00:03:35.580And then they grow up in different places for whatever reason.
00:03:37.580So they're subject to different environments.
00:03:38.760And you can actually measure basically how much more similar they are across all these different phenotypes to see basically how genetic something is.
00:03:48.460And so using twin studies, you can actually get measurements of things from diseases, right, like cancers and diabetes and Alzheimer's, as mentioned, to things like height or IQ or BMI, etc.
00:03:59.400So twin studies show that IQ specifically is about 50% genetic.
00:04:02.520But to be clear, IQ is just one of over 2,000 factors that we actually look at, right?
00:04:07.260principally parents and patients, they come for disease. They always come for disease. And remember
00:04:11.540that when the embryos you're picking from, the most important determinant of the genetics of
00:04:16.640your embryos is, well, your partner, right? So you're actually not changing DNA. This is not
00:04:21.280gene editing. You're not changing DNA. You're not making like an embryo's DNA better. You're
00:04:25.420basically reading the embryo's DNA that you have. So when you pick your partner, you're basically
00:04:29.440picking the kind of genetic pool, and then you can basically pick which embryo you deem to be
00:04:33.160best based off of your preferences and values. I mean, this like, again, I just want to say
00:04:40.760thank you for doing this. I'm not here to attack you at all. I think this is one of the most
00:04:45.620important conversations we can have. And I agree. You're much younger than I am. So you weren't
00:04:51.380here for the debates that took place in the early 1990s about what traits are the product of
00:04:57.720genetics and which are the product of environment. But up until pretty recently,
00:05:02.120the public conversation has settled on a consensus
00:06:00.040So if you have two bad copies of like cystic fibrosis, you're going to get cystic fibrosis and it's debilitating.
00:06:04.980And so there's like policies, you know, that basically encourage, you know, Americans and people around the world to do screening, to not pass down basically an invisible genetic burden to their child.
00:09:17.120Well, force did play, I mean, again, in 1927, the United States, the Supreme Court deemed constitutionally that forced sterilizations are constitutional.
00:09:23.980I'm just saying that, and I couldn't be more opposed to that, in fact, to the whole program.
00:09:28.620But I just want to note as a factual matter that forced sterilizations were an incredibly ugly, evil manifestation of an idea that was not limited to forced sterilizations.0.70
00:09:40.840The idea is the same idea you're articulating, which is people should try to improve the human species by selective creation of children.
00:13:43.220But that can apply across everything now, right?
00:13:45.140If somebody wants to have a child based off their extent of what they deem to be best, based off their lived experience, that's their right and that's their choice.
00:13:51.480So I'm not saying that it's better to have a child that is not deaf, for example.0.96
00:14:05.160I wonder though, but you described something that's absolutely real, which is a system globally that is designed to minimize, to reduce the incidence of certain conditions, right?
00:14:17.580So you said that that's the policy, like you genetic test all the embryos at every IVF
00:14:23.540clinic because you want to make sure we have less Down syndrome, for example.
00:14:27.440But no, but again, what's important here is there's not some sort of broad centralized
00:14:31.800body being like, oh, we need to all do this sort of testing embryos.
00:14:35.320That decision rests in the parent's choice.
00:14:37.980A parent can choose not to screen embryos for Down syndrome, okay?
00:18:32.900Is it valid for someone to come in and say, I mean, you said this is an ethically neutral question about whether or not to have a child with this or that genetic condition, but what about sex? Is that ethically neutral? Is it okay, in your view, for a couple to say, I don't want any girls?
00:18:50.880In my view, that is the prerogative of the parents to pick which sex they want.0.69
00:18:54.880And if you play that out across many, many, many couples making their own independent choices, right, which is an embodiment of this kind of liberty and choice, you see it ends up being about 50-50, which I think actually undercuts this idea that everyone's going to pick, you know, a boy, for example, right?
00:25:55.480They call it different things in Buddhism. It's a little bit more like surrendering to the illusion of the ego, for example. But the concept of surrendering, I think, is basically universal.
00:26:12.160That's the very beginning. That's the conceptual understanding of it. But then you move immediately into what does God want you to do? What powers does he have? What powers do you have? What are the things you're allowed to do? What are the things you're not allowed to do?
00:26:24.960So, I mean, that's just a product of logic, but it's also like pretty spelled out in every one of the three religions that derive from Abraham.
00:28:16.680Which is, as you rooted, rooted in some sort of, maybe there's some universal, this is good, this is bad.
00:28:21.080um then there's you know virtue ethics right which basically the the instead of saying oh
00:28:25.640the the the consequence instead of saying oh this action is good because the consequence was good
00:28:30.200or this action is good because the action is inherently good or wrong because of some secular
00:28:35.060non-secular set of rules you're saying hey the the the actual thing that you need to measure and
00:28:39.060you need to you need to think about is the moral character of the person doing the action and then
00:28:43.080if the moral character if they possess these kind of cardinal virtues things like temperance and
00:28:47.220justice and wisdom, for example, then it so follows that the action they do would be virtuous,
00:28:54.540right? So you try to cultivate the soul basically, and then in cultivating the soul and cultivating
00:28:58.220virtue confers basically virtue in the action, right? So basically the first two, in my view,
00:29:02.740in my view, deontology and consequentialism is very much about the action, right? It's saying,
00:29:06.920hey, is this outcome good based off some thing you're trying to maximize? And then deontology,
00:29:12.460which is this concept of, forget about if the outcome is good or not, is this the right or
00:29:15.380wrong thing. Then the concept of virtue ethics, which is instead of saying, you know, looking at
00:29:19.340the action, right? Because ultimately human beings produce action. Actions, you know, aren't just
00:29:22.880there. Human beings produce action. The quality of the action should be measured or it's deemed
00:29:27.240virtuous if the person can strive and embody virtue, okay? And so personally, and I'm still,
00:29:34.700by the way, talking about natural virtue right now. I'm not even talking about divine virtue.
00:29:37.020I'm talking about in the intellectual plane, things that people can think about and reason
00:29:40.080or argue over, things of the mind, not things that go beyond the mind, right? And so in the
00:29:44.500constant of virtue ethics, I think this is the try to moral philosophy we try to embody in saying,
00:29:49.980hey, and this comes back all the way to embryonic selection, which is, hey, there is no biological
00:29:54.440best. There is none, right? Again, the soul, which is non-physical, ultimately does not rest,
00:30:03.340it cannot be programmed in biology. So people can have different preferences. Somebody could say,
00:30:07.300you know, I want my son or daughter to be a lawyer. Someone else could say, you know,
00:30:10.360athlete. Someone else could say an entrepreneur. Someone else could say an artist. These are
00:30:13.700different outcomes that are based off people's local preferences physical preferences contextual
00:30:18.800preferences but they're smaller right they're smaller preferences they're not a divine uh
00:30:23.780preference there's no such thing as that yeah i well of course i disagreed that there's no divine
00:30:29.060preference but i there's no divine preference in biology because the divine isn't rooted in the
00:30:34.240it's not it's not um well it depends where you think biology came from i guess i guess that's
00:30:38.520true i mean i also don't create life no no so this is actually a paradox that i struggle with
00:30:46.640too because another thing that i think a lot about is something called panpsychism which is
00:30:50.660this idea that basically each object has its its consciousness even like a rock right um and this
00:30:56.780might sound strange to people but doesn't sound strange doesn't sound strange okay i don't think
00:31:00.120you're fully off base i don't know the answer i don't know yeah i don't know either crazy thing
00:31:03.400So this idea that, you know, rock has a consciousness, it's a being, albeit, you know, not as sophisticated as human consciousness, but it's there. And it provides this idea that consciousness is this kind of spectrum, all the way up to, let's say, humans.
00:38:14.660And so I think it's important to, before we can even argue, oh, is embryo life? It's like, well, where does the life come from, right? Is it the physical thing, right? For me, I think about when I think about death, I think death is a doorway. That's my own personal belief. This is a vessel, right? You're not the physical. We're not the physical. We're something else. We're metaphysical. We're soul, okay?
00:38:34.780and so then the fundamental question um is that okay well um does an embryo have a soul um and
00:38:40.660then i think about it i always like to think about things uh inductively so i don't i just
00:38:43.660don't want to think about embryo but i think about you know there's a huge diversity in a range of
00:38:47.060life and i can in my head at least and again this is the feelings of the intellect i think let's
00:38:51.980only do so much okay but when i think about i think okay i i think about a rock which i think
00:38:57.000has some kind of maybe proto-consciousness some like very very limited consciousness that we don't
00:39:01.740understand maybe through some psychic or meditative work, you could try to, you know, become a rock
00:39:06.100and try to understand it's like more subjective experience if it exists, right? All the way to
00:39:10.420an embryo, to a dog, to a human. And so because of this spectrum, it comes down to this question
00:39:15.380of at what point basically do we have this, is there a soul in an embryo? And I tend to think,
00:39:22.440and I don't know obviously, but I tend to think, I tend to think that an embryo doesn't have a soul
00:42:31.640In our culture, people will conflate greater performance
00:42:35.580with being morally better, which I think is a big problem.
00:42:38.660So there's two kinds of value. There's instrumental value and there's moral value. Instrumental value is contingent. And this is actually really important. All of biology, all of nature is contingent value. For example, you would maybe want an entrepreneur potentially to be more risk-seeking, but you wouldn't want your surgeon to be more risk-seeking, right?
00:43:01.380In other words, the value of phenotypes
00:43:02.960actually changes depending on the environment.
00:50:29.800Pro-genetic technology is fundamentally anti-eugenic.
00:50:32.860It's actually pro-genetic technology or pro-natalist in that way because the very people who would have been deemed unfit by some definition, right, because they have more suffering.
00:50:41.000And to be clear, if you suffer more, you have no less moral worth, to be very clear.
00:56:39.400But my question is, honestly, what's the effect of giving people this choice, which is to improve, in their minds, you say you're morally neutral on it, not attaching a value to deafness or hearing, but we're not.
00:57:02.320But to be clear, we can have more philosophy and then say, but most people will reject the idea that there's this idea of conflating reduced suffering.
01:02:40.500Well, obviously, that's like a longer-term evolutionary thing to saying that things were self-correct.
01:02:44.960So it actually wasn't self-correcting, and it was making the society unstable.
01:02:49.100I mean, if human choice on questions of life and death and procreation at this granular level is self-correcting, and it's just inherently good and there are no downsides, then why did the biggest country in the world ban it?
01:03:00.300To be clear, I'm not saying that there's not short-term material consequence for something like sex selection.
01:03:07.500Of course, there's especially sex selection. I'm not saying that.
01:03:09.760Why is that more significant than any other kind of selection?
01:03:35.200Depending on what you want, people make different choices.
01:03:37.340So it's actually a good kind of heuristic of how people will choose.
01:03:40.520And on that point, actually, interestingly, sometimes we receive criticism from, for example, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine for saying that traits are not reproductive medicine.
01:03:49.940However, sex is ultimately a trait that people have been picking for the last 20 years.
01:03:54.100So there's a bit of this hypocrisy in medicine as well.
01:03:56.300I guess what I'm trying to get to is really the core question, which is, is there a downside to playing God?
01:04:01.620Okay, first off, we're not playing God.
01:07:54.900I think people have a terrible track record for seeing the consequences of their actions.
01:07:59.280We know that in our own sex lives, don't we?
01:08:01.500So I think we can just say it's important with something this powerful and potentially transformative to, A, admit that there will be unintended consequences because that's 100% true always.
01:08:14.740and think through B, what those consequences might be.
01:10:09.880The outcome could have actually occurred even if you didn't necessarily do it.
01:10:12.280It could have just the baby could have happened that way.
01:10:14.680But also I would say that remember that there's gene editing, which is much further out.
01:10:19.380It's the idea that you can actually take an embryo and make it whatever you want, basically.
01:10:23.240Theoretically, we can talk about that, which is very, very different.
01:10:25.880So I think the concept of IVF clinics using this technology to give patients more information,
01:10:30.700When they're already getting information on their embryos, now we expand the information, we can help deal with the chronic disease crisis in the United States, the rare disease crisis as well, right?
01:13:19.700But the experience of India shows us that given choice, people will also make the wrong decisions as individuals.
01:13:30.780So I'm just wondering what those consequences might be.
01:13:34.420Let me just say, I'm interested in this because I have hunting dogs and I've had them my whole life.
01:13:38.620And hunting dogs are bred for certain qualities.
01:13:41.880And I watch it carefully and dogs have such short life cycles relative to people that you can kind of in your lifetime watch this happen.
01:13:48.080But they're bred for certain, I have flushing dogs, spaniels, and they're bred to work close to you, find the bird, jump the bird, retrieve the bird.
01:13:58.880If you are not very careful about breeding them, or if you breed them only for certain specific qualities, you can wind up destroying the dog.
01:14:06.820And this is well-known in animal husbandry, it's well-known in bird hunting, it's well-known among anybody who deals with animals.
01:14:12.760and i don't see people as any different and i know that there are massive consequences to the
01:14:19.040dog you get dogs that die of cancer at five you get dogs with hip dysplasia you get dogs with
01:14:23.060unexplained rage that bite your children like we can't foresee with any precision the effects of
01:14:29.600our tinkering with with reproduction absolutely let me actually give a real example of this so
01:14:33.840in in china um the scientist who was known for using gene editing to uh engineer the first
01:16:30.140it makes it easier for other pathogens to basically infect you.
01:16:34.260In other words, there's this, the dangerous side of this, to your point, is that balance, which is in trying to do something good, what he deemed to be virtuous, if you will, it actually potentially could have had very severe consequences on the children's health.
01:16:48.740And so I think that's a very real, tangible example that we've seen of some of the dangers and the balancing act that is nature.
01:16:58.020What about in your life, have you ever wound up with something that you didn't expect and maybe didn't want and found it to be a great blessing over time?
01:23:26.460But nobody's making the case that it is.
01:23:27.720No, but the argument that you can control, parents can control their child's life trajectory would suggest that genetics is pretty deterministic, but I'm saying it's not.
01:23:33.480I'm actually making the opposite argument, which is you have no freaking idea what's going to happen when you tamper with this stuff.
01:23:38.700We actually know way less than we think we do.
01:23:40.680We have less control than we imagine, and that we should proceed with that in mind.
01:23:54.480For the people who didn't do their best and who hurt others, like the whole world, like the guys who designed COVID in the Wuhan lab, which they did, we've established that, shouldn't there be some punishment for them?
01:24:08.180And wouldn't that help future generations make wiser decisions if they saw that there were consequences to being thoughtless with technology?
01:24:14.880Well, I think generally speaking, the kind of history, at least like the modern history of like Silicon Alley has gone from, I think it had some idea of kind of virtue ethics, right? Like, you know, Google back in the day was don't be evil. If you say that today, you'll kind of be laughed at. That was like their corporate motto.
01:24:37.080So you had, Paul Graham had his, you know, hackers and painters, this idea that that was kind of this, like, kind of a beautiful early Silicon Valley spirit.
01:24:46.740There was another case of Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement address.0.97
01:24:55.180He ended it by saying, stay hungry, stay foolish.
01:24:57.900Basically, humility, have humility, open yourself up to the world, not just the natural world, but the divine world.
01:25:03.940I think a lot of the Silicon Valley ideology has moved from sort of hackers and painters to, you know, maybe capitalists and, you know, politicians or the like.
01:25:12.880In other words, it's moved into kind of a techno capitalism, this idea that technology is inevitable, this idea that capitalism is inherently good, like it's inherently good if something grows.
01:25:23.920And you say that with AI companies all the time, they'll celebrate, oh, we hit 100 million AR in, you know, two days or something.
01:25:29.600And it fundamentally mistakes speed and the rate at which something grows with value, right?
01:25:41.120And so I think there's this fundamental idea that, you know, this kind of grow, grow, grow, grow, that, you know, inherently the consequences, like, you know, be damned, just grow.
01:25:58.420I think you described crisply and well the evolution of the attitudes in Silicon Valley, generally speaking, from, hey, this is going to liberate everybody, it's good, to, hey, this hikes GDP, and I've got a massive place in Atherton, therefore it's good.
01:26:15.340And those are definitely different justifications.
01:26:19.060And I wonder to what you attribute the change.
01:38:18.960And then there is a moral character of the person giving out to that drug.
01:38:23.540And in social media case too, talking about moral philosophy, optimizing for clicks and dopamine, you end up following a consequentialist framework, right?
01:38:32.040You end up following a consequentialist framework and justifies the means to the point that everybody's scrolling and liking and clicking all day.