In this episode, Harry talks to a man who is a cacao shaman, a plant medicine practitioner, and a scientist who specializes in manipulating genetics. Harry and Harry talk about what it means to live in an entirely created world, and how we need to find a balance between the things we like and the things that we don t like. And they talk about how we can find a way to get back to a healthy, balanced life, even if we don't like things the way they are. It's a wild ride, and it's one you don't want to miss. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg and Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneatersound, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Additional music was made by Joseph McDade, and our ad music was written and performed by Justin Timberlake. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerSpeakers, for producing the music for this episode and for the use of our logo and logo design by our theme song by our composer, Evan Handyside, who also wrote music for the intro and outro music, which was done by Ian Dorsch, and the rest of our mixing and mastering of this episode was done in part 2 of the album, which is available on all major podcast directories. . We hope you enjoy the episode, and share it with your friends and family. Thank you so much for all your support, we really appreciate it. Cheers, Amy and support us! - Amy and Jamie. - Thank you, Amy, Sarah, James, Matt, Jack, and Rachel Sarah, Rachel, Evan, Emma, Ben, and Ben, Matthew, and Jack, James and Rachel, John, and James, Sarah thank you, and thank you all for making this podcast so much love you all so much, thank you for listening and supporting us, so much , and so much more, so thank you so, so please leave us a review, so we can keep coming back for more of our work, and we can do more of this, and keep on coming, and more of you all of your support is appreciated, and so on and so forth, we appreciate you, so you can have more of your feedback, and you can be more of these things, and all of you can help us keep it coming.
00:01:43.000I believe that there are no – I say this in my ceremonies – there's no such thing as sacred cacao or sacred plants or sacred mountains or sacred people if we don't treat life with sacredness.
00:01:52.000But if we recognize that everything is sacred, then we infuse life with sacredness and meaning.
00:02:18.000Yeah, well, so that is this strange moment that we're in, because for about 3.8 billion years, our species has evolved by this set of principles we call Darwinian evolution, random mutation and natural selection.
00:02:33.000We used to be single-cell organisms, and now look at us.
00:02:36.000And there's been a lot of magic in that process, and there still is, but we humans are deciphering some of that magic.
00:02:43.000We are looking under the hood of what it means to be human, and we are increasingly going to have the ability to manipulate all of life, including our own.
00:02:51.000Yeah, that is very unnerving to a lot of people.
00:03:36.000We live in an entirely created world, and our ability to manipulate and change that world is always growing.
00:03:43.000And I think we need to recognize that, but being afraid is okay, and being excited is okay, and we need to find the right balance between those two emotions.
00:03:51.000I think for a lot of people, they feel like so many changes happened, particularly when you're talking about genetically modified foods.
00:03:56.000So many things happened before they realized they had happened.
00:04:00.000So when they're like, hey man, I don't want to eat any GMO fruit.
00:04:03.000Well, then you probably shouldn't eat any fruit.
00:04:06.000Because everything that you buy has been changed.
00:04:10.000Every orange that you buy, that's not what an orange used to be like.
00:04:18.000We reset our baseline just from when we were kids.
00:04:21.000So if you went back 12,000 years ago to the end of the last Ice Age and you said, all right, find me all these things that we buy at Whole Foods.
00:04:47.000And now we're entering the era of genetically modified humans, and there's that same level of uncomfortableness.
00:04:53.000But what happened, the reason why I've written this book, Hacking Darwin, is that if we approach genetically modified humans in the same way we approach genetically modified foods, which is the scientists say, hey, we've got this, we're going to manage them responsibly, and it just kind of happens to people.
00:05:12.000I mean, imagine how agitated people are about GMO foods.
00:05:15.000If they don't have a say in how the human experience of genetic modification plays out, people are going to go berserk.
00:05:23.000So we have this window of time where we can start bringing everybody into an inclusive conversation about where we're going because where we are going is just radically different from where we've been.
00:05:34.000Yeah, I think it's an awareness issue and I also think it's a perception issue.
00:05:39.000I think that everything people do is natural.
00:07:46.000I'm worried that rich people are going to get a hold of this technology quick and they're going to have massive unfair advantages in terms of intellect, in terms of physical athletic ability.
00:07:57.000I mean, we really can have a grossly imbalanced world radically quickly if this happens fast where we don't understand exactly what the consequences of these actions are until it's too late and then we try to play catch up with rules and regulations and laws.
00:08:14.000Yeah, that's a very, very real danger, and that's why I've written this book.
00:08:18.000That's why I'm out speaking every day about this topic, because we need to recognize that if we approach these revolutionary technologies using the same values that we experience today, where we're here and very comfortable, but just down the road,
00:08:33.000there are people who are living without many opportunities.
00:08:36.000There are people in parts of the world, like Central African Republic, where there's just a war zone, kids are born malnourished.
00:08:42.000If those are our values today, we can expect that when these future technologies arrive, we'll use those same values.
00:08:51.000So it's real, and right now we have an opportunity to say, all right, these technologies are coming.
00:08:57.000Whatever we do, these technologies are coming.
00:08:59.000There's a better possible future and a worse possible future.
00:09:02.000And how can we infuse our best values into the process to optimize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff?
00:09:08.000And certainly what you're saying is a real risk.
00:09:10.000Think of what happened when European countries had slightly better weapons and slightly better ships than everybody else.
00:09:17.000They took over the world and dominated everybody.
00:09:23.000Governments need to play a role in ensuring broad access and regulating these technologies to make sure we don't get to that kind of dystopian scenario that you've laid out.
00:09:33.000Well, it's also in terms of governments regulating things.
00:10:06.000We need some representation of our collective will just to avoid some of the things like you just mentioned.
00:10:13.000That's the reason why humans banded together and created governments.
00:10:19.000And the reason for democracy, especially if you have more functioning democracies, is that your government in some ways reflects the will of the people.
00:10:31.000And I know there are libertarian arguments where everyone should just, like, if you want a little road in front of your house, either go build the road or pay somebody.
00:10:38.000But there are a lot of things, even in that model, that won't get done.
00:10:42.000There are a lot of kind of big national, even global concerns that you need some kind of I think we're good to go.
00:11:03.000Every person needs to really understand these revolutionary technologies like genetics, like AI, and all of our responsibilities and opportunities to say, hey, this is really important.
00:11:14.000Here are the values that I think that I cherish.
00:11:18.000And just like you said, I don't want it to be That the wealthiest people are the ones who have kids with higher IQs and live longer and healthier than everybody else.
00:12:07.000And if they just decide to make super people, and they do it before we do, that's what people are worried about, right?
00:12:14.000They're worried about – there's trivial things, seemingly trivial, like athletics, and then there's things that are really – like, what's to stop people from just becoming the Hulk?
00:12:25.000What's to stop people from becoming immortal?
00:12:28.000What's to stop – what is – Well, two questions.
00:12:35.000The story of the 21st century, one of the biggest stories of the 21st century will be how the US-China rivalry plays out and the playing field will be with these revolutionary technologies.
00:12:47.000And China has a national plan to lead the world in these technologies by 2050. They're putting huge resources.
00:12:53.000They have really smart people they are really focused on.
00:12:58.000In genetic technologies, when last year, my book Hacking Dharma was already in production in November when it was announced that these first genetically engineered babies had been born in China.
00:13:09.000And so I called the publisher and said, we need to pull this back out of production because I need to reference this.
00:13:13.000But it didn't require much of a change.
00:13:22.000So I had to add a few sentences saying, and it just happened in October of 2018. So China is on that path.
00:13:31.000And we need to recognize that on one hand, the United States needs to be competitive.
00:13:37.000On the other hand, we don't want a runaway arms race of the human race, and that's why we need to find this balance between national ambition and some kind of global rules.
00:13:50.000Yeah, and the other thing is that we're competing with them, and so if they decide to do it first, we're almost compelled to do it second, or compelled to try to keep up.
00:14:00.000How far away do you think we are from physically manipulating living human beings, Versus fetuses, versus something in the womb.
00:14:10.000So physically manipulating living human beings, we're there.
00:14:25.000When you're younger, your body is better able to fight cancers.
00:14:29.000What you can do with someone with a cancer, you take their cells, you manipulate their cells to give them cancer-fighting superpowers, and you put them back into the person's body.
00:14:39.000And now the person's body behaves like you're a younger person.
00:14:43.000So gene therapies are already happening.
00:14:45.000A relatively small number of them have already been approved, but there is a list of thousands of them with regulators and applications to regulators around the world.
00:14:55.000So the era of making genetic changes to living humans, that's already here.
00:15:18.000And so we are going to be able to do things that feel like crazy things, like changing people's eye color, changing people's Skin color to funky things.
00:15:27.000I mean, there's a lot of stuff that we're not doing now that we will be able to do.
00:15:31.000How far away do you think we are from something like that?
00:15:44.000If it's with this kind of gene therapy, and it's a small number of genes...
00:15:50.000Probably, but we are messing with very complex systems that we don't fully understand.
00:15:54.000So that's why there's a lot of unknowns.
00:15:55.000And coming back to your point on regulation, that's why I don't think we want a total free-for-all where people say, hey, I'm going to edit my own jeans.
00:16:02.000Yeah, and you don't want some backyard hustler.
00:17:12.000So we're moving from a system of generalized healthcare based on population averages.
00:17:16.000So when you go to your doctor, you're treated.
00:17:18.000Because you're a human, just based on average.
00:17:21.000And we're moving to a world of personalized medicine, and the foundation of your personalized healthcare will be your sequence genome and your electronic health records.
00:17:30.000And that's how they can say, this is a drug, this is an intervention that'll work for you.
00:17:34.000When we do that, then we're going to have to sequence everybody.
00:17:38.000So we're going to have about 2 billion people have had their whole genome sequenced within a decade.
00:17:44.000And then we're going to be able to compare What the genes say to how those genes are expressed.
00:17:49.000And then humans become a big data set.
00:17:52.000And that's going to move us from precision to predictive healthcare where you're going to be just born and you're going to have all this information.
00:17:58.000Your parents have all this information about how certain really important aspects of your life are going to play out.
00:18:02.000And some of that is going to be disease-related.
00:18:05.000But some of that's just going to be life-related, like you have a better-than-average chance of being really great at math or having a high IQ or low IQ or being a great sprinter.
00:19:37.000That's an interesting conversation of whether or not—I wonder if we're ever going to get to a point where people don't allow people, sort of like people don't allow people to not get vaccinated.
00:20:20.000Or if they said, look, you can make babies however you want, but if you make babies the old-fashioned way, and if your kid has some kind of genetic disorder that was preventable, we're just not going to cover it with insurance.
00:20:35.000So you're going to have a $10 million lifetime bill.
00:20:49.000I mean, right now, somebody sees some little kid riding around their bicycle without a helmet.
00:20:54.000They're kind of looking at the parents like, hey, what are you doing?
00:20:56.000How come you don't have a helmet on your kids?
00:20:58.000And I just think that we're moving toward this kind of societal change where people will, I believe, see conceiving their kids in the lab as a safer alternative.
00:21:10.000And it's not just safety because once you do that, then that opens you up To the possibility of all other kinds of applications of technology, not just to eliminate risks or prevent disease, but you have a lot more information.
00:21:27.000So already it's possible to roughly rank order 15 pre-implanted embryos, tallest to shortest, in a decade from highest genetic component of IQ to lowest genetic component of IQ. This stuff is very real and it's very personal.
00:21:42.000What do you think will be the first thing that people start manipulating?
00:21:47.000Health will be the primary driver because that's every parent's biggest fear.
00:21:52.000And that is what is going to be kind of the entry application.
00:21:55.000People wanting to make sure that their kids don't suffer from terrible genetic diseases.
00:22:01.000And then I think the second will probably be longevity.
00:22:05.000I mean, right now there's a lot of work going on sequencing people, the super-agers, people who live to their late 90s, people to 100, to identify what are the genetic patterns that these people have.
00:22:17.000So it's like to live to 90, you have to do all the things that you advocate, healthy living and whatever.
00:22:21.000But to live to 100, you really need the genetics to make that possible.
00:22:25.000So we're going to identify what are some of the genetic patterns that allow you to live Those kinds of long lives.
00:22:31.000But then after that, then it's wide open.
00:22:41.000We are primarily genetic beings, and we are going to be able to look under the hood of what it means to be human, and we'll have these incredible choices.
00:23:25.000Women, human, female mammals are a little bit stingy.
00:23:30.000But then the next killer application is using a process called induced pluripotent stem cells.
00:23:36.000And so Shinya Yamanaka, this great Japanese scientist, won the 2012 Nobel Prize for developing a way to turn any adult cell into a stem cell.
00:23:44.000So a stem cell is a kind of cell, it can be anything.
00:23:47.000And so you take, let's say, a skin graft.
00:24:40.000And then you go to the parents and say, well, what are your priorities?
00:24:43.000And maybe they'll say, well, I want health, I want longevity, I want high IQ. When you're choosing from big numbers like that, you have some real options.
00:24:51.000And then on top of that, then there is this precision gene editing, the stuff that happened in China last year.
00:25:35.000You get that, and then you say, alright.
00:25:37.000What if you had like 20 sons that were awesome, and they didn't tell you about 18 of them, and you kept two of them, and then 18 of them shipped off to some military industrial complex, turned them into assassins?
00:26:35.000We need some representatives helping us with that.
00:26:38.000The real concern is the competition, right?
00:26:40.000The real concern is whether or not we do something in regards to regulation that somehow or another stifles competition on our end and doesn't allow us to compete with Russia and China, particularly China.
00:26:51.000And so what we need to do is to find that balance.
00:26:55.000And one of the big issues for this is privacy.
00:26:58.000So if you kind of look around the world, I'd say of the kind of the big countries and groupings of countries, there's three models of privacy.
00:27:05.000There's Europe, which has the strongest privacy protections for all kinds of data, including genetic data.
00:27:14.000And there's the United States that has the middle.
00:27:16.000And the paradox is from an individual perspective, we all are thinking, well, we kind of want to be like Europe because I don't want somebody accessing my personal information, especially my genetic information.
00:27:27.000This is like my most intimate information.
00:27:31.000Genetics is the ultimate big data problem.
00:27:34.000And so you need these big data pools and you'd access to these big data pools in order to unlock the secrets of genetics.
00:27:42.000So these three different groupings, everyone's making a huge bet on the future and the way we're going to know who wins.
00:27:48.000Like right now in the IT world, we have Amazon and Apple and Google and those big companies.
00:27:54.000But whoever gets this bet right, They will be the ones who will be leading the way and making a huge amount of money on these technologies.
00:28:03.000What we're talking about is a trillion, multi-trillion dollar industry.
00:28:07.000How do you think this is going to affect things like competitive athletics?
00:28:27.000It's a different topic that probably everybody in the Tour de France was doing exactly that when he won.
00:28:33.000But what if, which will be the case, we're going to be able to sequence the people, let's say nobody's doing drugs, and we sequence all these athletes.
00:28:42.000Some of them will just have a natural genetic advantage.
00:28:46.000Their bodies will naturally be doing what Lance Armstrong had manipulated his body to do.
00:28:51.000You know that's happening with a sprinter right now?
00:28:57.000And I feel really sorry for her, but we have categories.
00:29:02.000I mean, with your world in mixed martial arts, I mean, I think I remember in the past there was some person who was kind of a borderline on a...
00:29:12.000Between genders and we're just kicking the shit out of all of these women in cage fighting.
00:29:17.000It's like we have these categories of man and woman.
00:29:19.000We know that the gender identities are fluid, but how do we think about it when these genetic differences confer advantages?
00:29:28.000So if your body is primed To do something.
00:29:33.000Maybe you could have like a Plato's Republic world where everybody fulfills a function that you are genetically optimized to do.
00:29:41.000And then you could imagine that being a very competitive kind of environment.
00:29:45.000But what do you do for now in something like the Olympics?
00:29:48.000If somebody has this huge genetic advantage, should we let somebody else manipulate their bodies?
00:29:53.000There's this thing called gene doping.
00:29:55.000In order to change the expression of genes, so your body to act like you're as naturally genetic enhanced as somebody else, it's complicated.
00:30:03.000Are they capable of doing certain physical enhancements through gene doping right now?
00:31:21.000And then they go around the country and they test kids, and then they bring a bunch of them to their Olympic sports schools.
00:31:26.000And then they get them all involved, and then some kids are the best of those kids, and then the best of those kids, and then you get with these champs.
00:31:36.000But what happens if they're doing that, but it's at the genetic level?
00:31:40.000And there are countries like Kazakhstan that are already announcing that they are going to be screening all of their athletes.
00:31:46.000The science isn't there yet, so it's impossible right now to say, well, I'm going to do a genome sequence of somebody, and I know this person has the potential to be an Olympic sprinter.
00:31:57.000But 10 years from now, that's not going to be the case.
00:32:10.000I mean, look, it's not like people don't already alter their bodies by training, by diet, exercise, all sorts of different recovery modalities, cryotherapy, sauna, high elevation training,
00:32:26.000all these different things that they do that manipulates the human body.
00:32:31.000But, it's not like, it would be kind of crazy if you had sports, but you couldn't practice and you couldn't work out.
00:32:37.000Like, we want to find out what a person's really like.
00:33:53.000Like it seems about right to us that everybody gets immunizations.
00:33:58.000But immunizations are a form of superpower.
00:34:00.000Imagine if our ancestor, they couldn't even imagine immunizations.
00:34:03.000What an unfair advantage when you have 100 million people dying of Spanish flu.
00:34:09.000So all this stuff is scary and it's going to normalize, but how it normalizes That's what it played in.
00:34:16.000Well, the world has changed so much just in the last 20 years, but it feels like this is just scratching the surface in comparison to what's coming.
00:34:24.000People misunderstand, and they underestimate the rate of change.
00:34:29.000And the reason that they do that is since the beginning of the digital revolution, we have experienced a thing called exponential change.
00:34:37.000You've heard of Moore's Law, which is basically computing power roughly doubles every two years.
00:34:42.000And we've internalized Moore's Law, and that means that every new iPhone we expect to be better and stronger and faster and all these kinds of things.
00:34:50.000But now we're entering a world where we're going to have exponential change across technology platforms.
00:34:57.000And so we think about, well, what does exponential change mean in the context of biology?
00:35:02.000Well, at the very, very beginning, it's genome sequencing is going to be basically free.
00:35:09.000But we're going to be able to change life.
00:35:12.000And because we're on this J-curve, Like when you think of what's a 10-year unit of change looking in the rearview mirror, that amount of change is only going to take five years going forward and then two years and then one year.
00:35:24.000And so that's the reason why I've written this book is we have to get that this stuff is coming fast.
00:35:29.000And if we want to be part of it, we have to understand it and we have to make our voices heard.
00:35:40.000First, humans and all of us are incredibly complex.
00:35:45.000I mean, we talk about genetic code, which is mind-bogglingly complex.
00:35:50.000But our genetics exists within the incredible, incredibly complex systems biology.
00:35:56.000We have all these things like our microbiome, our virome, our proteome, our metabolome.
00:36:01.000And then that exists within the context of our environment and everything's always changing and interacting.
00:36:07.000And so we are messing and we have the tools to mess and we will mess because we're this hubristic species with these really complex ecosystems, including ourselves, we don't fully understand.
00:36:38.000When we think about diversity, we think, well, it's great to have diverse workplaces and schools and we're more better people for it and we're more competitive.
00:36:47.000But diversity is something much, much, much deeper.
00:36:50.000In Darwinian terms, diversity is random mutation.
00:36:54.000Like, that's our core survival strategy as a species.
00:36:57.000If we didn't have that, you could say we'd still be single-cell organisms, but we wouldn't.
00:37:01.000We would have died because the environment would have changed and we wouldn't have had the built-in resilience to adapt.
00:37:07.000Yeah, that is really important when you think about diversity, right?
00:37:10.000That we need a non-uniformity when it comes to our own biology.
00:37:14.000We need a bunch of different kinds of people.
00:37:23.000There's just well-suited for a particular environment.
00:37:25.000If that environment changes, The best suited person for your old environment may be the least suited person for the new environment.
00:37:33.000So even if we have things that seem like really great ideas now, like optimizing health.
00:37:38.000So if you have sickle cell disease, you're probably going to die and you're going to die young and it's going to be excruciatingly painful.
00:37:46.000And so you would say, well, let's just get rid of sickle cell disease, which we can do.
00:37:51.000But if you are a recessive carrier of the single-cell disease gene, you don't have it, you're just carrying it, and you have a pretty significant risk of passing it on to your kids, but you also have an additional resistance to malaria.
00:38:07.000And so we are almost certainly carrying around all kinds of recessive traits, maybe even ones that we don't like that are harming us now, but that could be some protection against some future danger that we don't yet understand or haven't faced.
00:38:22.000And so the challenge is that diversity has just happened to us for 4 billion years.
00:38:26.000Now we're going to have to choose it, and that's a big challenge for us.
00:38:31.000So essentially, we're going to have, without doubt, some unintended consequences, some unintended domino effect, things that are going to take place that we really can't predict.
00:38:45.000We just have to kind of go along with this technology and see where it leads us as it improves.
00:38:50.000If you go back and look at surgeries from the 1950s, comparison to surgery of 2019...
00:38:57.000I mean, I would never advise someone to get their knee operated by a 1950s physician.
00:39:03.000But that's kind of, someone's going to have to be an early adopter when it comes to these genetic therapies.
00:39:09.000Yeah, no, so I agree with you, but where I would slightly, where I would add to what you're saying is, these technologies, they're going to happen, they're going to play out.
00:39:18.000What's at play now is not whether these technologies are going to advance.
00:39:22.000They will advance in a way that is going to just blow people's minds.
00:39:27.000What's at play is what are the values that we are going to weave into the decision-making process so that we can get a better outcome than we otherwise would have had.
00:39:36.000And that's what, in my view, that's the real important issue now.
00:39:41.000Unintended consequences are something that I've been taking very seriously lately when I'm paying attention to technology as it's used in social media.
00:39:52.000Particularly, one of the things that's disturbed me quite a bit over the last few weeks is that there's a model that they use, and not intentionally, But there's a model that they use to get people upset about things, show you things in your feed that you argue against because that makes you click on them more and you engage in them more.
00:40:14.000And because of the fact that we have this advertiser-based model where people are trying to get clicks, Yeah.
00:40:58.000If you had to go to Facebook and say, hey, Mark Zuckerberg, I know you have fucking $100 billion or whatever you got, but you can't make any more money this way.
00:41:05.000Because what you're doing is fucking up society.
00:42:41.000Everyone's life experiences, we kind of take for granted.
00:42:44.000You can go out the door, walk to Starbucks and not get shot, or you can have your house, something happens, your house gets robbed, you call the police, and the police aren't the ones who've robbed your house.
00:42:55.000I mean, there's all these kinds of crazy things.
00:42:58.000If we break down the foundations that underpin our lives, that's really dangerous.
00:43:04.000What I was kind of getting at was that through this process of this algorithm, how this algorithm selects things that shows you in your feed and how people are getting upset by this and how this is generating massive amounts of revenue, once it's already happened, it's very difficult to stop.
00:43:20.000And my concern would be that this would be a similar thing when it comes to genetic engineering.
00:43:26.000We're saying we need to be able to put regulations on this, we need to be able to establish...
00:43:30.000But once it gets out of the bag, once it gets rolling, and I have...
00:43:35.000Do you remember when Mark Zuckerberg sat in front of all those politicians?
00:43:38.000They had no fucking idea what they were talking about.
00:44:01.000The fact that they're dealing with one of the most important moments of our time, but they didn't bring on some sort of a legitimate technology expert who could explain the pitfalls of this and do so in a way that the rest of the world's going to know.
00:44:14.000So they're not going to protect us from genetic engineering either, right?
00:44:27.000Yeah, I totally agree with you that if we wait to focus on this issue until it becomes a crisis, it's going to be too late because all the big decisions will have been made.
00:44:38.000The reason why I wrote this book, the reason why I'm on my almost week three of this book tour doing events like this every day is what I am saying in every form that I can is this is really important.
00:44:51.000We were watching the news yesterday, they had this royal baby in the UK. I don't give a shit.
00:44:58.000But what is at play now is the future of our entire species and our democracy and our lives.
00:45:04.000And we have to be focusing on those things because we have a moment now where we can, to a certain extent, influence how these revolutions play out.
00:45:16.000And if we just wait around, if we're distracted and we're focusing on all this stuff that's sucking up our attention, and whether it's Trump or Brexit or Mueller and all these things, I mean, how much of our time are we spending focused on?
00:45:27.000It's fine, let's pay a little bit of attention, but there's really big stuff 50 years from now, 100 years from now, no one's going to look back and say, oh, that was the age of Trump.
00:45:35.000They're going to say that was the age when after almost 4 billion years of evolution, humans took control of their own evolutionary process, and it's huge, and it's going to change all of life.
00:45:46.000And what I'm trying to do is to say everybody has to have a seat at the table, whether you're a conservative Christian, whether you're a biohacking transhumanist, everybody needs to be at the table because we're talking about is the future of our species.
00:46:02.000We're talking about the future of our species, but are we even capable of understanding the consequences of these actions, the stuff that we're discussing?
00:46:12.000I'm talking about it, but if someone said, hey, you've got to go speak in front of people about the consequences in a very clear one-hour presentation, I'd be like, no, I'm not.
00:46:26.000But two, the reason why I've written this book, Hacking Darwin, is I wanted to say if you could read just one book, And it's written just for everybody in a very clear way with a lot of jokes that I think are funny, my mother laughed at them as well, that you get it.
00:46:39.000And then once you know just the basics, as a human being, anybody, it has an equal right to be part of this conversation as the top scientist or the leaders of any country.
00:46:52.000I would agree with you there, but I don't think that other people are going to see it that way.
00:46:56.000I think the people that are in control, they're not going to say, Hey, we need to be fair with everyone, all the citizens of the world.
00:47:03.000But that's why we need this bottom-up groundswell, but we can't have a bottom-up groundswell if just general people aren't even aware of what the issues are.
00:47:14.000And that's the challenge, and that's why forums like yours are just so important.
00:48:22.000Seven billion people on earth, how are they gonna do that?
00:48:25.000But we have the opportunity and we have to try because you don't want, like with the beginning of the genetically modified crops era, the scientists were actually really responsible, but regular people weren't consulted and they felt these guys just did it to me.
00:48:39.000So if you have all the marchers with genetically modified organisms, we are entering the era of genetically modified humans and that's gonna scare the shit out of people.
00:48:49.000And so we need to start preparing and we need to make people feel that they're respected and included.
00:48:54.000And our government leaders aren't going to do it for us.
00:48:56.000So we have to find ways of engaging ourselves.
00:48:59.000And that's why with me, with the book, I set up a website where people can share their views, debate with other people.
00:49:07.000I really want everybody to be part of this conversation.
00:49:10.000How do you think it's going to play out in terms of how people, various religions perceive this?
00:49:17.000So there are people on one end of the spectrum who believe that this is quote-unquote playing God.
00:49:24.000And if you believe that the world was created exactly as it is by some kind of divine force and that it's wrong for humans… To change, to quote-unquote, play God, it's hard to explain how you could justify everything that we've done.
00:49:41.000I mean, we've changed the face of life on this planet Earth.
00:49:45.000But I really respect people who say, look, I think that there's a line, that I believe that life begins at conception, and that any kind of manipulation after conception is interfering, that's going too far, and I respect that.
00:50:00.000And those people need to have a seat at the table.
00:50:03.000And there's certainly very strong religious views.
00:50:06.000In Judaism, there's an idea called tikkun olam, which means that the world is created cracked and broken, and it's the responsibility of each person to try to fix it.
00:50:15.000And that's a justification for using science and doing things to try to make the world a better place.
00:50:20.000And then there are now these new kind of, I mean, transhumanism.
00:51:37.000Definitely, I think that 20 years from now, 30 years from now, people are going to look at pictures of us and say, what's that little rectangular thing?
00:51:45.000And you're going to say, that was a phone.
00:51:56.000So, we are all Michael Douglas because our technology, you're absolutely right, is not going to be something that we carry around.
00:52:05.000Technology is coming inside of our bodies.
00:52:08.000That is the future of where it's going.
00:52:10.000And, you know, people say, well, what does human genetic engineering have to do when we know that AI is going to get more and more powerful?
00:52:19.000The future of technology, the future of all of this, it's not human or AI. It's human plus AI. And that is what's going to drive our – we are co-evolving with our technology, and that's what's going to drive us forward.
00:52:32.000But you're exactly right to be afraid and to be concerned.
00:52:35.000And again, everything comes to, well, how are we going to regulate it?
00:52:38.000Are we going to have guardrails of how far is too far?
00:52:41.000Are we going to let companies just do whatever they want, or are we going to put restrictions on what they can do?
00:52:46.000I think letting the whole world decide, though, you're going to run into those religious roadblocks.
00:53:07.000I'm part of the World Health Organization International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing.
00:53:11.000So we're meeting six times this year in Geneva.
00:53:13.000And the question that we're asking is, how do we think about global regulation, at least to try to put limits on the far ends of what's possible?
00:54:10.000It's not like the really important stuff.
00:54:13.000It's Trump did this or Kardashians did that.
00:54:17.000We're in this culture where there are a lot of draws on our attention, but sometimes there's really important stuff and people are afraid of it.
00:55:18.000And he started going, and it was very technical.
00:55:21.000And I could just see the faces of the people in the audience.
00:55:24.000It was like, oh, God, what's happening here?
00:55:26.000And their level of excitement, it just shrunk.
00:55:29.000Because they couldn't really put it all in a box.
00:55:32.000And scientists aren't trained, by and large, to communicate anything.
00:55:38.000And to see in the future, so a little more than a month ago, I was in Kyoto in Japan, and I went to the laboratory of the world's leading scientists who's doing a process of what I mentioned earlier, of turning adult cells into stem cells into eggs.
00:55:53.000And so this will revolutionize the way humans reproduce.
00:55:57.000And so I was in a meeting with his top postdoc students.
00:56:01.000So these are like really the cutting edge of these technologies.
00:56:04.000And I went around to each of them and I said, here's my question.
00:56:10.000And two, tell me what are the implications of what you're doing now for 50 years from now.
00:56:15.000And the first question was, oh, I'm doing this and we're doing this with mouse models and people were so animated.
00:56:21.000And then 50 years from now, people just froze and it was so uncomfortable.
00:56:25.000They were like squeezing the table Just because that's not what scientists do.
00:56:30.000They are trained to say, well, this is the thing just in front of me.
00:56:33.000So I thought I was writing this book for the general public, but I'm being invited to speak to thousands of doctors and scientists because what they're saying is we get that we're doing this little piece of this, and whether it's lab research or fertility doctors or all sorts of things,
00:56:48.000but it's really hard to put together the whole story of the genetics revolution and what it means for us and for society.
00:57:37.000Science has been diffused, at least with nuclear power.
00:57:41.000It was a relatively small number of people.
00:57:44.000And it was one or two states that could do it.
00:57:47.000Now, with precision gene editing, you get the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to do, you will get the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to do CRISPR gene edits.
00:58:00.000But to apply it, once the formula already exists, you get like an A- in your high school biology class.
00:58:06.000So this technology is out there, it's cheap, it's accessible.
00:58:11.000Did you go to that 2045 conference in Manhattan a couple years back?
00:58:19.000That's part of the thing with these transhumanist folks.
00:58:22.000They believe that with their own calculations of the exponential increase of technology, that somewhere around 2045. There's a singularity.
00:58:31.000At the very least, we're going to reach this point where you're going to be able to either download consciousness or have some sort of an artificially intelligent sentient being that's hanging out with you.
00:58:43.000I'm on faculty for one of the programs of Singularity University called Exponential Medicine.
00:58:48.000And so we're thinking a lot about that.
00:58:50.000I actually had an editorial in the New York Times a few weeks ago imagining a visit to a fertility clinic in the year 2045. And again, because we're on this exponential change, it's really hard for people to internalize, to kind of feel how fast these changes are coming.
00:59:08.000I do think, though, Ray Kurzweil, who's a really incredible genius, he thinks that we are soon going to get to a point where our artificial intelligence is self-learning.
00:59:19.000But AI, if it gets to the point where it can read something, read and comprehend, like in seconds, it will read every book ever written in human history.
00:59:29.000And then when you have all these doublings and all this more knowledge, you can imagine how that would happen pretty quickly.
00:59:36.000The counterargument against, and I think that it will, But I don't think that our human brains are, on one hand, they're incredibly complex, and they're also kind of irrational.
00:59:47.000I mean, we have all these different layers.
00:59:48.000We have our lizard brain, and every decision that we make, there's the rational decision.
00:59:52.000But then there's all the other stuff that our brains, that doesn't even rise to the level of our awareness, that our brains are processing.
01:00:00.000And right now, we only really have one really effective artificial intelligence algorithm, which is for pattern recognition.
01:00:07.000But if you think of pattern recognition as a core skill of what our brains do, our brains probably have a thousand, two thousand different skills.
01:00:14.000But the core thing is whether we reach this singularity moment or not.
01:00:20.000These technologies are going to become incredibly more powerful.
01:00:23.000They're going to become increasingly integrated into our lives and into our beings and part of our evolutionary process.
01:00:30.000There's no longer, oh, we just have our biological evolution and our technological evolution, and those are separate things.
01:00:36.000It's going to be that weird question of whether or not if an artificial intelligence is going to be able to absorb all the writing that human beings have ever done and really understand us.
01:01:07.000Because I think when people imagine this AI future, they're imagining like some intimate relationship with some artificial intelligence that feels just like a human.
01:01:20.000Well, no, but just because AI, it will be its own form of intelligence.
01:01:24.000And it may not be, frankly, we wouldn't want AIs with these brains like we have that have all these different impulses that are kind of imagining all this crazy stuff.
01:01:32.000We may want them to be more rational than we are.
01:02:16.000Yeah, so first we had chess, and chess people said, oh, that's what it means to be a human.
01:02:22.000The computers will never beat humans at chess.
01:02:24.000Now, it's like everyone says, well, no human could ever compete.
01:02:27.000And then they said, well, there's this Chinese game of Go, which kind of when people here look at it, it looks kind of like checkers, but it's actually way more sophisticated, way more complicated than chess.
01:02:36.000I heard that there are more moves in Go, more potential moves than there are stars in the universe.
01:05:11.000We're almost too much chimp, right, to contemplate these critical decisions in terms of how it's going to unfold from here on out.
01:05:20.000We really might, not we, but the people that are actually at the tip of the spear of this stuff, they really might be affecting the way the planet exists.
01:07:16.000Us being intelligent, trying to survive against nature, and predators, and weather, and all the different issues that we came up, that we evolved growing up and dealing with.
01:07:26.000And then now, we just want things to be better.
01:07:29.000We just want things to be more convenient, faster, but more data.
01:07:34.000You're aware of Elon Musk's neural link technology.
01:09:46.000I think he's off based on your use of the word your.
01:09:53.000So I mentioned that a month ago I was in Kyoto and I was at this stem cell lab, but I also went to another lab of a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguro, who's the world's leading humanoid roboticist.
01:10:05.000And so he's the guy who was on the cover of Wired and he's created these robot avatars.
01:10:10.000And like I had a conversation with this robot woman, And it was really interesting because I could see that if I would smile, she'd smile and lean forward.
01:10:20.000And if I had an over-exaggerated sad face, she'd change her expression.
01:10:30.000But we're still a long way, and so from having full robotics, but I had this, for robotic human interactions, but I had this debate with Ishiguro, and he was saying that he thought that the future of humanity was non-biological,
01:10:46.000that we were going to kind of unload ourselves to these non-biological entities, and that is how we would gain our immortality.
01:10:53.000And I argued something very different.
01:10:58.000I think we'll fully integrate with our technology, but if we ever become entirely non-biological, then that's not us.
01:11:05.000Either we will have committed suicide as a species, or these robots will have killed us.
01:11:12.000Because even if, let's just say, that I could download my entire consciousness to some kind of robot, and let's just say that was possible, that robot would be me for that first Right.
01:12:12.000And so I think that nobody is going to say, well, I'm going to be Joe living a life or I'm going to like not be Joe and I'll just have my...
01:12:34.000I think some people will want that, not everybody.
01:12:36.000I think some people will, but they don't know what they're getting, right?
01:12:38.000In terms of you don't know what that experience is going to be like, nor do you know if there is some sort of a chemical gateway that happens in the mind when you do expire and allows you to pass through to the other dimension that your consciousness and your soul longs to travel to.
01:13:55.000I don't think so, and I'll tell you why.
01:13:57.000So I listened to the Michael Palin interviews, and he had his great conversation with Sam Harris, and I really think that this psilocybin stuff is real.
01:14:08.000You just got decriminalized in Denver.
01:14:12.000But, as I said before, I think that the ultimate drug is us.
01:14:18.000And so for me, I would rather, and I definitely think that our awareness, it doesn't encompass everything that is knowable, everything that we could know, but we hem ourselves in.
01:14:29.000And if we want to get out of those limitations, certainly drugs are ways that people have used for many thousands of years.
01:14:57.000That if we want to expand our consciousness, there are all kinds of ways, whether it's meditation or awareness or just simple appreciation.
01:15:05.000That's when I do these cacao ceremonies.
01:15:07.000What I say is you have this cacao in front of you, but it's not just this.
01:15:13.000The person in Honduras who planted the seed, the person who watered that seed, the person who took the plant, the person who paved the road to bring the plant.
01:15:22.000And I just think that we can expand our consciousness through our own means, and then we always have access.
01:15:29.000I hear what you're saying, but you're saying this from a person that's never had psychedelic experiences in a It's really preposterous.
01:15:34.000If you did experience what psilocybin can do to you, you definitely wouldn't be saying it this way.
01:15:40.000You also wouldn't be thinking that you take it and then you're not on it anymore because it's profoundly influential for your perspective in regards to the whole rest of your existence.
01:15:50.000There's many people that have had psychedelic experiences that Think about it as a rebirth, that they've gone through this and changed.
01:15:59.000So why would you have this rigid thought process about drugs and not drugs, but yet you don't have it about cacao, which is a mild drug?
01:16:09.000Yeah, and so you're right that it may not be entirely consistent.
01:16:12.000Some of the people you've described are good friends of mine who've really done it, and I've talked to them about it, and I'm endlessly curious.
01:16:58.000And just, I think it's such a great point.
01:17:00.000Because I'm very close with, actually, with the Tibetans.
01:17:02.000One of my closest friends is the prime minister of the Tibetan exile government.
01:17:06.000So, I've been many times to Dramsala in India.
01:17:09.000I've met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama many times.
01:17:12.000And the most incredible thing about meeting with these guys, and they are all people who've found these incredible states of heightened consciousness, so much that their brains are changed when they go into the fMRI machines.
01:17:28.000But When you have a conversation with them, it's not like what we do.
01:19:02.000There's a real thought, and this is something that Terence McKenna described way back in the late 90s, early 2000s.
01:19:11.000He believed that you're going to be able to recreate a lot of psychedelic states through virtual reality so that people that don't want to actually do a drug will be able to experience what it's like to be on that drug.
01:19:25.000And that, I mean, it's very theoretical and hypothetical.
01:21:48.000I mean, I think that there's real big issues here.
01:21:52.000Yeah, I mean, that is the matrix, right?
01:21:55.000And if it feels better and it's more enjoyable than real life, what is going to stop people from doing the Ray Kurzweil deal and downloading yourself into this dimension?
01:22:09.000Whether it's possible to do a full download or not, I mean, I think that's an open question.
01:22:14.000But whether people are going to be more comfortable living in these alternative worlds, and whether we're going to be able to say, oh, no, that is the fake world.
01:22:23.000Like, if you're in this virtual world, but you have friends in that world, you're interacting in that world, you have experiences that feel every bit as real in that world as in our world, And people say, oh no, that's not real.
01:23:40.000I'm worried about augmented reality, too.
01:23:43.000When you see people that use Snapchat filters and they give themselves doggy ears and stuff like that, how long before that is just something that people choose to turn on or turn off about life itself?
01:23:56.000You'll be able to see the world through different lenses.
01:24:02.000I might write about this in one of my novels, Eternal Sonata, where I think we're just going to have these contact lenses, and it'll be different kinds of information based on what people want.
01:24:13.000I mean, like, I'll meet with you, and it'll say, all right, this is Joe, here's a little bit of background, whatever, and we'll have useful information.
01:24:21.000Or you're walking around a city, and you'll get little alerts of things you might do, or history.
01:24:28.000That's what they were thinking about with Google Glasses, right?
01:24:30.000Yeah, I know, but it just was so annoying that people wanted to kill people.
01:24:48.000Now, do you think that that's going to come in the form of a contact lens, or do you think it's going to come in the form of ski goggles that you're going to put on?
01:26:04.000Any kind of crazy stuff you can think about is probably going to happen.
01:26:06.000Some of it will take, some of it won't.
01:26:09.000Yeah, it seems like that's what we're going to have to see, like how it plays out.
01:26:13.000And that's one of the things when you were talking about scientists that are working on these things, they're working on what's right in front of them.
01:26:18.000They're not looking at the greater landscape itself in terms of what the future holds.
01:26:22.000It's not their job, and that's why we need other people.
01:26:25.000I certainly see myself— Who are those people?
01:27:09.000But in terms of the people who are kind of articulating the big picture of the world and what are the challenges that we're facing, I certainly put myself in that category.
01:27:18.000People like Yuval Noah Harari who are just kind of big, also kind of big thinkers, people like Sid Mukherjee.
01:27:25.000And I just think we have to articulate the big picture and we have to do it in a way so that people can see themselves in this story And then enter into the conversation.
01:27:38.000Are you writing this book just to sort of educate people and let them understand exactly what is going on and that it is a really volatile and chaotic and amazing time?
01:28:08.000I can give you just a little bit of background.
01:28:10.000So more than 20 years ago, I was working on the National Security Council.
01:28:14.000And my then boss, Richard Clark, who was then this obscure White House official who was jumping up and down saying, we need to be focusing on terrorism and Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden.
01:28:26.000And he was trying to tell everybody...
01:28:28.000And nobody was paying attention to it.
01:28:39.000And Dick, even before then, would always tell me that if everyone in Washington was focusing on one thing, you could be sure there was something much more important that was being missed.
01:28:47.000And so more than 20 years ago, I was looking around.
01:28:50.000I saw these little pieces of disparate information, and I came to the conclusion that the genetics revolution was going to change everything.
01:30:50.000Yeah, and that's like Sanjay Gupta had a wonderful quote that's actually on the cover of my book, which is, if you can read one book on the future of our species, this is it.
01:30:57.000So what I've tried to do is to say, like, if you just want to go to one place to understand what's happening, what's at stake, what it means for you, and what you can do now if you want to get involved, I've tried to do that.
01:31:09.000Ironically, I'm now, as I mentioned, being asked to speak to thousands of doctors and scientists because they're all reading this book and they're saying, this is positioning my work in a much bigger context.
01:31:20.000Sanjay Gupta is a very interesting cat because he was very anti-marijuana and then started doing research on it and then totally flipped 180 degrees, which to me is a great sign of both humility and intelligence.
01:31:32.000He recognized that the data was different than his presuppositions.
01:31:49.000So this one, I've been asked to go and speak, and a lot of members of Congress are going to be invited.
01:31:55.000And what I'm going to tell them is, look, this...
01:32:04.000What are you going to say to try to really get it into their head?
01:32:07.000What I'm going to say is that the genetics revolution is here.
01:32:11.000If we don't have a system, if we don't have a rational system to manage it, if we don't have a system, you talked about public education, the challenge that we face in the United States is we traditionally have had a representative democracy.
01:32:24.000And now we're transitioning from a representative democracy to a popular democracy.
01:32:29.000So Switzerland has a popular democracy, but they have really well-educated people who have enough information to make smart decisions.
01:32:36.000We haven't educated our public, and yet the public is making big decisions, and a lot of it is happening just on a gut feeling.
01:32:43.000That's what's happening with trade agreements, where people just have a feeling it's bad, Without the ability to really get into the details.
01:32:52.000And so we are having that transition, which means there's a lot of responsibility on us to educate our public.
01:32:58.000We treat people in this country like you can just throw people away.
01:33:02.000Like if you're in some crappy school system and your chances of success are so minimized, not because of anything that you've done, just because of your circumstances.
01:33:15.000I mean, equal opportunity is what we really should all strive for.
01:33:19.000And I think some people conflate that with equal success.
01:33:25.000And you're not going to get the same equality of outcome.
01:33:28.000You're going to get different amounts of effort and different people are qualified or more talented at different things.
01:33:35.000But what I'm worried about is what I said initially, that some people are going to get a hold of this stuff quickly, and it's going to give them a massive advantage.
01:33:46.000The first person that has the ability to go forward in time five minutes is going to be able to manipulate the stock market in an unprecedented way.
01:33:57.000I don't think that that's really possible in our lifetime, but that's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
01:34:01.000You could get so far ahead that if we're talking about competition, there will be no catching up.
01:34:06.000But you don't have to travel in time to do that.
01:34:09.000But I'm saying if that was a technology.
01:34:13.000But there's real technologies that are likely to happen, which are going to confer billions, tens, hundreds of billions of dollars of benefit.
01:34:36.000My father and grandparents came here as refugees.
01:34:39.000I believe in what this country at our best stands for.
01:34:42.000I want us to continue to be the country that's setting an example for the rest of the world, that is articulating what are ideals of Responsibility and governance, good governance and accountability and all these things that we've championed.
01:34:57.000And because of that, I want us to get our act together politically and I want us to be the leading technological country in the world.
01:35:06.000And so I think that's what's at stake and we're losing so much time because there was a time in the period after the Second World War Where we recognized that technological leadership was the foundation for everything else.
01:35:18.000We had recreated the world out of the ashes of the war.
01:35:22.000But we realized that we needed to have the economic growth.
01:35:30.000And now we've lost our focus and we have to regain it.
01:35:34.000The way I look at humans and the way I look at the human race today in 2019 is like we're driving very fast through fog, and it's very difficult to see what's in front of us.
01:35:44.000When I look back at – I don't know if you've ever read any H.G. Wells, but some of his predictions about the future are really interesting, because he was pretty close on quite a few things.
01:35:55.000But that vision, to be able to sit there and use your imagination, close your eyes and think, what is this going to be like?
01:36:03.000What we're dealing with now, as opposed to what?
01:36:15.000Is there going to be a time where there are no diseases, there is no death, and that we just have to regulate population control in some sort of other manner?
01:36:26.000And the only way people die, they're going to die from accidents and things along those lines.
01:36:47.000I have a whole chapter in the book on the science of human life extension.
01:36:52.000So I think definitely it's real that we're going to live healthier longer.
01:36:56.000We're going to harness our technology for that.
01:36:58.000I don't think that immortality, that biological immortality is in the cards for us.
01:37:03.000Maybe not immortality because we'll still be biologically vulnerable.
01:37:06.000We'll have hearts and brains and all that stuff.
01:37:08.000Yeah, I think we will age slower and we will live healthier longer and I think it's going to be great.
01:37:14.000But back to your core point, I mean that's the reason why I also write science fiction is that the world of science is changing so fast that we really need to apply a lot of imagination to imagine where it's going.
01:37:27.000Because if you're just looking at what's happening now, It's like this train is going to speed by you.
01:37:33.000We have to kind of imagine – it's like Wayne Gretzky.
01:37:34.000We have to imagine where the puck is going to be, not where it is now.
01:37:38.000And I mentioned George Church, who's like – he's at Harvard.
01:37:54.000And what I do is I look at the research coming out of labs like George's, and I say, all right, well, that's where we are now.
01:38:01.000What's that going to mean in 20, 50, 100 years?
01:38:05.000Science fiction plays a more important role than it ever has in kind of imagining where we're going, and it's that imagining that allows us to try to say, well, what if that's one of the options of where we're going?
01:39:50.000And it's going to change the way we make babies because people are going to have real choices about which embryos to implant.
01:39:58.000And we're going to have a lot of information about a lot of really intimate stuff.
01:40:02.000So you feel like genetic manipulation and genetic engineering, genetic understanding, genetic knowledge, and then applied genetic medicine.
01:40:10.000Those are going to be the big changes in the next 20 years, even more so than technology?
01:40:14.000Well, it's interconnected because there's really, it's like a super convergence of these technologies.
01:40:19.000So the genetics revolution is the artificial intelligence revolution in the sense that the complexity of genetics is so great.
01:40:27.000It's Way beyond what our brains on their own could process.
01:40:31.000And so really all these technologies are touching each other.
01:40:35.000And so the biological models are now influencing the AI. So for example, we are coming to the limits of silicon storage.
01:40:45.000But DNA has unlimited storage capacity.
01:40:49.000So it's, as I've said before, the boundaries between biology and AI, or genetics and AI, is going to be very blurry.
01:40:58.000Yeah, that is an interesting concept, right?
01:41:01.000The idea of storing information in DNA. And that has been discussed.
01:41:05.000Yeah, DNA is the greatest information storage mechanism ever imagined.
01:41:11.000But the question is, what happens when you do store things in there, and how does that information interact with all the rest of the stuff that's in your body already?
01:41:17.000Well, I mean, if you can do it in your body, it doesn't have to be in your body.
01:41:21.000Right, it doesn't have to be external.
01:41:21.000But just think, like, your DNA has four billion years of history, and it's done a great job of recording it.
01:41:49.000And that these, they're in there because this is how we've learned over the years without actually having to experience these things personally.
01:43:00.000And so if you're a Komodo dragon, you better have your entire survival strategy baked into your DNA because nobody's teaching you anything.
01:43:09.000And so for us, we have this sense that it's like parenting is really important.
01:46:11.000And I think that in some ways it's about our orientation.
01:46:14.000Like, how do we make sure that we keep this view of life, that we have artists and humanists who are just at the core of this conversation about where we're going?
01:46:25.000What if that mystery ultimately turns out to just be ignorance, and that as you develop more and more understanding, there's less and less mystery?
01:46:47.000And there are some people, going back to the issues of life extension, there are some people who say, well, that death is essential for appreciating life.
01:46:59.000And then there are people who say, you're talking about eliminating these terrible diseases, but I know somebody who had that terrible disease.
01:47:08.000And their suffering was a gift to everybody else because we all had more humanity in response to their suffering.
01:47:14.000I was like, well, that's kind of screwed up.
01:47:15.000I'd prefer them to not have that suffering.
01:47:20.000But we need to – I totally agree with you that if we allow ourselves to get swept away with this kind of scientific determinism, if we don't say we really value – Our humanistic traditions, our artists, our cultures, we could get lost.
01:48:54.000But I also think that we're a long way away from that threat.
01:48:59.000And we will be enormous beneficiaries of these technologies.
01:49:04.000And that's why, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but that's why I keep saying it's all about values.
01:49:09.000I think we should take those threats very seriously.
01:49:11.000Values are so abstract and we don't agree on them.
01:49:14.000It's true, but like Elon Musk, I mean, they've set up this institute where to say, well, what are the dangers?
01:49:20.000And then what are the things that we can do now?
01:49:22.000What are standards that we can integrate, for example, into our computer programming?
01:49:26.000And so I mentioned my World Health Organization committee.
01:49:29.000The question is, well, what are the standards that we can integrate into scientific culture that's not going to cure everything, but may increase the likelihood we'll have a better rather than worse outcome?
01:49:39.000But isn't there an inherent danger in other companies or other countries rather not complying with any standards that we set because it would be anti-competitive?
01:50:06.000And like I said, we have chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, where we've had international standards that have roughly held.
01:50:13.000I mean, there was a time when slavery was the norm, and there was a movement to say, this is wrong, and it was largely successful.
01:50:20.000So we have history of being more successful rather than less.
01:50:28.000I mean, this is a race between the technology and the best values.
01:50:32.000My real concern about artificial intelligence is that this paradigm shifting moment will happen before we recognize it's happening, and then it'll be too late.
01:50:42.000And that's, like I was saying, that's why I've written the book, that's why I'm out on the road so much talking to people, why it's such an honor for me to be, and pleasure for me to be here with you talking about it, because we have to reach out to people, and people can't be afraid Of entering this conversation because it feels too technical or it feels like it's somebody else's business.
01:51:01.000This is all of our business because this is all of our lives and it's all of our futures.
01:51:06.000So if in the future you think 20 years the thing that's going to really change the most is predictive genetics and to be able to predict accurately a person's health, what do you think- Health and life.
01:51:19.000The biggest detriment for all this stuff and the thing that we have to avoid the most.
01:51:48.000So in India, there are no significant genetic differences between people in different castes, but the caste system has been maintained for thousands of years because people just have accepted these differences.
01:52:00.000So it's a whole new way of understanding what is a human.
01:52:05.000And it's really going to be complicated.
01:53:01.000Number two is we need to make sure that we have a functioning regulatory system.
01:53:07.000In this country, in every country, and I do a lot of comparative work.
01:53:11.000And like the United Kingdom, they're really well organized.
01:53:13.000They have a national healthcare system, which allows them at a national level to kind of think about long-term care and trade-offs.
01:53:22.000In this country, the average person changes health plans every 18 months.
01:53:26.000And I was talking with somebody the other night, and they were working on a predictive health company.
01:53:32.000And And they said their first idea was they were going to sell this information to health insurers because like, wouldn't this be great if you're a health insurer and you had somebody who was your client and you could say, hey, here's some information.
01:53:45.000You can live healthier and you're not going to have this disease 20 years from now.
01:53:49.000And what he found out is the health insurers, they could have cared less because people were just, they were only going to be part of it for a year and a half.
01:53:55.000So we really need to think differently about how do we invest in people over the course of their lives.
01:54:02.000Certainly, education is one, but thinking long-term about health and well-being is another.
01:54:06.000What do you think is going to be the first technological innovation in terms of what's already on the pipeline right now that's going to radically alter human beings?
01:54:19.000So radically, I think it's going to be the end of procreative sex.
01:54:24.000And so when we stop conceiving our babies through sex, and we're selecting our embryos, that's going to open up this massive realm of possibility.
01:54:35.000And certainly, when we expand the number of fertilized eggs that we're choosing from, that is really, I think that's kind of the killer application of genetics to the future of human life.
01:54:47.000Do you see that being attainable to the general population anytime in the near future?
01:54:52.000Once the technology gets established, it seems like it's going to be wealthier people that are going to have access to it first, right?
01:55:03.000But when you think about right now, we have all these people who are born with these terrible, in many cases, deadly genetic diseases and disorders.
01:55:12.000And what is the societal expenditure for lifetime care for all those people?
01:55:18.000I mean, this is huge, huge amounts of money.
01:55:20.000So if we were to eliminate many of, not the people, but prevent those diseases and disorders from taking place in the first place, And we could use that money to provide IVF and embryo screening to everybody using just the economic models now.
01:55:38.000But then there's another issue that we have to talk about.
01:56:19.000And we need to be extremely sensitive that we're not dehumanizing people.
01:56:24.000But if you have 15 or 15 fertilized eggs in a lab and you have to pick which one gets implanted in the mother, and one of them just has a disease like Tay-Sachs or sickle cell disease where they're going to die before they're 10 years old.
01:56:40.000Would you choose, affirmatively choose, to implant that embryo versus the 9 or 14 or whatever the number is of other ones?
01:57:43.000I mean, one is certainly in the religious community.
01:57:45.000We're saying, well, this is playing God.
01:57:48.000But there's another kind of – it's like a progressive community who are the kinds of people who are uncomfortable with genetically modified crops, people who are saying that – There's this slippery slope that once we start making what are called germline genetic modifications,
01:58:06.000so germline is that are sperm, eggs, and embryos.
01:58:08.000If you make a change to an adult human, it doesn't pass to their kids.
01:58:11.000If you make a change to a sperm, an egg, or an embryo, it will pass on.
01:58:15.000And so there are a lot of people who are saying, well, we don't understand genetics well enough to make these changes that will last forever.
01:58:23.000I just think that we need to be cautious and we need to weigh the risks and the benefits of everything that we do.
01:58:29.000Do you think we do know enough about those changes?
01:58:32.000It depends because if we're – it depends on what we're selecting against.
01:58:36.000Like if the thing we're selecting against is some kind of terrible genetic disease that's going to kill somebody when they're a little kid, we have a lot of latitude because the alternative is death.
01:58:47.000And that's why I was so critical of this Chinese biophysicist who created – who genetically engineered these two little girls born in China last year because he wasn't in the gene edits that weren't – Probably weren't successful.
01:59:00.000It wasn't to eliminate some disease or disorder.
01:59:04.000He was trying to confer the benefit of increased resistance to HIV. And so I think that we need to be very mindful and we need to be doing kind of a cost-benefit analysis of the different interventions.
01:59:17.000And there was an unintended side effect of this, they believe, a perceived potential unintended side effect, and that's increased intelligence.
01:59:28.000So this gene, it's called a CCR5, is this gene, and when it was disrupted in some mouse studies, those mice became a little bit able to navigate mazes.
01:59:42.000And so that was what led people to believe that this disruption of the CCR5 could potentially lead to that kind of change in human.
02:00:20.000And so we need to try to establish some kind of guide rails, guard rails, about what's okay, what we're comfortable with, what we're not.
02:00:29.000Now, this guy is not operating in an isolated incidence.
02:00:33.000There's got to be a shit ton of that going on right now as we're talking in China.
02:00:37.000What do you think is happening over there?
02:00:39.000You know, I think China has a lot of money, they have brilliant people, and they have a government that is hell-bent on leading the world in advanced technology.
02:00:50.000And the scientific culture in China is just very different than it is here.
02:00:56.000And so we know what we know, but we don't know what we don't know.
02:01:01.000And it's a really, really big deal, because China is in many ways a Wild West.
02:01:07.000And the technology exists to do some really big stuff.
02:01:12.000And that's why we have to at least try to establish standards.
02:02:03.000I mean, they are increasingly powerful.
02:02:05.000And China is going to be a major force defining the world of the 21st century.
02:02:11.000That's why America has to get its act together.
02:02:13.000That's a hard concept for us to grasp when we think about the fact that they had the Great Wall, they have so much ancient art and architecture.
02:02:19.000We just assume they're a really old culture.
02:02:28.000That's why if you want to see great Chinese art, you have to go to Taiwan.
02:02:31.000Because when the Chinese nationalists left in 1949, as they were losing the Civil War, they took the treasures and they put them in the National Museum of Taiwan.
02:02:41.000In the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, China, the Red Guards were just smashing all of their own stuff, their own ancient history.
02:02:49.000And now the Chinese Communist Party is saying, oh no, we're going back and we have this great 5,000-year-old culture.
02:02:55.000In some ways it's true, but in some ways it's like an adolescent culture without these kinds of restrictions that other societies have.
02:03:03.000That's such a unique perspective that I haven't heard before.
02:03:06.000It makes so much sense in terms of like how frantic they are at restructuring their world.
02:04:17.000When in the Olympics, you engineer your population, you take kids away from their families and put them in their Olympic sports school.
02:04:23.000So I write about this in Genesis Code.
02:04:26.000If you're China and you kind of have this Plato's Republic model of the world and we're going to kind of identify the genetic or maybe manipulate these genetic superstars to be our greatest scientists and mathematicians and business leaders and political leaders, like there's a model that you can imagine for how to do it.
02:06:31.000We have this whole fight of how do we keep people out.
02:06:33.000What I'd like to do is to go to the State Department and say, all right, every embassy in the world, you have a new job.
02:06:40.000We're going to give you whatever number, 500 slots per year.
02:06:43.000You have to, in your country, find the 500 most brilliant, talented, creative, entrepreneurial people and say, we're giving you a green card.
02:06:52.000We're going to give you a little starter money.
02:06:54.000We want you to move to the United States and just start a life and have kids.
02:06:58.000And we should be creaming the crop, skimming the cream.
02:07:05.000Like, we could take over, we could revitalize this country, but we're having this fight of how do we keep a small number of refugees out?
02:07:12.000And it's just, we're not focusing on the right things.
02:07:15.000That's, again, another very, very interesting perspective.
02:07:19.000We learned about Huawei in this country, really.
02:07:24.000Well, I learned about it because they put out some pretty innovative phones and some interesting technology.
02:07:29.000But we learned it because the State Department was telling people to stop using their phones.
02:07:34.000Do you think that that is trying to stifle the competition?
02:07:38.000Because the market share that they have, if they do really have the number two selling cell phones in the world now, that's not from America.
02:07:47.000America's largely out of that conversation.
02:07:50.000And if they were in America, they would probably dominate in America as well.
02:08:22.000For sure, the founder of Huawei is a former Chinese military officer.
02:08:27.000For sure, in the early stages of their company, they stole, straight out stole, lots of source code from companies like Cisco.
02:08:37.000For sure, we should be really worried if Huawei is the sole supplier of the infrastructure that supports 5G all around the world because the Chinese government would have access to everything.
02:08:52.000And so that leads us to the question is, one...
02:08:54.000Is there a problem with Huawei itself?
02:08:57.000But then two is, let's just say, and I think the answer to that first question is probably yes.
02:09:04.000But then the question two is, let's just say Huawei is a legit company and they're not totally intimately connected to the Chinese government.
02:09:13.000Can we trust their relationship with the Chinese government?
02:09:16.000And the Chinese government has a rule that every one of these companies has the big Chinese national companies, national champion companies, They have a Communist Party cell inside of that company.
02:09:28.000I think that we can't think of big Chinese companies just like we think of companies here.
02:09:34.000We have to think of them as quasi-state actors.
02:09:37.000That's why this fight that's happening right now is so important.
02:09:41.000That's why when China is out investing in different parts of the world, including Africa, their companies are kind of acting like arms of the government.
02:09:50.000They're making all kinds of Investments that don't really make sense if you just see, well, this is a company doing something.
02:09:57.000If you say that this is a company with backing by the state that's fulfilling a function that supports the state, it's a very different model.
02:10:05.000So I am actually quite concerned about Huawei, and I'm not a fan of everything that this administration is doing, but I think on China, it's important that we need to stand up, and I think pushing back on Huawei is the right thing to do.
02:10:19.000I'm uncomfortable about this for two reasons.
02:10:21.000One, I'm uncomfortable about that, about the Chinese government being inexorably connected to this global superpower in technology.
02:10:28.000But I'm also uncomfortable that it sets a precedent for other nations to follow.
02:10:33.000Because they're like, look, this is the only way to compete.
02:10:35.000Because what you were talking about, the investments that Huawei or that the Chinese government makes in these other countries and that don't seem to make sense if you're just dealing with a company.
02:10:44.000But if you're dealing with someone who's trying to take over the world, it makes a lot of sense.
02:10:50.000Yeah, and so when we have our companies, you're out in some place in Africa and you're competing with a Chinese company to do something, build a port or whatever.
02:10:59.000And you're competing because you are an American company.
02:11:02.000And so you have your cat, this is the port, what's the income stream going to be about it?
02:11:06.000And you have a certain amount that you can bid Because otherwise it becomes a bad investment.
02:11:11.000But if the Chinese company, their calculus is not, is this a good or bad investment?
02:11:16.000It's what is the state interest in controlling or quasi-controlling this asset?
02:11:21.000And so that's why we can't project ourselves onto the Chinese.
02:11:26.000We can't say they're just like us, just different.
02:11:29.000We have different models and our models are competing.
02:11:31.000Do you think that we should avoid Huawei products like consumers should?
02:11:35.000Well, I think the government should very tightly regulate products like Huawei products.
02:11:43.000Because some other network, like routers, they've shown that they're using them to extract information.
02:11:51.000And so we have a long history of European, Japanese, South Korean companies that have invested very well.
02:11:58.000They've out-competed us, and we've allowed the Japanese companies to out-compete our auto manufacturers, and that was fine.
02:12:06.000In the 1970s, our cars had become shit because we had this monopoly.
02:13:33.000Yeah, so I've advised the North Korean government on the establishment of special economic zones, which I certainly believe if North Korea could have economic growth and integrate into the rest of the world, that would be great.
02:13:47.000When was this that you went over there?
02:13:48.000This was in 2015, but I've been there twice, crossed the border from China and zigzagged the country by land, visited 10 or 12 different sites, so spent almost two weeks by land.
02:14:57.000And they said, well, we know about clearing land and building a fence.
02:15:01.000And then we went to Pyongyang and I spoke to about 400 economic planners and I said, look, I know you have these plans to do these special economic zones.
02:16:53.000I have this very strong belief in human rights and in supporting people.
02:16:59.000In North Korea, they have about 120,000 people in the most brutal, horrific prison camps in And so when I was asked to be part of this six-person delegation advising them on the establishment of special economic zones,
02:17:16.000one instinct was, screw them, I don't want to be part of this at all.
02:17:20.000But I also felt that if North Korea could have some kind of integrated economic development, That would at least connect them to the world that would create some kind of leverage and that would help people.
02:17:38.000And I'm glad that I did, but these are really hard issues.
02:17:43.000And it's very unfortunate that in President Trump's negotiations with the North Koreans, human rights was never once mentioned.
02:17:51.000And I think that that's coming back to values.
02:17:53.000We have to be clear about who we are and what we stand for and be consistent in fighting for it.
02:17:58.000Do you think that Trump didn't bring that up because he wanted to be able to effectively communicate with them and not put them on their heels?
02:18:08.000Maybe, but I feel like had they done – I mean, I think that if he thought – That there was a real chance of progress.
02:18:16.000But the hard thing was he didn't know much about the North Koreans.
02:18:21.000We have brilliant people working in the United States government.
02:18:23.000And all of those people, all of the U.S. intelligence agencies were telling President Trump that the North Koreans have absolutely no intention of giving up their nuclear weapons.
02:18:32.000And so maybe he did think that he would charm Kim Jong-un or he would say, hey, we're going to give you economic development or whatever.
02:18:40.000I think for most people who were observers of North Korea who had watched it for a while, thought that was not – so we gave away a lot.
02:19:34.000Like that would have been a legitimate thing.
02:19:35.000But what he said is somebody, the North Korean, I mean, sorry, the South Korean national security advisors peeked into his office and he goes, hey, they want to meet.
02:20:12.000We have our closest ally, Japan, who's had citizens abducted.
02:20:16.000And so I think that was what he thought is like, let's be friendly.
02:20:20.000And then with the force of personal chemistry, everything will unlock.
02:20:26.000But I think that was always extremely unlikely.
02:20:30.000What do you think is going to happen to that country?
02:20:32.000I think eventually, and I've written this, I think eventually this regime will collapse under its own weight, but it's really held out a long time because you think of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
02:20:43.000The Soviet Union had enough bullets to survive.
02:20:46.000If they had said, you know, we're just going to shoot everybody at the Berlin Wall and every dissenter, they would still be – North Korea has essentially murdered millions of people.
02:20:55.000So with famine and execution and prison camps – So I think they're going to stay for a while, but eventually there will be leaders in North Korea who will come to the conclusion that it's safer to oppose the Kim family than to wait for the Kim family to come and get you.
02:21:13.000And that tends to happen in these kind of totalitarian systems where there's so little trust, there's so little loyalty.
02:21:49.000But they have really focused their energy on building these nuclear weapons because they think that these nuclear weapons give them leverage to do things and to extract concessions and to get – it's terrible infrastructure.
02:22:04.000So do – They don't have an internet, right?
02:22:08.000But they have something similar, but it only allows them access to a few state-run websites?
02:22:13.000Well, average person doesn't have access to the internet.
02:22:16.000So the way it works is it's all about loyalty.
02:22:19.000So you need three or so generations of loyalty to the Kim family to even set foot in Pyongyang, the capital.
02:22:27.000So it's not like you can kind of move around or whatever.
02:22:30.000It's like just to be in the capital, like you have to have your loyalty proven.
02:22:36.000And so average person out in the country, they don't have access to much of anything.
02:22:41.000They have a little bit more now than they did in the past.
02:22:44.000And then for this relatively small number of elites who are largely in Pyongyang and in the other cities, where there's a ring of defense around these cities, and just to enter, you have to have all of these checks.
02:22:56.000Some of them have access to limited internet, but it's tightly controlled, and it's not like you're going on Google and going wherever you want.
02:24:00.000And her father was a low-level North Korean official, and then he was accused of something, and so this family that was privileged all of a sudden was out, and just these horrible things, and prison, and rape,
02:24:52.000And then the group of the local officials would come and they'd have like a big chart And they have a plan, like here's where we're going to build this building.
02:25:00.000And I would always ask the same question, like, what are you going to do here?
02:25:04.000Why do you think you're going to be competitive?
02:25:07.000How do you know what the market prices are?
02:25:10.000How are your workers going to be empowered so they can change things?
02:25:14.000I mean, in the old days, it used to be you just kind of have these automaton workers.
02:25:17.000Now workers are actually making big decisions and fixing things.
02:25:21.000And they didn't have an answer to any of those questions.
02:25:23.000And that's what happens when you have these totalitarian, top-down systems, is that being creative is actually really dangerous.
02:25:32.000So if somebody says, do X, you just do X. Wow.
02:26:50.000The Americans fighting against the Koreans.
02:26:53.000But the Korean War, the two sides was America and the South Koreans fighting against the North Koreans and the Chinese.
02:27:00.000The Chinese did the most of the fighting.
02:27:05.000And so China, North Korea is the only country in the world that has a treaty alliance with China, kind of like we have with Japan and with South Korea.
02:27:13.000And so China, their biggest fear is having a reunified Korean peninsula I think if there was a coup, the Chinese would immediately move in militarily.
02:27:35.000I think it would be agreed that the Chinese would stay and they just would put on blue helmets, like as a UN force.
02:27:41.000And then we'd have to negotiate what happens next.
02:27:43.000And I think what the Chinese would do would be say, well, we'll leave when the Americans leave.
02:27:47.000I think that would be what will likely happen.
02:27:51.000I think we're going to see a Korean reunification.
02:27:54.000And the good news of these reunified countries like East and West Germany is there's a whole system of law that is just – North Korea will be swallowed into South Korea.
02:28:36.000I really appreciate you coming here and You've certainly sparked a lot of interesting ideas in my head and I'm sure a lot of other people's heads as well.
02:28:44.000And I would like to see down the line where this all goes.
02:28:47.000And I hope we don't get swallowed up by machines.
02:28:49.000We won't, but it's up to us to fight for what we believe in.