit analysis to to change the foundations of what it means to be a human it's actually a really big deal it's actually really serious we don't know enough about the fully how the human body works to feel that that any change is is costless i mean anything that we do there there's an upside perhaps and then there's a potential downside and sometimes we don't know what those things are so we just we need to be thoughtful about cost benefit analysis and we need to be making sure that we're keeping society together because when when we start when people start talking about changing their genetics it's not just them especially you started to mention heritable or germline manipulations if i have a germline manipulation and i have a child with somebody then my children will also gain that that change and that and they might those kids will go out and live their life and they may have kids with with somebody else so everybody else is a stakeholder in my decisions when we're talking about these kinds of systemic change i think they should be and i think that that's why we need to have these broader and inclusive conversations about the way let me ask why why do you think that it matters so much is it purely the psychological component because let's say that you were if you introduced a um essentially you're introducing a mutation it's very intentional but you're introducing a mutation that mutation is either going to work or it's not going to work if it doesn't work it's going to die out and if it does work then would not society depending on what it is obviously would not society benefit from that and look i i am well i am asking a sort of devil's advocate rhetorical question i am well aware of the implications of eugenics and all that terrifying [ __ ] but i what i'm trying to understand is are we because i'm basically gonna whatever our big fear is i'm gonna say okay if we remove that then like where does the discussion open up so is it the the sort of moral implications of we shouldn't play god is it the societal implications like you're talking about where it's like look we've got seven plus billion people like it's shitty to make them obsolete versions basically and you're introducing something so much better like that's sort of brutal in its own right is it the suffering of that one person that if you get it wrong like [ __ ] like you could be messing them up in ways you don't even know until they're like 35 and then their face starts to melt you know it's like you you just don't know like where where are the big like when you guys sit down in your think tank room what are you putting your finger on if like this is where we can't go here for this reason yeah so personally for me uh definitely playing god has nothing to do with it because i i write about this in the book if if you believe in that kind of god then why isn't god playing god like why isn't god preventing all these all these kinds of bad outcomes for me and it's not inherently um morally wrong as a matter of fact i could easily paint a scenario where it would be morally wrong not to intervene if you had some let's say you had one embryo and if that embryo was implanted it's the only one you have your only chance to have a child and if that embryo was implanted uh that embryo would uh that when it became a child would die very young of some terrible single gene mutation disorder and it's not treatable and i i could easily make an argument that it would be immoral not to intervene not to genetically engineer that pre-implanted embryo to make that one change so that that kid could could live a a long life and so i i definitely think on a moral front we have to be having these conversations and that certainly was very under the vatican published a piece of mine that's that's on my in my website um on exactly these issues and i raised some really challenging issues for for them in how we should think about these these moral issues for me the issue is societal um because we're not going to first we're not going to know whether any changes that we make are good or bad certainly if you're saving a kid from from death that's that's good but for these other kinds of changes it may take a long time and our biology is extremely complex and so i just feel like if somebody is changing a system and we're all part of that system it's not because if if if it was inheritable it was just somebody doing something to themselves you could say all right well you know you you tried the kind of you know three eyes thing or whatever and and maybe it worked for you maybe it didn't work for you but when they're changing we're all part of this connected thing of of humanity and i'm not saying don't change it i'm just saying that changing it should at least partly be a collective decision it's primarily an individual decision um but because individual changes when they're heritable will affect everybody else we need to have some kind of of process and i think there's a you know this is life and and it's normal in our societies that issues that touch life are regulated and we you know we have debates on things like abortion versus versus choice um but at the end of the day i think we recognize that life is really sensitive and we need to have some kind of guard rails beyond just human self-experimentation and we need to make sure that the science is good okay so now let's say i get it you have been so clear and consistent on your messaging this everyone should have a seat at the table everybody should be voting on this now i'm just saying let's say that we had a representative democracy here and we all elect you and we want you because you know can i say um thank you this was a wise choice i promise i will leave wisely in your interest this is all about you it's not about me amazing i love that so what what rules do you put in place and let's make them twofold one self so are there limitations to what i can do myself and then on the germ line where this is now going to affect everybody what sort of you know we don't have to get down to like sub point you know 14 on a big contra actual thing but just sort of broad strokes what limitations if any would you put on the self and what limitations if any would you put on germline yeah so i definitely would have more latitude for people doing things to themselves um but not complete latitude i mean right now it's it's illegal to commit suicide and it's hard to argue but do you think that's smart you know i i think it's it's hard to inform i think we should stigmatize um suicide but should we make it illegal well i'm going to pause and and reflect i don't think it should necessarily be illegal um because certainly i support euthanasia um but i also feel that we should make sure that it's discouraged other than in some pretty terrible and and extreme cases uh because there are cultures um that that actually um are much more accepting of suicide some asian cultures uh for example and traditionally japan and i don't think it's i don't think that's healthy so i i think it's good to have bad things stigmatized whether making them illegal is the right way to do it i don't know and again as as i said i support i support you euthanasia in extreme cases but again in a regulated environment where it's because otherwise things can really get uh get out of hand but coming back to your question about so for in terms of individual latitude i think individuals should have some latitude but i also think that society has a responsibility to protect individuals health like if i go to the drug store and run themselves from yeah well like for example that's why if i go to the drug store and buy some kind of product or or a drug i want the government to regulate whether it's safe for me to take that thing into my body if i go to a doctor and the doctor is doing some kind of procedure on me i want the government to say well this is a safe procedure or this procedure is within the bounds of normalcy because otherwise you go there and then somebody would say well i you know i cut off your arm like whatever the the thing is we need that and i don't imagine that every individual has perfect knowledge and so if if everybody had perfect knowledge of all the risks and all the ben and um and all of the benefits of any kind of intervention you'd say well geez you you go to the drug store or you go to the doctor here's this range of stuff you're getting your your arms and legs cut off because you have a headache it seems like a bad idea but if you want to do it go for it we don't want to live in that kind of of society so i think there's all right let me pin you down so you've got uh in food anyway it's called grass generally recognized as safe so if if an ingredient is generally recognized as safe then you can put it in your food without having to seek any further approval or anything but if you're putting something that's outside that list then you may have to seek approval um would you be in favor if there was a a grass list of edits where it was like we've tried these out we went through whatever approval process we had to go through we've gone through that is there anything that you would intrinsically say this is only for self i would not want them doing you can't add a third arm no third leg um no increasing your intelligence like is there anything that as long as it was safe is there anything you would not want the self to do so i'll flip it a little bit so let's start with the things that i would be comfortable with so like the whole range of of deadly single gene mutation disorders once it's proven that these interventions could be happening and they're safe which and we're not there yet again which is was why i'm so critical of who john kuei the chinese scientist but i think we will be i think we will be relatively soon i think it's that we're going to think about like a range of interventions whether it's at the pre-implanted embryo stage whether it's the embryo stage newborn stage whatever and they'll be in a certain time where it'll make most sense to to intervene in mo in most cases to prevent something bad and that will i'm certain of it that will become a norm and there will be a growing list of acceptable interventions that over time we know either or say are safe or that the the risk is outweighed by what we know about the potential benefits but as i write about in the book that list is going to grow and it's going to grow over time and it's going to move beyond what we think about as therapeutic interventions into new areas that now we think of as enhancements and i'm not necessarily inherently against anything but i just think that it will make most sense for some kind of intervention to get on the this is safe we know what we're doing list before people start doing experimentation or self-experimentation and again as i said and the government has an interest in protecting us from those things and i listened to a lot of these different podcasts and i was on joe rogan and and i it's i love that podcast but there's some stuff that people say it's like oh yeah of course x is true and i'm listening it's like well wait a second x isn't true and and when we're talking about systemic life-changing interventions we just we just need to be careful biology is really complicated stuff we don't we don't really understand human biology if we think of of all of human biology as like if you understood it completely that would be a hundred percent and if you knew nothing it would be zero percent maybe we're at four percent maybe five percent we don't know fifty percent of how our our our bodies work so i think we need to be conservative but i don't i don't i don't see any inherent barrier over time i mean if somebody is trying to do genetically engineer their kids now for an enhanced intelligence it's just not going to going to work but only because we don't know how to do it right correct intelligence is just so complicated it's the interplay of so many different genes that we haven't identified yet part of what i'm i'm trying to walk through and i find this so [ __ ] interesting is i i want to get to um i want to remove some of what i'll call the more mundane like you and i aren't actually making policy right now you may be in in the you know outside of this podcast but at least in the confines of you know our time together we're not actually making policy so i'm trying to figure out like where where the pain points are for you so here's here's how i see it so one i i watched somebody um in the last couple days of their life and they were [ __ ] suffering at a level i was just like this is so crazy and he he really was hell-bent to live up to this idea of like i'll never give up and i thought wow that's so impressive and it was like i was moved by it and i i have built my reputation on like you know never say die like keep going and as i was watching him i was like this doesn't make sense he should absolutely my advice to you dear friend that's going through this is 100 euthanasia like there's this is a one-way street there's no coming back from this it is clear that you're within hours or days of passing away you are so uncomfortable now it should be his decision a hundred percent but i know at one point he had looked at it he was going to have to move states and all that and so it was just like this real complicated mess and i just thought euthanasia 100 should be legal now like you i i consider it such a dangerous tool to employ quickly that it scares the [ __ ] out of me but do i think that it should be illegal no i do not because i just think it's so complicated now the now when i extend that to my thinkings about one's ability to begin to modify yourself i think you're a [ __ ] idiot if you start playing with your jeans unless that [ __ ] has been tried by a lot of people before you but my fascination or my hope is that enough people do want to be early adopters that the government has gone through with a hunt definitely not letting this be the wild west but going in just like they do with food and i think they make a lot of bad decisions in food but it's better than no decisions being made that they come up with a generally recognized as safe editing list and that people then get to decide what they want to try and that over time we'll get a see like hey what works i will not be an early adopter but i will certainly be paying attention for things like if i could beef up my intelligence i would do it 100 if i could beef up my ability even to read faster i would do it 100 now of course i'm gonna just like staying in good health i would rather do it through diet and exercise than i would through taking a supplement i like knowing that supplements are there so that if i'm unable to get to you know whatever point i want that i can lean on that or even plastic surgery i've not done it but i reserve the right to so i'm glad that it's not illegal so i definitely fall under love regulation think that's so important to keep people because they're not going to be educated to make sure that they're not getting themselves in trouble but i like the idea of like pushing the boundary of what we can recognize as being safe further and further out on the flip side of that now you've got germline editing that one taps into something for me which is far more terrifying which is i think that we want to do it i think i think we should want to do it as a better way of saying it but you want to talk about something that i think the discrepancy between what i want to be true and what will be true is so terrifyingly vast that if we could lock that oh god you you really can't lock it forever i'm going to read i'm going to and you wouldn't want to lock it forever just because i mean the whole point of evolution is evolution is buggy when we random mutation that means that every offspring of every species is different from their parents and sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse and if we were just living totally in nature then the better stuff and better doesn't mean inherently better it's just better suited for the particular environment in which it it exists that then that wins over time and that's how and that's how species evolve but for us who kind of are wedded to being this thing that means that every generation you have some good stuff and you have some bad stuff and sometimes the bad stuff is so bad that it can kill you and sometimes we call it cancers and and other things so i don't think that we should rule out any kind of of intervention just because of the nature of that intervention it's just that we need to be really careful and thoughtful about the cost-benefit analysis and the context in which we do something and so i i just think i think it'd be a terrible mistake to say never germline i mean i i've had this debate with the catholic church um and and but that doesn't mean that the alternative to that is always germline or do whatever you want i i want to drop this into the messy reality by quoting um you well probably your publisher but this was something written in the description of genesis code one of your science fiction books it says in 2023 america bankrupt violently divided by the culture wars and beholden to archrival china the rules of the game are complicated and i thought first of all when did you write that yeah what year i'm so proud of that i wrote it oh god um in two i have to remember like 2 000 and uh i don't know seven or 2008 the fact that you put your finger on the culture war is crazy i want to be audited i want somebody to go through everything i've written everything that i've said and and tell me which i kind of know like how accurate it was because in this i mean in in genesis code i mean that's what's happening our culture is divided they're all these culture wars we're ripping each other ripping each other apart and then there are all of these these new technologies which are kind of which are amplifying these divisions and creating new opportunities for people to do things differently so when i think about like the tragedy of the commons and the fact that you know hey i'm looking at this whale in the water and i think it adds more value to my life to be in the water and to be free and you know how beautiful that is but then somebody else is like [ __ ] that like i'm gonna harpoon this thing and take it in and sell it for the oil and you realize well man then i'm here like do it it is going to get whaled so do i be the one to whale it it's like we we have seen that play out so many times and it's so devastating obviously not taking us anywhere spectacularly wonderful and yet it is the reality that we face and the fact that china has already done um gene editing on living humans you can see like we may not want it to be true but the fact is that people are playing with this and if we get and look it's not today so everybody who's who's dismissing this by saying why the [ __ ] are they even talking about this like this is potentially decades out it's going to happen if you give us any like there's a great um elon musk quote where he's saying about virtual reality if you give any rate of improvement you don't have to buy into moore's law it could take ten thousand years but th this is going to end up being a debate that has to happen same is true in because because the big question mark in gene editing is we don't know what genes actually do what when you take them in concert but as you say in the book hacking darwin we are not infinitely complex we're just incredibly complex and as long as there is a finite nature to the level of complexity ultimately our ability to process that data with computers or whatever is going to reach the point where we will be able to say this embryo equals this this is your einstein embryo this is your rain man embryo and like you get a pig and so cool i'm gonna take my einstein embryo okay now if we're playing that game and i know that either very rapidly through gene editing or more slowly by just embryo selection a nation state can take itself like you can imagine when this is like the chicken that lays one egg a month becomes a chicken that lakes an egg every day what happens when it's einstein and then you take einstein's einstein baby and then you take einstein's einsteins einstein baby and like all of a sudden it's you know you've got iqs of 300 or 500 or a thousand and compared to somebody who refuses to play those games i don't want to go up against somebody with an iq of a thousand with my you know buck 15 or whatever that i'm hovering at so it's like that that gets gnarly but what do you do when it's the culture war is tearing us apart it's us v china or russia or whoever and like they're gonna [ __ ] harpoon the whale if we don't and now it's like as much as i was about to say lock that [ __ ] down i'm like oh man you can't because i don't want to become you know i don't want to get taken over essentially by a nation that does choose to do that and so that you put your finger on exactly the point and that i'm spending about 90 percent of my life's energy right now trying to solve exactly that that uh that problem um because if we don't solve this this global tragedy of the commons problem where um we're just going to compete ourselves in into uh out of existence and that's for me i mean this i i'm so i'm now i'm i'm in earlier i'll give you the quick back story um earlier in the year in the very very beginning stages of the pandemic i was supposed to give a talk for singularity university which is like the university of the future and i'm on faculty there on whether the tools of the genetics revolution were a match for the pandemic and that morning i woke up and said it's a really important question but it's not the question the question is what you just asked is why is it that we weren't prepared for this pandemic and why is it that we can't we weren't able to prepare for any pandemic and why is it that we can't solve any of these big global problems whether it's protecting the ocean ecosystems like you mentioned or climate change or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or the the big scientific issues um because we're all competing with each other and the reason is is this this same global collective action problem is that we are our big problems are shared and global but the way we're organized to address them at least since 1648 and the piece of westphalia which ended the 30 years war is predominantly national and so these these kind of national forces that you've just described um they drove us into two world wars and then we thought oh [ __ ] if we don't fix this problem we're going to keep going war after war after war and that was why we created this thin overlay of international organizations like the like the u.n but still we live in this world of competing states and the problem is that our little species of these these african nomadic primates suddenly and very rapidly became a species with the ability as as we're talking about now to fundamentally change all of life on earth so we're just this is one little species we now have this this power and we don't have an infrastructure that allows us to come together to solve these kinds of of problems and so that's you know that that talk went viral then i stayed up all night i drafted a declaration of global interdependence that went viral i called a meeting of people on my email list i had a 130 people from 25 countries and together we launched this what's become one organization one shared world and one shared.world now we're a community of people in 110 countries but the goal is to solve this global collective collective action problem because if we just if it's everyone for themselves and every country for themselves our species is now so powerful we're going to wipe ourselves out so what what is the sort of key tenant how do we pull that off so what we have to do is first we need to recognize and articulate our interdependence i mean that's that's the problem i mentioned i'm an advisor to who um this pandemic could have been stopped in its tracks if we had just built the world health organization that we need a whoo that had its own global surveillance system that could send investigators anywhere in the world on a moment's notice unlike in the actual situation where china blocked them for for almost uh a month where the who could coordinate a smart collective uh response to the pandemic if we had all those things we wouldn't be in this in this in this predicament that we're in we're in now so what does it look like it looks like every organization in the world every business every civil society group every government every political party has to recognize that we have our core constituencies the people who we represent whether it's the citizens of our country and we have our collective constituency of our of our species and our and our planet and that we have to ultimately coming back to your thing of killing the whale or or not it's the same point as whether we you do germline edits or not we have to do a cost benefit analysis but if everybody is thinking just cost benefit to me then we're just gonna we're gonna kill ourselves and so we we have to we have to not just change consciousness but then use that change conscious changed consciousness to change the institutions around us but do you have any sense of how we actually pull that off like a lot of when i hear stuff like that i'm like yes but humans aren't currently wired that way and until because so i think about this a lot in the context of ai and people are always worried that you know the paper clip problem that if you give ai the incentive to make paper clips it'll look at you and be like those atoms would be way better used as paper clips so it doesn't kill you to kill you it kills you to turn you into the superior paper clip and so but the the that desire was programmed right and minus that desire um you it's essentially inert so i started thinking about desires as sort of being programmed and i think about humans as sort of wet ai and through evolution we've got these imperatives now i don't maybe somebody's taking the time to to write them down it'd be super interesting to see somebody's take on what our imperatives are um but we're we're driven certainly at a really simplistic level towards pleasure away from pain and nature has made things like sex very pleasurable so that you have kids that have kids um and things like getting injured very painful so that you stay along stay alive long enough so that you can have kids have kids so that is at a really basic level it shows if you want to change the outcome you have to you have to change the incentive structure and so if evolution has given us a set of um imperatives like how do you get a radical change like that without a dramatic change and imperative yeah and then maybe that begs nature versus nurture but i don't think how do we solve that you have to go that far because there's no national imperative in evolution i mean there's you're you're in california i'm in i'm in new york isn't there like we're so tribal wait we're in trouble but those tribes used to be you know some small group of families that were together and then it was like oh those [ __ ] you know over there that that other tribe but then we we've grown and so then it became you know people in your region that were that was the us and the other thing was them and then now it's the people i mean um you've all know harare talks about this in your country i mean i haven't met most people in in the united states i i feel like we'll work i mean when we feel that way we're kind of on the same team and sometimes we'll have like a world war ii where everyone will really feel it and then we'll have a time like now where people don't feel it quite as much but there's nothing natural there's nothing inherent about a national identity let's dive into that because i'm gonna have a hard time moving past that one so um i agree that it isn't inherently national in nature at all but the national is leveraging something that already exists which is us another so if we know you could change that you look at like for example these young kids in the the global climate change movement i mean they've kind of decided well i'm i'm less an american and i'm more someone who wants to change the climate i think that there's there but they're just changing the us and the other so what i'm saying is you have an us another problem and so there's a reason that so many great science fiction have you um read the comic book the graphic novel the watching that's something i was just it's different than the movie you know why i have to i haven't read the comic book i saw the series which i loved even though it totally collapsed in uh in the end but before that i thought it was great and then i went back and watched the uh the movie which i thought sucked um but the idea that you kind of create the giant squid to kind of because i do think that we have this us and them but the categories of who is us and who is them are really malleable and so if the us is us our little tribe or us our country or whatever them can be the other tribe or the other country but it could just as well be with our exact biology uh that the us is humanity and the other are these forces that are that are trying to that have the potential to destroy us and destroy our our homes that's so abstract i don't think humans are going to get down with that like when i really really stop to think about okay how do you so impact theory it's whole thing is like how much can i actually influence the cultural subconscious so i think a lot about like how you get people to group up and it it does seem true to me that you need a very compelling tangible other to bond people together just like at a neurochemical level right you're right that you would be expressing vasopressin oxytocin that you're bonding with these people in a very non-abstract way like a super concrete way like how about if you just replace this giant squid um with a virus that is attacking us and killing all of these all of these people we just ran that experiment did it work but it didn't work and we're dying because it didn't work and that's i think that's the big but that's what i'm saying like i wish it had worked like that would have been rad and honestly for a brief second it looked like it was going to work but it's still playing out and we don't know um whether it will or won't work i mean the way i i always say this is year it's kind of like a 1918 year where there's like some good possible futures we can imagine and there's some bad possible futures that we can imagine and the good ones are are better but it's but yeah you're right i mean 1945 we were able to do all these kind of new things because there was this devastating war 75 million people died and then the good guys won and were able to say hey we're going to do things a little bit differently and so it may be that this crisis isn't big enough but if there was ever an a learning opportunity to say well how do we how do we handle this and and i think this is the way we have to come together because let's say that we we get a control of this virus who's to say there's not two years from now three years from now five years from now a synthetic biology a genetically engineered virus that's 100 times 100 times worse and so i'm not saying that that we definitely will succeed but i think that it's it's not pushing against our evolution in any kind of of way that's different from the idea that a bunch of different people can all have that same identity as being part of one country i mean it may be that we are and us versus them species but there's a lot of different ways that those that those forces and impulses can be configured okay so as my elected representative to make all these decisions i i have a pitch that i want to make um and tell me if you think this is crazy so when i think about okay the way forward it's messy you've got countries for right now maybe we can one day transcend that that would be amazing um i love the idea of when you draw a circle to exclude me i'll draw a bigger circle to include you i think that's spiritually so rad um but right now we're in like a super messy place where it's nations fighting against each other resources being limited nah so you get all the madness that we're all experiencing right now within that confine one thing maybe maybe that we could get people to get on board with would be we're going to totally say um gene editing except for um mendelian what is it the single the single like mutation genes those that are like just horrendous diseases um that are very easy to edit yes to that and unfortunately for now we have to say no to everything else so even though you could spare some human suffering we there's just too many unknowns so we're not going to play with that so yes to mendelian no to everything else but what we are going to get behind is a 10 improvement across let's say 10 variables longevity intelligence whatever you you're going to end up telling us what the 10 are but across 10 things that we agree globally um and those are examples of what i mean we're going to push for a 10 improvement just mathematically and we're going to do it through embryo selection so that would require us obviously to beef up our ability to assess what genes equal what outcomes but then because technology the best definition of technology i've ever seen is technology is a hope for a better future so you have to give people this belief that life is going to get better for their kids and better for their kids and better for their kids because that ultimately i think is what people are really fighting for to be like yo i made all these sacrifices so that my kids would have it better than i had it i love that impulse thing it's beautiful even though i don't have children so that that to me makes sense and if we capped it to something manageable so that no one generation felt like you know i'm being totally left behind that it's 10 improvement but over 10 generations like you've got a doubling yes representative i love you tom bad idea um [Laughter] so here's one so first it's not we we shouldn't feel that the the single gene mutation the mendelian interventions are good and others are are bad because some of those interventions may end up being good some may end up being bad it really depends and also for these these more complex interventions we don't know what's going to work what we want we need is not rules because any rule that we set is not going to make sense when when the messiness when it faces the messiness of the world but what we can have are values and values of what we believe in uh and and the level of certainty of confidence that something is going to work to drive a a desired outcome because it's not just our bodies are really complex and so let's say we said we're going to make ourselves you know 10 percent smarter we have no idea what comes with that 10 it could be madness it could be all sorts of things and so i think that for me rather than but if we were making 10 improvement we would have the chance to pump the brakes if we see a problem the thing is so but i think we should always be exploring everything using this kind of cost benefit analysis integrating our best our best values and having a broad open public conversation and and process so we can make those decisions because it may be that 10 is too low maybe we need to be 500 times smarter than than we are in order to survive because we know our planet is is going away i mean i think there's that i for me i and that this is again my piece for the vatican was about this in which i was why i was so surprised they actually published it because i said exactly the point i'm making to you is if we try to live by hard and fast rules those rules are going to be immediately obsolete what we have to do is say what are the principles that we want to guide us and what are the structures that we'd like to build to help make these balances in an inclusive democratic way and then explore carefully and cautiously what's working and what's not working and there may be some areas we're seeing like that's incredible my feeling is if we can get he'll extend healthy lifespan i'd say no limits i mean let's i'd love to have you know my parents living you know to their hundreds and hundreds and twenties and two hundreds and and and whatever so i don't think we need to impose imaginary restrictions on ourselves for futures that we're we are we don't know yet we just need to keep moving forward and and keep moving forward carefully okay so now to push this a little bit farther one thing i've learned in business this is an immutable truth you are only as good as what you write down so you at some point the values the system has to be translated into a document when i think about the us we the constitution's been pretty amazing right you put this document down your ideals maybe you could even call that your value system uh you put in sort of a formal structure to things so there's checks and balances i think it's it's really quite brilliant do you have sort of rough swag notions that would be put down like all like if if we were going to go back and write the constitution again i think we would change men to people right so all people are created equal like that's a pretty rad start um do you have something like that in terms of how we need to think about like specifically what is the value set yeah so um two questions in terms of writing it down there there have been efforts to do unesco did it the council of europe did it it's never it's never perfect it's so far actually hasn't even been been that great um but it but i do think that the value set for for me are one we need to have an open environment for science two we need to have meaning that all information needs to be put out there well i think we just did that we we shouldn't be trying to cut down the basic science to prevent some kind of theoretical outcome in the future i really i believe in science i believe in in scientific experimentation and i know the people who are going to be asking these questions about what are the rules some subset of them are going to be people who say well let's just shut down the science so we never have to ask these questions so my point number one is i really believe in the science i believe in the process of scientific exploration and i think that needs to be really important number two um is that in terms of the process this has to be an open inclusive transparent process that we can't have even very smart people even specialists making decisions about the future of life that apply to everybody this is up to to everybody and number so should it be voted on well so that's a big question it's connected to the work that i'm doing with um with one shared world and um so and with the world health organization so governance systems aren't it's not just one thing i mean right now we think of how is how is is genetic engineering for example regulated it's not just laws it's internal review boards in hospitals it's how scientific publications operate and there's a lot of different pieces of this so yes there are there there are laws and they they need to be written down but in my mind we should think also in terms of processes because it's not it's not going to be any one thing any one mechanism that fully establishes a governance and then third is that we need to have regulatory infrastructures that in my mind the best regulated at least for genetic engineering and human fertilization and um is the united kingdom uh where they do they have a really thoughtful process where they're actually weighing costs and benefits of different interventions so i think that every country needs to have a system right now some do and and some don't have have anything that balances these kinds of international best practices is this like the fda of genetic alterations it it is but it's much the the uk system is just much more thoughtful i mean fda is a great agency but this is it's much more thoughtful and there and like for example there's a pro a procedure called mitochondrial transfer um just a quick summary is the mitochondria are the power packs of your dna uh the power packs of your cells i'm sorry and if you're if you think of your cell as like an egg the nucleus is the is the egg yolk and the cytoplasm is the egg white and the mitochondria exist in the egg white when some women have faulty mitochondria they pass them in varying degrees to their children and that can cause all kinds of things including early death so there's a process called mitochondrial transfer basically swapping egg yolks from a one with the disease mitochondria to one with the healthy one it's not it's it's banned in the united states in the uk they had a three-year national debate then they had an open vote of both houses of parliament and then they passed it to this human fertilization embryology authority to regulate and so everyone who wants to do it you have to apply first for your clinic or your lab and then for each application you have to apply again for each specific application and they have all these experts and very thoughtful people who are making those decisions it's a really smart way to do things we don't have that and and certainly we need that and then finally um and so and that will allow us to have do this kind of cost-benefit analysis which i think is is essential and then the the final piece of it is that i think it's okay for society to define red lines beyond which we don't think people should go even though those may change over time so we had after the second world war the nuremberg trials were to say well there were things like human experimentation which we think are so wrong that we're going to create an international standard saying that they're that they're wrong and so you know again we we have our our access to read write and hack the code of life and there are all kinds of really nefarious things that people could do including human experimentation including let's just say i mean this is a kind of a caricaturish example but there was some country like north korea that said all right we can do embryo selection some minimal genetic engineering to have to divide people into certain classes we want a certain class that's more docile more subservient or whatever and let's just say hypothetically i don't think that we would say oh just live and let live that's north korea that's just north korea being north korea i think we'd say we want we want to have some standards about what is and isn't okay and that we collectively like we do with all sorts of issues in international law come together to start to try to articulate what those things are all right you just scared the [ __ ] out of me so you you've got your science fiction ability to predict so much that you want the audit to see what you've been right about walk us through what i i never contemplated a future where a society would want to do that but as soon as you say it it seems almost self-evident naive to think that they wouldn't um what what is going to happen like where where are we headed over the next and i don't know what timeline you think is most relevant so you've got sort of near term in the next call it 20-ish years but then what are we talking about in the next like 100 to 200 years what where do we go so so when you go and i write about this in the book if you go to the olympics i like and as i've uh as i've done you you see different forms of societal organization competing with each other like when you see when i went to the in the beijing olympics i went to the volleyball uh i think it was the bronze medal game it was the us versus china and when i saw the chinese team it was just clear that everybody had been selected based on some criteria when they were a little kid like all the all i don't know all the things but all the setters were like the same body build all the spikers were the same body build they clearly kind of searched around and they had a and for the americans we had all these different people of different shapes and sizes and someone had like extra spirit and somebody tried really hard and and and and then we competed and somebody won because it was two forms of just of societal organization competing with each other that's what's going to happen uh even if we are as collectivist as i've as i've articulated that's what's going to happen with us and so just like there was athens and sparta in ancient in ancient greece let's just imagine that you're sparta actually we can make it make it athens because this is based in part on plato's republic where everybody had a role but you could imagine a society that had identified that we that that believes that outliers which is is probably true for lots of societies that outliers are the ones who push the envelope of of possibility and so for our physicists and our abstract mathematicians we want them to be like superstars and our athletes we want them to be superstars and rather than leave everything to chance we're going to screen every embryo of people who have the potential to be born um once we make the selection of which embryos are are implanted we're going to have a pool of people who have the genetic possibility of being the the einsteins or the usain bolts or whatever the thing is you could also add a um genome editing a genetic engineering component where you maybe make a couple of changes to those embryos to maybe give them some kind of boost or prevent some kind what are the boosts though that you think people are going to go for so if the forget the exact quote but it's something like the science fiction writer's job is not to imagine the car but to imagine the traffic jam what what are the what is it going to be intelligence is it going to be athletic prowess like i think it'll depend but there's all kinds of things that people want there's the general things that people want to live longer healthier more immune to disease people want to be tend to want to be smarter as long as it doesn't come with a a high cost and my guesses people will probably find that it it does um and so i think i think it won't be kind of rocket science but then they'll be outliers and then there'll be individuals and societies who say well my my life is based on being x and you're going to have to make those if you're talking about genetic engineering and you're going to have to make those decisions those things will have to be made for you before they're they're born and you know people always point to the movie gattaca about well isn't that so terrible that everyone's been identified for their roles and and certainly that's the theme of the movie but when i saw that movie i had a different outcome it's like god this guy ethan hawk he's not genetically enhanced he's she snuck his way into the space program with all these people who are genetically enhanced i if i'm in a space program i don't want some non-enhanced person being a liability because their bone structure isn't able to resist the radiation in space i mean i just think that we may become super specialized and we may want or for our survival we may even need people to play a certain role i mean how much of our lives now are dependent on innovations by people like alan turing or john von neumann or other of these kind of giants who opened up possibilities that we now occupy like maybe society would be better off if we had more of those guys i mean or maybe it would be better if we had less of those guys and i don't think i don't think we know but we do know that these different systems are going to be competing with each other and as happens with evolution we're going to be constantly throwing up variation and some of that variation is going to prove good within the context of a particular environment and some isn't and over time we're going to know do you think we will slide towards uniformity or will we slide towards massive diversity it's a great question on one hand you can understand uniformity because if you ask the average person what do you want people tend to want the same things which is why when people go to sperm banks and they have a choice of what they want you know a lot of people are picking well i want tall i want this i want i want that even though like there's nothing inherently better about being tall than being short it's just it's rewarded in our in our society in ewok village they hated the tall people um and so on the other hand so you could imagine all these social pressures that every no because no one's going to want to all i'll invest in diversity by having a kid who's got a greater likelihood of dying of some terrible genetic disorder people say well geez i don't want that but let somebody else be the carrier of diversity even though that that gene that may increase the risk of some you know terrible disease may also have some benefit that we don't even know about on the other hand you could imagine i mean we're a social species so if i had to bet i would bet on uniformity um but you could imagine that people say well jesus i'd like to be blue you know i'd like to you have whatever whatever the thing is um you could imagine people wanting to do it and if it was meaningful enough maybe it could have some kind of evolutionary impact yeah when i think that there will be values will come into play again and what you're going to see is the people who value you know people's temperament tends to break into certain sort of archetypes and i think each archetype is going to optimize for the thing that they value whether that's creativity whether that's intelligence you will certainly see parents if we're talking about germline stuff you see parents trying to optimize for their kids not struggling so i want my kid to have it better than i did so if you were artistic but maybe you flirted with like bipolar disease then your your parent wouldn't want you to struggle in that same way so it'll be interesting to see how that will fluctuate and i think while we'll we'll probably oscillate towards uniformity and then back out because what will happen is if everybody optimizes for intelligence then you run into no matter how intelligent you are you know you're you're all sort of you're just now competing against each other right so then how do you stand out you stand out by being more creative or you know so it'll be really interesting i think even if people try to game the system they'll inherently run up against the weaknesses of uniformity or they'll run up against well i wanted them to you know be different and for there to be diversity but there's a huge price to pay and now my kids are struggling in a way and so those kids end up rebelling and they have the most conforming children because they didn't want them to struggle the way they did so it feels to me like you're gonna see you know that sort of oscillating pattern yeah you you'd be super easy to see yeah but the other thing is that there could easily be funnels i mean one of the reasons why humans we're more similar to each other to all humans than say chimpanzees are to other chimpanzees is that our ancestors have gone through these very narrow funnels where almost all homo sapiens died because of starvation or climate change or or whatever and a tiny number of them survived and so the genetics of those tiny numbers who survived became all of our genetics so what you're imagining which i think makes sense is humans living on earth or living on earth in this environment but you could just as easily imagine that there's some group of us which i think will certainly happen that leaves this planet and goes and colonizes someplace else and so that's kind of the beginning of that funnel and who those people are let's say it's all the people who've given themselves um blue blue skin there'll be an entire species of you know blue homo sapiens and that that's just going to be their reality and just like us when we when we see those evolutionary charts and we have you know ramapithecus and homo erectus and homo habilis it's like oh yeah those those creatures which is how we see them that used to be us but now we're this now we're homo sapiens and i think these guys these homo blueians will say oh yeah we they'll see see those those pale people on the chart that used to be us and we passed through this funnel just like our ancestors passed through the funnel and now this is us in this new reality and whatever there's those attributes they'll be that will be them one thing that i think that most everyone will strive towards will be immortality um agree with that disagree with that and do you think that there are any um inherent problems with striving for like truly living forever so i'm all for it i mean i if i could do it i certainly would there's nothing wrong with it a lot of people say well what about overpopulation and whatever i i think it's totally fine i just don't think it's achievable with the physic in the physical bodies that we that we have um and even if you start living a really long time just the law of averages you know gets you it's like i didn't know penguins could get rabies or whatever it's like that that that that a liar will eventually get you um but um so you know i don't think it's achievable i think but i think that striving for it is is a good idea i mean i'm pretty deeply involved in the the science of of human life extension and a lot of people think oh it's like elon musk or um sorry to use foul language on your show but that [ __ ] um adam newman um but who who's adam newman why is he that [ __ ] the founder of wework um yeah yeah did he do something dodgy well he had a whole thing of of wanting to to control the science of of human life extension and then and then use it to go to people with like billion dollar companies and says i want to buy your company and i'll i'm going to pay you one dollar but i'm going to give you the secret of human life extension um in exchange for your company actually i heard him say this what yeah you know it was insane it was insane and so um so there's a lot of crazy people but there's a real science of human life extension which is really great because the the these terrible diseases cancer heart disease dementia that we fear are all correlated with aging and so if we can slow the process of biological aging we can do more to fight cancer and these other terrible diseases i think even then we can by investing directly into mitigating those diseases because if you eliminate all of cancer we only live about three years longer but if you can slow the process of aging we can live hopefully much longer but it's it's it's a new field of science but i think like i i think it's great for us to to strive for for immortality and also i think it's it's a some people say and i disagree with this that it's the finitude of life that gives it meaning i mean everything is the meaning of life gives it meaning there are all kinds of people who are finding meaning in all in all sorts of things and death could be it for somebody but it doesn't have to be so for everybody what do you think so if nature had a conceivable answer which was too like there's a jellyfish that is immortal so we know there's nothing sort of biologically necessary humans could have lived for or maybe you said that you actually think that we couldn't in our current form so what is it in our in our current biology that makes us different than the jellyfish why couldn't we live forever yeah so i'm glad you mentioned the jellyfish in my most recent novel eternal sonata that's the the immortal jellyfish is actually part of the of the theme and the science to crack the code of immortality so the reason why i think it's going to be hard for um humans to uh to live forever i mean that immortal jellyfish it goes from kind of adult back into polyp and adult and pulp so by that standard we kind of do live forever in the sense that um you know an adult male an old female they give their cells to each other and then it reconstitutes as a newborn baby who's not 50 or 60 but but uh but but zero but why we in this exam this physical form in my view is just there's we can extend healthy life i think that will definitely be possible and we're already doing it um but there's too many damn parts i mean i just think that this is when i talked about theology before like i i love the intelligent design people who say like oh my god you know the body is so complicated there's so many moving parts and if one thing goes wrong um then you would die there must only god could come up with that system and i just think well i don't call that intel that's [ __ ] design here's here's an intelligent design you have two parts there's the body and there's the head the head screws off when the body gets old you just screw off the head and screw it back on another body like that's that makes sense since to me i just think that right now there's so many different systems um that are it's like you have a car you know like cars don't last forever um even well-maintained cars there's there's always something would it be possible conceivably to replace each part one at a time and that's what's happening now with these these um synthetic genomes a very sim single cell organisms where they're just they're replacing one little piece one little segment of dna at a time and they kind of keep doing it until eventually they've replaced the the workings of this single cell organism with basically the exact same code that it had before and maybe some some small differences but just in this format and so the question is could we shift to another format and to do that we'd have to find a way of downloading our consciousness and that's where we're very very far away we know nothing next to nothing about how the how the brain works but even if we were to do that which would be i don't think we're 100 years away we may not even be a thousand years away from that but let's just say we we did it then it would be more you than you just being dead um but let's say you're kind of your consciousness gets transferred into some kind of of other receptacle whether it's a computer or a robot or or whatever like i think that that would be you maybe at that moment of transfer um but then that robot is out kind of doing its own thing and whatever it is like it's not that our our brain and our consciousness are totally disassociated from the complexity of our of our biology so any long answer i think we need to explore all those issues i'm all in i say we extend life as much as we can in in a healthy way and strive for immortality and and that for me writing books being on podcasts which i hope you're preserving this for thousands of years um like i think it's all part of that that very human aspiration it's interesting because i don't have kids um i the sense of living forever is i guess it could come down to like do creating a work of art that i think is gonna live beyond me but the just the percentage of of things that live more than a couple generations is essentially zero and so i don't take a lot of refuge in that and when i think about um there almost certainly are limits to the human body well there are limits of the human body obviously now and they may be truly unovercomeable like you're saying it makes me wonder about okay uploading myself into the cloud would i even be would that experience even be recognizable if i could forget for a second that it would have to be simultaneously the me that exists now dies and the me that comes online has a sense of continuity otherwise you're still going through the same problem that you were trying to avoid which i don't want to die so when i think about how the the biology really does make us who we are and something i talk a lot about is you're having a biological experience and by that i mean your brain as an organ reacts in a certain way using neurochemistry to make you feel a certain way your hard wiring makes you act a certain way so if we're and you talk about this in hacking darwin we're probably roughly 50 hardwired and then 50 percent malleable so if i know that 50 percent of who i think of as me and this experience that i'm trying to preserve is hardwired and that it's this incredibly complicated interplay between the mushy brain and the microbiome and the way that you know my um vagus nerve is taking it's like 80 of the vagus nerve is sending body stimulation and communication to the brain it's not even 50 50. so if it's like my body is making up this huge part of who i am and there's all this sort of real time feedback between the brain and the body and that 80 percent goes away as i'm uploaded to the cloud now of course you could sort of mimic it but then you start asking questions well do i really want to be limited to the way that i am now or do i going back into that like but don't i really want to optimize a little bit don't i want to be smarter and so then it becomes this question of you know what am i really preserving and look if i could live forever i would like that is something i would do in a heartbeat 100 like i am far more interested in the upside than the downside but it is like this really sort of tangled up question and one of the things that i've come to recently because i used to be really hardcore about i want to live forever that's it and then just asking the the question of why don't we live forever and a quote that i'm haunted by is that science progresses funeral funeral by funeral or one funeral at a time whatever the exact quote is and it just got me thinking about the way that humans tend to like their belief system begins to calcify and they get stuck in their own way of thinking and they're not able to challenge themselves and so i didn't know about the jellyfish that it it sort of reverts to a polyp and then back out that makes a lot of sense like in some ways you have to break out of who you are the way you think um in order to renew and that sense of renewal i thought is probably one of the things that nature has blindly but still optimized for yeah maybe i mean and certainly i think that let's just say that all of a sudden you or i or somebody else was granted i don't know by whom um immortal life and you say all right well i knew this stuff i did it for 100 years and now i'm gonna i'm gonna reset and it doesn't mean you kind of reset by wiping out your brain but i just think that we would kind of figure out some kind of cultural way to to keep growing but i think that the basic issue is that we're like i said in the beginning we're we are just animals and and we have these biological evolutionary imperatives of just to kind of keep going without any kind of rhyme or reason it's just it's just kind of built in and so um it's good news and the bad news i mean the good news is um that nature wants us to procreate and creates all these pleasures and other things that push us to uh to procreate but then after we're done it's not like that nature had any real incentive to kind of keep us around past reproductive age it wasn't against it it wasn't for it the good news is because it wasn't heavily selected against it creates more malleability i mean if there's like we are we're heavily um selected for needing to breathe oxygen uh if we if we said all right we're gonna try to change that in humans it's basically another species and and we i don't think we could do it but nature's kind of hasn't really in any meaningful way given a [ __ ] about whether we live to 40 or 80 or 100 or whatever and so at least it creates malleability when we look at different examples of the animal world or some of these long-lived animals greenland sharks and some turtles and other things naked mole rats and we can say what are some of the lessons and a lot of it is is slowing metabolism which we can do some people can do it with lifestyle but then there are different drugs that people are experimenting with called like metformin and rapamycin and nicotinamide and others that are trying to kind of trick our bodies into going into that that low metabolism kind of screen saver mode yeah that stuff is interesting whether that'll bear fruit or not is a another question and you want to talk about making me nervous in terms of taking an exogenous substance and slowing down my metabolism it's like what are the things that we don't know about the consequences of that certainly i'm totally with you on that because people like i write about this stuff and i know lots of the researchers and people say like well what are you taking and i said well i'm not taking anything these are i'm taking exercise and fruits and vegetables um because these are like systemic drugs i'm not against taking systemic drugs but like you said before i don't want to be the first guy saying like i heard on joe rogan that nmn is it helps you live longer i'm going to take that but i think that you know i want to be the 10 000th person or the 50 000th person to take an intervention and then by all means let's let's do it because it's not like it's not like just fruits and vegetables and exercise are going to get you that much more um but i'm all for the scientific method and figuring out what are the hacks and doing them safely yeah speaking of hacks the book darwin um hacking darwin starts with you freezing your sperm yes what is your advice to people on that um and why did you do it so first with the advice everybody i mean unless you already have kids and don't want any more um if you are going to have kids at some point freeze your definitely freeze your sperm and probably freeze your eggs um because why the difference well just because sperm you know average guy i mean this will look like a little bit of money you go there they basically stick you in a broom closet they give you some dirty magazines they give you a little plastic receptacle it's like you know so the only it's like it's like the plus minus like plus it's like well that wasn't that bad minus it's like some money it's not a huge amount of money for a woman has at least in the in the current system you go you have to take pills or shots you have to have a you know semi-invasive surgical uh procedure with some level of anesthetic and it's it's a it's a bigger deal than it is um for a guy but the reason why i think why i did it and i think everybody should do it is i think that we're moving towards this form of procreation anyway we're removing uh we're going to be a sexually reproducing species but just less so through the act of sex and if you're going for going to do it anyway why not freeze your eggs or sperm when you are young as young and healthy as as possible and even if you do it and it's wrong and you don't need it well then just throw it away i mean so it seems like the the the upside is potentially huge and there's the downside is relatively small it's a bigger downside for women than than for men so i tell everybody to do it and in the book you talk about doing it as young as you can why why does that matter just so that at a certain age uh it's not necessarily always as absolutely young as as you can but there are kind of peak ages for men and for women i don't remember it exactly but my guess is men is around 20 and women is around around 25 and it's just that our our bodies start to take on mutations with age through exposures and um some of those mutations are passed on to offspring through our eggs and our and our sperm so it's just you if you're going to freeze you may as well do it when you're at your reproductive peak that makes sense jamie i think that is the perfect place to tap out as people now they have a mission they need to run out and get this stuff frozen yeah dude thank you so much man i i just could not have been more into your book i'm super excited to see what else you do both on the fiction and the non-fiction side so my man thank you and where can people find you where can they pick up the book yeah that's great so they can find me at my website jamie madsel.com uh you can also go to the hackingdarwin.com site to learn more about the book and you can pick up the book there and given that most of us are living virtual life you can go to your local bookstore wear a mask and then if you want to learn more about one shared world you can go to oneshared.world awesome all right guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care it makes me want to live life to the full and to encourage other people to do the same the only life we've got so let's live it to the full and let's leave the world a better place than we found it