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If you love epic stories of myth and legend, listen up. Before Camelot and before the crown, the Pendragon Cycle Rise of the Merlin tells the origin story of the legend that shaped Britain in a seven episode cinematic epic years in the making. This is not a retelling of the King Arthur story, it's the rise of the world that made Arthur possible. The Pendragon Cycle Rise of the Merlin is available now on Daily Wire. Plus. Shot across multiple international locations, this series brings myth to life with serious production value, full scale battles and a sweeping original orchestral score. At its core, this is a return to classic epic storytelling where faith, prophecy and sacrifice truly matter stream. The Pendragon Cycle Rise of the Merlin only on Daily Wire. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Jamie Metzl. Jamie Metzl is an American technology and healthcare futurist, geopolitical analyst and author known for his work on the societal impact of genetics, biotechnology and AI. A former US national security official, he's the author of Hacking Darwin and Super Convergence. Jamie was also one of the very first public intellectuals to argue that COVID 19, had come from a lab in Wuhan. In this episode, we talk about how Jamie became the Lab League whistleblower. And then we get on to the scary and exciting future of genetic editing. We talk about how gene editing will affect parenting. We talk about embryo selection technology, which in theory allows people to choose the traits their children will have, at least to an extent. We talk about how the world's religions are likely to treat gene editing tech when it comes fully on board. We talk about the myth that GMOs Genetically modified organisms are bad for your health. We talk about whether artificial intelligence will cause mass unemployment and much more. So, without further ado, Jamie Metzl. Every year I promise myself I'll stop procrastinating on the important stuff. Life insurance was one of those things I avoided thinking about until I realized it's actually quick, affordable and essential. Fabric by Gerber Life makes it easy to start the year feeling like you've handled something major for your family. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. Made for busy parents like you all online on your schedule. Right from your couch, you could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. If you've got kids, and especially if you're young and healthy, the time to lock in low rates is now. Even if you already have life insurance through work, that coverage might not be enough for your family and it probably won't follow you if you change jobs. Fabric also offers more than just life insurance. They've got free digital wills, tools to invest in your kid's future, and more, all from your phone. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their families. Apply today in just minutes@meetfabric.com Coleman that's meetfabric.com Coleman M E-E-T fabric.com Coleman Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Okay, Jamie Metzl, thanks so much for coming on my show.
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My great pleasure to be here.
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We're here to discuss your book Super Convergence. And before we get to that, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence. We're going to talk about gene editing. We're going to talk about the frontiers of what's happening in science right now, how it's going to change the world and change all of our lives both in in our lifetimes and in the lifet times of our children and grandchildren. The ethical problems that that will no doubt arise when we have perfect gene editing, the the AI of the future and and all the rest. Before we get to that, I want you to tell me a little bit about yourself. You have a national security and history background. You were part of the National Security council in the 90s under Bill Clinton. So first of all, how did you come to be a part of the National Security council in the 90s? And then how does a guy that's into national security and history then pivot and become a scientist and or rather a sort of analyzer of science and health and technology and sort of a futurist?
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Well, thanks, Colmena. So I'll give you the short version of a longer story. So I grew up in Kansas City, but my father, my now late father sadly was a Holocaust survivor. So growing up, the issue of that history and the responsibilities that it engendered were certainly very important for me. When I was 18 years old, I met a classmate of mine who was also a freshman at Brown, who was a Cambodian American who'd been a survivor of the killing fields in Cambodia. And hearing his story had such a profound impact on me that that summer I went and quit my job in Kansas City on the first day, had a garage sale of all the crap in my parents house and I bought a plane ticket, went to Thailand and worked on the Thai Cambodian border in a refugee camp. And that was really the experience that changed my life. And I became after that very involved with issues of human rights and refugees and the more involved I got, the more I realized that there was a stream and the refugees were at the far end of the stream. And when you traveled up the stream and you got to policy decisions and decisions that big powers like the United States made, in this case, in the context of the Vietnam War and everything that that engendered. And so that was. I won't go through all the details, but led me to do my PhD dissertation looking at why the world failed the Cambodian genocide. I worked for the UN in human rights, and when I graduated from law school, then I went to work for Bill Clinton on the National Security Council. And when I was there, my then boss and still close friend Dick Clark, who later became famous as the kind of Cassandra of 911 who had predicted it but couldn't do enough to prevent it, always used to say that the key to efficacy in Washington and in life is to try to solve problems that other people can't see. And so for him, it was terrorism and cyber. And for me, as I looked around the world, this was almost 30 years ago. It felt very much to me that this intersection of machine learning, what we now call AI biotechnology, the nascent genetics revolution, were going to have these profound implications for all of us. And nobody was really talking about it. And so at that time, I started educating myself. When I was ready, I started writing articles. I was invited by a member of Congress, Brad Sherman, who recently got into trouble, but Brad Sherman, to go and testify in Congress about these issues. And I was trying to get this word out that, hey, here's something really big. It's coming down the line. It's important. And I didn't feel like I was getting traction. So I'd already written a nonfiction book on the Cambodian genocide. I'd already written a novel exploring those same kind of issues to try to bring people into the story. And at that time, I thought, why don't I write a novel? It ended up being two novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata, raising the issues of the genetics and biotechnology revolutions in the context of stories. And when I was on the book tours for those books and I explained the science in my way, as someone who had to teach it to myself, I could see in people's eyes that they were recognizing that something really big was happening for humanity. There was a story, and they were part of it. And that was really, really significant. And that was what inspired me to write my last book, Hacking Darwin, on the future of genetic engineering. And it's like all these kinds of things. Once you take a step, it leads to another step. And so, just as that book was coming out, the thing that I predicted in the book, that the world's first CRISPR babies would be born that would be born in China. In that book, I had even predicted, I had a list of five genes that I had thought would be the first ones to be edited in humans. And that gene, CCR5, was the one that was targeted for those kids who were born in 2018. So after that book came out, I was invited to be a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing. And when I was. And I got involved with a whole lot of things, and when I give a lot of talks around the world about revolutionary technology and ethics and implications, and I never use notes and I never stand behind a podium, so what happens is that my talks tend to drift. And so in the beginning, I was talking about human genetic engineering, but I kept saying, but this is just a little piece of a much bigger story. Let me tell you about that bigger story. And that bigger story is the subject of super convergence. And that is the story of these technological transformations that we're experiencing now. And really where the rubber hits the road in our lives in areas like healthcare and agriculture and energy and advanced materials and other things. And then what are the things that we can do to try to make sure that this becomes a wonderful story for humanity, which it very much can be, and also decrease the odds that it'll be a terrible story, which it very much could be if we. If we don't do things right.
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Okay, before we get to the book, just one question. I learned in the book that you were one of the earliest people to, in my view, likely correctly identify that the coronavirus came from a laboratory mishap as opposed to the wet market. And I think Forbes magazine called you something like one of the earliest identifiers of this probable fact. I don't think we'll ever quite know for sure, but for me, it was when I read Alina Chan and Matt Ridley's book, which probably came out six months to a year after you were talking about this issue, which persuaded me that there was an 80% chance that that was true. What was it that you saw that people weren't seeing or willing to see in what would have been what, mid or early 2020, when you were talking about this?
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I started early in 2020. That's why Forbes called me one of the first. Others have called me the original COVID19 whistleblower. I wasn't the only one, but there was just a small number of us. And the basic thing for me, and just politically, I'm a center left Democrat, I'm a liberal Democrat, which I guess that also, AKA a dinosaur, a lost person without a home these days. So I had no ideological reasons, but just it was early 2020, in January 2020, and I was sitting in my dining room at home and I was telling my girlfriend, I said, you know, this is really weird. I'm looking at the media reports about COVID 19 origins, and I'm seeing one story and I'm looking at the available evidence at that time, and I'm seeing a different story because there was a paper that came out on January 24, 2020, which was published by Chinese scientists, which showed that about 40% of the earliest cases of people who had been infected with the SARS CoV2 virus, people with COVID19, had no exposure to the Huanan seafood market. And in my view, that was a pretty clear indication that, that that market was where the virus spread, but not where it originated. Because had it originated there, 100% of the cases, the earliest cases would have been with people with some kind of connection to that market. So I really started digging in. I'd been in Wuhan the year before, so I think a lot of Americans at that point, when they heard about this wet market hypothesis, they had in their mind the kind of wet markets that they have in southern China, in Guangdong, where SARS one story really centered, or where I had used to live in Cambodia. But Wuhan is a very different kind of place. It's a very sophisticated, wealthy, highly educated city. It's China's Chicago. And they have very different eating habits. So a wet market in Wuhan wasn't like certainly what we used to have when I lived in, in Cambodia. So there was just this story didn't seem right. So I just kind of dove in. I knew because I, like I said, just been in Wuhan about that. Wuhan was really one of China's center for biotech. I knew they were already doing very aggressive research on viruses, including chimeric viruses. So I started pulling my case together. Then February of 2020, I went to South Africa for our meetings of our World Health Organization expert committee on human genome editing. And I thought, you know, I'm just going to present my case privately to my colleagues. I mean, some of the most brilliant scientists and regulators around the world. And maybe I'm missing something like, how could it be that I'm seeing this story that's so radically different from what many other very smart people were saying, so I did that privately. And privately a lot of my colleagues said, there's not a hole in your argument. This actually makes sense. And so I came back in February, and then in February, March, I just started speaking out publicly. In April of 2020, I launched my website on COVID 19 origins, which very quickly became the top website in the world on this subject. As a matter of fact, friends at that time, the Trump National Security Council were passing around my website to their, to allied governments and to others in the US Government saying, hey, maybe we should look into this. And things really grew from there. And that was when people like the people you mentioned, like Alina Chan and Gilles de Monof and others, we started to find each other and we congealed into a group that was later came to be known as the Paris Group. And I was, I was one of the leaders with others of that process. And so we just started meeting once a month and having almost really academic style meetings where we'd present papers, challenge each other's hypotheses. And for all of 2020, it was a very painful process because I was reaching out to all of these editors and journalists and saying, hey, you're getting the story wrong. I'm not saying I know it comes from a research related incident, but you are writing that it comes from a market and there is no definitive evidence making that case. It was very painful. And I certainly was attacked by my own fellow Democrats who were saying, oh, you're supporting President Trump? Because later President Trump said, I know it comes from a lab accent, but I have evidence and I can't tell you, I don't know whether he had evidence or didn't. But what I said, and that's why I'm happy to be here with you, Coleman is I don't care who's saying what. My job is to try to find the right answer, to look at the evidence dispassionately. I really don't want to care about the politics. So it was only really after a year of pushing in early 2021 that the dam started to break. And there were a few different things that happened. Nicholson Baker had a great piece of in New York magazine. Later than that, Alina and Matt's book came out. And Matt actually is a great story. I love Matt, brilliant guy. But he actually switched sides in this debate. He had started as saying, on the other side, if everybody knows, it comes from a market. And then when he dug in, he also, as many people said, when you actually look at the evidence, in my view, the preponderance of the available evidence. And you're right to say we may never know because China has been destroying so much of the evidence and hiding records. And they have a law of making it illegal for their scientists to share information about this. So, yeah, so I was the lead witness in the congressional hearings on this. Leslie Stahl in 60 Minutes did a piece and it's now been almost six years and we're still pushing because it's really important. And I unfortunately don't feel we're ready for the next pandemic. But thank you for asking. It's a very important thing for me.
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Yeah, I don't want to dwell too long on it, but just I have two observations. One is the reason why China is censoring it is puzzling to me because I think it makes China look worse if it came from a wet market. Right. Because you know, if, if it did come from a wet market, then the image that puts in the whole world's head is China is still this backwater, it's this third world country. They're dealing with animals in a way that we've moved past in the civilized world. So much so that they put the whole world at risk with this, with this virus. Right. That's actually a very bad look for China. Yet if it did come from a lab that was doing a kind of research that the United States supported not only financially, but Dr. Fauci was writing op eds in defense of gain of function research. And it was a type of research, we endorsed that, we allowed that, we supported that. Actually, not only does that make China not look as bad as the wet market hypothesis, it actually brings almost the whole world in a kind of shared responsibility. So to me it's a little bit, I don't know exactly why China feels so censorious other than the fact that they're an authoritarian regime and it's their nature to censor everything. And then the second point is this happened at the height of a moral panic about racism in America. And it very quickly the argument became it's racist to say that China caused this through a bioengineering mistake, which again, my first argument, it would seem kind of more racist in the opposite direction if it's a wet market thing, but there's so much that just doesn't even make sense about the way that issue is treated as a taboo and censored from social media as opposed to just an open ended inquiry into the evidence. And if you want to say any last thing on that topic.
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Sure, yeah. So I'LL just do three points. First, from China's perspective, the reason why they're suppressing everything. So certainly they've been most aggressive on the lab accident. And then certainly it would make them look bad that they had. I mean, this story of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a pretty terrible story of a collaboration with the French. And the French were so disgusted by the way that the Chinese had mishandled the construction that they wouldn't certify this. There was a lot of secret work going on. There was a military role in that incident. So it wouldn't be that great for China. But certainly China also had a law which came out of the SARS 1 experience, banning this illegal wildlife trade. So that's also bad. And that's why China has just been so terrible on this issue and basically manipulated all of these processes. And China was trying to make crazy allegations that it came from frozen food that was shipped to China from someplace else. You're absolutely right about the moral panic, as you say, issue, because I was saying this at the time. If people are worried about race, is it better or worse to say this comes from a lab accident in China versus it comes from a market where people may have negative associations with the wild animal trade? I mean, you'd have to weigh, in a Chinese traditional perspective, you have to weigh that against our slaughterhouses and everything there. But there is certainly this complexity of that issue. And that's why for me, and I know you're the same, the only way to navigate all of these issues is to say, let's just articulate what our principles are and then follow the evidence, follow the data as dispassionately and honestly as we can. And it just seems that everybody was trying to layer in different biases one way or another. And when we compared, even among, particularly among the US Scientists who were making the case for the wet market hypothesis in their private slack channels, they were saying, well, this doesn't seem right, but if we raise the possibility of a lab accident, there's going to be. I think their word was a shit show. So why don't we just go with this? And that is where we all get into problems when we start to say, well, let's try to manipulate the story we're telling in accordance with our politics. I think everybody should try to be say, here's what my principles are, and then here's the evidence that I'm using to draw my conclusions.
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Yeah, so the lab leak issue actually dovetails into the themes of your book very nicely. Because the questions you're asking are largely related to what you might think of as the best case scenario for gene editing and, and technology. And the worst case scenario, like where and with coronavirus, I think we saw, if it was indeed a lab leak, one of the worst case scenario options, which is that we genetically engineer viruses to be more contagious in humans using humanized mice or whatever it was. And we just literally see pathogens that would not have arisen in nature and would not have spread to the degree that they did as a function of gain of function research. So I guess one good bridging question to your book is what do you make of gain of function research as an idea? And how does that fit into the worst case scenario, best case scenario pictures about gene editing?
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Well, there's a lot of confusion about the words gain of function research. Technically, a lot of things that we do, including lots of wonderful gene therapies that we're using to treat and cure all kinds of diseases technically are gain of function because the delivery mechanisms are viruses that we have transformed to do other things. So when people talk about gain of function, what people really mean is this gain of functions on pathogens with pandemic potential. And so that's a, that's a much smaller thing. But there's been a lot of, of confusion on that. And my view in general, I mean, we could kind of go down into the rabbit hole, is that there are some people who are saying this should never be done under any circumstances. I am, I don't go that far. But I absolutely believe that we need to have a very serious cost benefit analysis for the research that we're doing. And that Basically you mentioned Dr. Fauci, and so Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins at the early stages of all of this, of this new phase of what is now called gain of function research on pathogens of pandemic potential. They had an editorial in the Wall Street Journal and they said that there are cases where the benefits can outweigh the harms if this work is done. And then they listed the ways that it needs to be done in these careful settings in regulated environments. And technically it was right. But what happened is then they opened the spigots of funding, and you mentioned these relatively minuscule amounts of U.S. funding that had gone to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and they had gone to institutes all around the world. And part of that was connected, this theory of the case after SARS one is that, well, we need to expand and enhance the capacity of virology centers all around the world, so that we have eyes and ears everywhere, so that we have response capabilities everywhere. And we were beneficiaries of that. For example, when the Omicron variant came out and it was analyzed very quickly in South Africa, and that really helped us. But once this spigot of funding happened, there wasn't anything remotely close to the level of transparency and accountability. And so when you kind of get to the telephone game through this organization called Ecohealth alliance, giving sub grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's when everything really started to get opaque and in my view, shady. And so the standards that had been articulated in the beginning of the weren't even remotely followed at the end. And although I think this is primarily a Chinese issue, there certainly are American fingerprints on it.
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So when you say it was helpful in the case of Omicron, are you talking about gain of function research or the ability to quickly respond via mRNA?
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The capacity building? So the United States invested in building and supporting these different virology institutes around the world and in the training and education of virologists. So that was the thing. It was the analytics that help us with Omicron. There's an open debate on whether this gain of function research on pathogens of pandemic potential can ever be helpful. There are people who I respect, like Richard Ebright, who say, let's just ban the whole thing because the potential benefits that we can articulate are outweighed by these risks that, in my view, have already been realized. I think that's a very legitimate case. But I don't want to completely and uniformly rule out that possibility forever because there could be cases where we need to use it to understand a pathogen in real time. But the work that was done of just saying, how can we supercharge dangerous pathogens to make them more dangerous? Or how can we take pathogens that aren't transmissible to humans and then make them transmissible to humans? The bar for just carefulness in doing that needs to be very, very high. And it has over the last decade. It certainly hasn't been high enough.
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Yeah, my guess is it should probably be banned altogether. I mean, at that specific last sentence clause you said, I'm sure there's some applications outside of those pathogens with pandemic potential. But to me, the lesson of lab leaks, the lesson of the fact that there's still bank robberies in. In sophisticated countries where that have been dealing with, like Germany, there's still bank robberies in Germany and France like every year. Right. And which me. And they're still in the most sophisticated militaries in the world. We allowed 9, 11 to happen. Israel was caught sleeping on October 7th and so on and so forth. To me, the law of human complacency is at, in another 20 years when Covid is a distant memory, another BSL3 lab which is in theory super protected, but it is in effect only as protected as the urgency and the daily vigilance of the personnel that work there. They're going to get complacent and it's just going to happen again. So that's informed by one of my kind of Bayesian priors about human nature.
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Yeah, yeah. Well, certainly I have both priors that humans will definitely screw things up if given enough opportunities. But I also have the prior because when you look at the case of COVID 19 with this hypothesis that I very much believe that it very, very likely came from a research related accident. So that's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is that in 11 months we went from a sequenced genome, first sequence genome of the virus, to actually a very effective vaccine that saved many millions of lives. I mean that Jon Stewart had a very funny little riff on Stephen Colbert that I reference in the book where he said like, it's amazing what science has done. Finding a solution to a problem science has also created. So that's the story of us humans. And that's basically I talk about this at length in the books. That's the story of all of these technologies. All of our technologies can be used for better and for worse. And even though we may think, oh, agriculture, wasn't that a great technology? Well, without agriculture we don't have pandemics, we don't have mass world wars, we don't have genocides, we don't have nuclear weapons. Horse stirrups. So that seems like a pretty benign thing, just putting stirrups on your horses so you can just ride around and not fall off your horse. But when the Mongols got horse stirrups and they connected their horses and stirrups and shooting arrows from a horse, they took over a huge amount of the world. And I love the Mongols now, but they killed a whole lot of, a lot of people then. So all of our technologies are dual, all of our Sirius technologies are dual use technologies. In some cases the right answer is just ban it forever. And in some cases it's how do we think about cost benefit analyses where there's not this kind of drift towards dangerous stuff. But if there are people who can, if there's a governance and regulatory system and there are people who can make the case, look, we need to do X in order to prevent this terrible harm or even to provide this incredible benefit. I don't go all the way to a uniform ban forever, as some people I greatly respect do. But I'm extremely, extremely cautious. And I think we need to be very, very careful.
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Okay, let's talk about gene editing in general. This is one of your biggest topics in the book that you take throughout various domains, agriculture being one of them, but also just, you know, genetic editing of human beings and human babies, germline editing, CRISPR, Cas9, the breakthroughs we've had in the past five, six years that we are only going to see advance. You know, I'm sure it will advance either slower than people think or much faster than people think, but given some length of time, we're going to have serious, serious gene editing on the menu for parents who are, you know, having children. And I think this is one of those areas where almost no one has a problem with gene editing to prevent horrible, harmful diseases. Maybe except, you know, the Christian Scientists or some kind of fringe religious groups. But the wider concern about gene editing to improve traits, right? You want a kid that's taller, you want a kid that's stronger, you want a kid that's smarter, you want a kid that has a more symmetrical face, you want a son that has a more pronounced jaw, or, you know, a daughter with blonde hair as opposed to red. Whatever you identify as better or society identifies as better, that's at some level, you know, going to come hand in hand with, with, with the edits that we can all agree with. So I wonder if you, do you agree with that framing? And then how do you, how do you think we should think about the future of gene editing?
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B
Yeah, thank you for that. So as I mentioned before, my previous book, Hacking Darwin, is entirely about human genome editing. I was a member of this WHO expert committee on this topic. It is very, very much my view, although I'm a sharp critic of the Chinese scientist or scientists who were involved in facilitating the genome editing of the first CRISPR babies who were born in China. Three of them, two in 2018 and one in 2019. I'm a sharp critic of that person, Hojian Kuei, because I felt like we weren't ready. And so that amounted to what I've called Nuremberg style human experimentation. But I do think that we are moving in the direction where at some point in the future, whether that's five years or 10 years or 20 years or whatever that amount, where it will be safe, it will be ethical, and we'll be able to do it in a limited, careful way to address very specific needs. And those would be cases where there are two prospective parents who want to have a genetically related child. Perhaps they have a limited number of eggs or of fertilized embryos during ivf. And specific harms are identified in all of those embryos, such that if those embryos were implanted in the mother and taken to term, a child would be born who would have a deadly or lifetime debilitating genetic disorder. And so it is my view and what you said, that everybody can agree. I don't think everyone will agree. And there's a whole lot of people who would say we should never do any heritable editing of pre implanted human embryos. I'm not one of them, even though my view is we shouldn't do it now. And so that's where things are going to start and where we will be able. And this science is advancing very, very quickly. The accuracy of our ability to make these kinds of edits is improving very, very quickly. There are two major papers that are going to be coming out very, very soon, which I will make this clear to most everyone. And so the first step is going to be in these specific cases, taking a child who would be born with a deadly or massively debilitating disorder like Huntington's disease, or Tay Sachs or Sickle Cell or some other things, and changing a short and painful life to the potential of a long and healthy and fulfilled life. And as you correctly said, the question is going to be, as our understanding of complex genetics increases, as our ability to edit more locations within the genome increases, what will be possible scientifically and what will be considered acceptable? Human genetics and human biology more generally is extremely complex. We understand, I would say, about 3% of the total complexity of human biology. So we're at the very, very early stages of our understanding. Do we know it well enough to change one letter in a human genome to prevent a single mutation, Mendelian disorder? We do. And the cost benefit analysis is such that if we're changing an abnormal to a normal and something that will cause disease to a normal state, that won't cause that specific disease, that will be the easier state. But when we get to some of the things that you have mentioned, it's going to be more genetically complex. And so maybe we'll get there. And I think that we're going to have to have those conversations, societal conversations, about what we want and what we don't want. And some people say therapeutic applications are good and enhancement applications are bad. But how we characterize what is therapeutic and what we consider enhancement, that's a blurry line. And it's said in a cultural context. So I do think that we're going to go there, but it's going to be easier for us, as I wrote about at greater length in Hacking Darwin, to say, well, if we want to have, you know, put our finger on this child creation process, what are the different things that we can do? So one of them is having more children through in vitro fertilization. And then as we do that, using new capabilities, I won't go into the details, but it's called induced pluripotent stem cells, where you can take any cell. So let's say you do a skin graft and you can have this Yamanaka process of inducing skin cells backward in time, turn them into stem cells, and then forward in time into egg precursor cells and then into eggs. So now, rather than the 10 to 15 eggs that a normal woman may extract as part of the IVF process prior to fertilization, let's say you could have a million eggs. And in every male ejaculation, there are hundreds of millions, if not billions, small number of billions of sperm cells. And so let's say you fertilized 1 million, or let's make it 1,000 eggs, and you grew 1,000 eggs about five days in a laboratory setting. And then, as we do now with pre implantation genetic testing, you extract a few cells that would have otherwise grown into the placenta of these potentially future children, you sequence those, and we have much more information. Just what we're understanding of the information that we're getting back from sequencing now, you have a thousand options. And let's say you want to do those things that you articulated, let's say you want to rank order those thousand for the genetic component of IQ or height or eye color or hair color, then you can have a matrix and you can have a much more informed and I think supercharged process of embryo selection. So I do think the embryo selection, if we can certainly, if we can increase the number of eggs or the number of pre implanted embryos, I think that's going to be a pretty big driver. Our ancestors didn't know anything about genetics, but they took wild chickens laying one egg a month and turned them into domesticated chickens laying one, one egg a day just by uninformed, unmolecularly informed selection. But then let's just say you pick your one among that thousand or ten thousand or million. And let's say then you want to go in and you want to say, well, we're going to make a relatively small number of changes again because we know so little about how genetics works. If it's, if it's one letter change, that's a safer bet. If you're changing 20, 30, 40 letters in the nucleotides in the genome, we don't know what every gene is doing. So a lot of these things that we may change may be doing the thing that we're targeting and they may be doing something else that we don't really understand. But the future of our species involves traveling down this path where we will have more and greater choices about how to do human reproduction. And the reason why I write these books, the reason why I for a very long time have been calling for a species wide dialogue on the future and the applications of these capabilities is because this is where we're going. And it's not enough for scientists or experts or our governments to be the ones thinking about this. If they are, and in most cases they aren't, this is really a fundamental question for all humans. And I think everybody needs to be part of the process of figuring this out.
- [40:47]
C
Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with epglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking EB gliss achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [41:06]
D
MGLIS Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250mg injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have New Orleans or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGLIS before starting ebglis. Tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.
- [41:40]
C
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- [42:17]
A
One topic this brings up in moral philosophy is the distinction between acts of omission and acts of commission. This is also underlying some of the famous trolley problems within moral philosophy, where most people tend to judge acts of commission, which is to say doing something and say causing harm therein, whether intentional or not, differently than causing the same harm simply by not doing something right, by letting something bad happen. So if you let someone die where you could have helped them, people judge that differently than if you killed someone, at least some of the time and then others of the time. We sort of do hold people accountable, and some moral philosophers challenge that distinction. Some people uphold it as a rational distinction. But this is going to become important because allowing a child to have, say, Huntingtons or Tay Sachs, because you have a moral problem with interfering with whether you think nature's creation or God's creation is one thing, messing around with the genome. And no doubt there are going to be mistakes. Right. Whenever the technology comes, it's not going to have a 100% success rate with no side effects, or else it would be the first such technology to ever exist. So there's going to be viral and upsetting stories, no matter how rare of side effects. And, and I think maybe you can remind me and the audience that this actually happened with the initial Chinese babies in 2018 and 2019 where there were unintended gene alterations. Right.
- [44:04]
B
Well, we don't.
- [44:04]
A
Yeah, go ahead. Okay.
- [44:05]
B
Keep. Well, we don't know with those kids now. We don't know because no one that I know has had access to them or to their medical records. From what we do know, the edits were not successful and the thing that they were trying to do, it wasn't to address a harm, it was to try to give them increased resistance to HIV at some point in the future, should they be exposed. But you're absolutely Right. I mean, it's this balance between Kantian ethics of people should be not a means to an end, but an end in themselves and utilitarian ethics of the greatest good for the greatest number. I mean, right now, in the context of self driving cars, people say that if you have a self driving car and it has to swerve one way or another, and on the left side are three nuns and on the right side are three babies, how does the car decide to swerve? Does it kill the nuns or kill the babies? But another thing would be if you just say if we have only self driving cars. And there was a great piece, I think it was either the New York Times or Wall Street Journal this week about this, but if you have only self driving cars, we're going to save about a million lives a year, give or take, because there are going to be so many fewer car accidents. So if this self driving car kills the nuns and the babies, but saves 900,000 lives because all of those people are alive, is that a harm or not? And you correctly said, because we have this much higher standard for doing stuff than for not doing stuff, the second a self driving car kills three nuns or three babies, even if it's, if self driving cars in general have saved close to a million people, are saving close to a million people a year, there's going to be this kind of moral panic. And in a way that it's good because I was certainly at the forefront of people who were criticizing He Jiankui, again the Chinese scientist, because I just felt like we weren't ready. This was a collective decision. And so I think it's very dangerous to say, well, in the name of utilitarian principles, we're going to allow for human experimentation. That's why governance is important, that's why regulation is important. But we shouldn't be so afraid of new things that we accept the things, the ways that we're current living, which may be really terrible, like a million people dying a year from car accidents, but just we've so normalized them that we just think, oh, that's just the way things are. And so this is a broader point, as you've suggested, for all kinds of technologies, for all kinds of issues related to the adoption of our most revolutionary technologies.
- [47:13]
A
Yeah. So before we even get as a society to widespread, cheap available gene editing, we are going to, and sort of are already at the point where you can, you know, if you're doing ivf, you can have a whole bunch of embryos, sequence the genomes of those embryos. And there are companies that will tell you to the best of their knowledge, which of your embryos, first of all, has any of these easily detectable 1 gene diseases, but even more interestingly, will tell you the likely height, the likely intelligence, the likely whatever. We understand about the relationships between genes and, say, depression, right? And we understand something about this, right? People have been studying this. There's big data. They've got hundreds of thousands of data sets and they can find correlations, they can run it through AI, they've done this. It will only probably get more accurate. They can tell you, okay, well, based on our simulations, which are say 50% reliable, this, you know, or maybe 70%, this embryo is going to be less likely to suffer depression than this other embryo. We understand depression has genetic correlates. Schizophrenia has genetic correlates. I don't understand, you know, as putting myself in the shoes of a prospective parent, it would be very hard to put that information out of my head. If it was already in front of me and I was choosing an embryo, I would be unable to ignore the fact that one had a higher likelihood of schizophrenia or depression or anything like that. But I imagine many parents would not want to know that information. Almost like you don't want to know the sex of a child. There's something sacred about the lottery of childbirth for people. On the other hand, there's this problem, and I was talking to someone who works at one of these companies that, you know, sequences the embryos, and he was telling me, well, one problem we're facing is that most of our data comes from, you know, British data sets. So we're incredibly good at predicting who's going to be smarter or taller or more depressed or more happy if the babies are British or close cousins, you know, French are probably genetically similar enough that we do well with them. We really do poorly with African babies or African American babies or Asian babies and so forth. And so we're actually unable to offer this service as in a. In a way that would be racially equitable and diverse. And that's a big problem for us. Obviously, they want to make more money by offering. Offering it to everyone. But from society's point of view, to me, it would be a terrible thing if this were only available to certain races and not others. But then there's this problem where on the political left, the whole concept of genetics is taboo, as proven recently by the idiotic reaction to this Sydney Sweeney advertisement, where I'm sure you saw this, they made it. Sydney Sweeney made a double Entendre about having good genes in an advertisement selling jeans, what they obviously meant is that she individually has good genes. Right? Just like Dwayne the Rock Johnson has good genes. Just like every A list Hollywood celebrity, most of them have good genes. And people, certain people on the online left had a meltdown over this. But that's reflective of what is actually a wider taboo on the left, around, around genetics. And yet if we're going to, if we're entering this new world where picking an embryo for its traits is an option that may become cheaper over time, an option that some people are going to take, we have to be able to talk about how that intersects with things like race. Right, because race is going to be relevant. If we can't offer that to black people, that's a huge problem. And so I think we have to find a way, in particular people on the political left, where these taboos exist, to have a conversation about these issues without all of it, without instantly bringing up Nazism and Hitler and eugenics, as if every marginal advance in this technology is going to lead to the Third Reich.
- [51:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. I write about the eugenics issue at significant length in my, in my last book, Hacking Darwin. So in order for sure, the predictability for these single mutation disorders is very, very high. And as we move up the complexity scale for different traits, everything becomes more probabilistic. So I'm actually on the scientific advisory board for one of these companies, Genomic Prediction, that's doing exactly this. And it's very difficult for parents to understand probability. So if you have a trait and you say this trait is, to the best of our knowledge, 40% genetic, and then here's what we are predicting, we can predict 20% differential within that 40%, not comparing you to some kind of abstract, but comparing your five or 10 different embryos that you're considering for implanting in the mother, and you're going to have to pick one. So that's inherently complicated for people. On top of that, there's the issue of the data sets. The reason why most of the highest quality genetic analysis comes from these UK resources. The UK has its UK Biobank, which is just very, very high quality. They have really excellent governance, they have strict protocols for research. And so that is a starting place. But the United States, we have our all of Us program, which is currently under different names and evolving, building a much more diverse data set for exactly this reason. So we need to build out these kinds of data sets. There are initiatives, certainly big ones in China and Asia, there's an Africa Genetics initiative, so the UK was the first and best. But there are very, very active efforts to build out these data sets. And that is really important because not just for human genetics, but for the future of our human ability to re engineer life. The basic three ingredients are more and higher quality data, stronger algorithms to do the analytics and more computing power. And that's what brings us these kinds of insights. And I completely agree with you that if we just label everything racist and eugenics as eugenic as a way of not even having a conversation, that's going to be bad. But it's also true that when we talk about making changes to living systems, it's really important for us to be mindful of what are the values that are guiding us. And so I'm a huge believer. I mean, I'm not a fan of capital dei, but I'm a huge fan of lowercase dei. I mean those are all fantastic principles. And diversity in a Darwinian sense isn't just how we got some different kids living in the college dorm. Diversity is the sole survival strategy of our species and every species. And if we could just imagine a sci fi future where we have much greater control over this procreation process and the product of our creation. And based on our societal biases, we lead ourselves into a narrowing of human diversity that's going to be, actually has the potential to be really, really dangerous. I mean, that's the whole point of diversity is you never know what conditions are going to be like if you don't have enough diversity as a species to face some new kind of circumstance. If that circumstance emerges, you're actually going to be really in trouble. So I think that while I, like you, am a critic of the craziness on the far left and the far right, I think it's important that just like we're saying don't use racism and eugenics to prevent a conversation, we also need to say, well, there are very real issues of lowercase diversity, lowercase equity, lowercase inclusion, like building these, these data sets that need to be woven into all of our processes from the beginning.
- [56:06]
A
Right? So another question or you know, thinking long term is how is religion going to interact with fully realized gene editing technology, embryo selection? That's cheap. How is Christianity going to deal with that? How is Islam going to deal with that? And you know, often what religion is in the position of trying to fit together things that were written in books, you know, whether a thousand 1500 years ago or thousands of years ago, to fit in rules that were just reacting to an ancient world and seeing how those rules would apply to brand new technologies. Right. So if there's like a. A prohibition in Islam on sort of like tampering with God's creation. Right. And that's been interpreted to prevent castration, which is why in. In the Arab slave trade, where millions of Africans taken to the Arab world over the past several thousand years, they often had to get non Muslims to perform the castrations on the eunuch slaves. Because a certain Quranic verse has been interpreted as forbidding that.
- [57:23]
B
Yeah. But just a quick aside, it's highly ironic because the Islamic slave trade was bigger than the Atlantic trade. It didn't leave as much of a trace because of the mass castration of the male slaves who were captured in Africa and brought into the Islamic world. So my feeling is it's like we have a lot of craziness that gets woven into our religion, but it's like, oh, I'm. I'm against castration, so I'm going to have somebody else mass castrate all of these people. That seems nuts to me.
- [57:58]
A
Yeah, it's. It's a little bit. It's like, isn't God clever enough to see that you're.
- [58:03]
B
Exactly. There's a loophole. Exploiting a loophole.
- [58:06]
A
Yeah, exactly. In any event, I. I wonder, you know, because obviously there's over a billion Muslims in the world. There's dozens and dozens of Muslim majority countries, some of which have Islam enshrined in their, you know, in their. In the state and all, you know, there's almost as many, maybe more Christians in the world. And so how. How do you see religion interacting with this? Is there going to be a big backlash among the religious to this kind of technology? And how do you see that playing out?
- [58:39]
B
Yeah, it's really interesting. And the religions are quite different. I mean, I was invited to the Vatican to lecture on this, and I explained my views very clearly. And then I was actually quite surprised because I was a critic of some of the official positions of the Vatican against stem cell research. A lot of things that I think are quite beneficial to people. And they asked me to publish in their journal my critique, and I spent a lot of time on it. Actually. I can share with your producers if you want to put it in the show notes. And so Catholicism is actually one of the most strict in having just pretty clear prohibitions against a lot of these things. And that's why even there's a debate now in the evangelical community about ivf, which has been so normalized Societally that it makes it a lot more complicated. Judaism and Islam are actually much more flexible on these issues than traditional Catholicism. In Judaism, which I know more about, the basic philosophy is life always wins. They say if you have a funeral procession and a wedding procession and they're coming to the same intersection, the funeral procession has to wait for the wedding procession to go through. So Judaism is kind of all in for stem cell research, anything that will save lives. So Judaism is generally pretty open. And Islam also has been traditionally much more open to these kinds of things. And Judaism and Islam actually share, certainly within the Gulf countries, the same kind of genetic complexities that Jews, Gulf Arabs, French Canadians and others have, which are frankly just the result of inbreeding over many, many years. And so there's a lot of really interesting work that's being done on these kinds of issues in places like the United Arab Emirates. So religions have a really important role to play, and they must play that role, because religions are just a very important part of many people's lives. But these new capabilities, even beyond editing life, I mean more broadly, we're experiencing a revolutionary moment for humans, like controlling fire, like the advent of agriculture, like industrialization. This next era, whether it's the AI era, whatever we want to call it, is going to be one of those moments. And so we're going to have to figure out what values we would like to guide us in that process. And I think it would be dangerous to say that we have to invent whole new values for these new capabilities. And so we do need to say, well, what are the best values that our ancestors over thousands of years have developed that we can bring forward? If we're trying to twist and turn new realities to fit some kind of very specific dictates that had nothing to do with this situation, that might, might not be good. But if we have broad principles about respecting life, those are actually really good things to bring forward. As a matter of fact, my next book, which is coming out in April, is called the AI Ten Commandments. And in it I've reimagined the Ten Commandments and have a whole process where I worked with GPT5 to come up with a new set of 10 commandments for the AIH that are very significantly drawn from the entirety of human religious and spiritual and cultural history, but are tweaked in a way that I believe can help guide us into a future. So summary is there's a big role for religion, but that is going to require some level of flexibility, including among the religions, to say that we're not about very specific rules being followed forever, were about articulating a core set of principles and having respectful, inclusive dialogues about how can those core principles be best realized in these new environments.
- [63:07]
A
Okay, I want to talk about GMOs for a minute. I learned from your book that corn was bred selectively over presumably hundreds or thousands of years from a plant that only yielded something like 12 kernels.
- [63:22]
B
Right.
- [63:22]
A
To the plant that we see today. And this is all. This was all done by the indigenous people of Mexico and Central America and so forth.
- [63:31]
B
Yeah.
- [63:32]
A
You know, it's so interesting to me that people have no problem with that. They have no problem with the idea that corn came from something barely corn. Like, we have no problem with the idea that your, that your pug or your Chihuahua was bred slowly from something that was basically a wolf.
- [63:53]
B
Yep.
- [63:54]
A
But if you were to make that same exact change, if you were to return that, that corn stub into a thing of corn or a wolf into a Chihuahua via genetic editing, people would have a completely different attitude about it. They would say, oh, that's. They would. The, the yuck factor, the ick factor would be so strong. And that, you know, the way you talked about it in your book made me think of that. I guess I just have so two questions on GMOs. One is just how is GMO going to play. GMO is going to play a role in the future of humanity, if at all differently than they do now. And then the second question, you can take them in whatever order. Looking at your graph in your book about which countries support GMOs the most and which countries fear and oppose GMOs the most, it jumps out at me that all the countries that oppose GMOs the most are all English speaking countries. It's literally America, the uk, Australia and India. And it's like it's very noticeable in the graph. So do you know why that is? Those are my two questions.
- [65:02]
B
Yeah. So GMOs, you're exactly right. If you meet somebody in say, what's your view on sustainable organic food? And they'll say, well, I'm against all GMOs. I like my food to be natural. And you could go with that person to Whole Foods and you could say, go to the fruit and vegetable section. You could say, show me something that is a non genetically modified fruit and vegetable and it's almost impossible. And maybe you could get those, whatever they're called, those little fruits that grow on cactuses, like maybe a couple of things in Whole foods are not genetically modified by our ancestors, but pretty much all of the fruits and vegetables that we eat are genetically modified foods when compared to their wild ancestors 10,000 years ago, or in the case of corn, even less. And so when we talk about genetically modifying plants, it's not we're applying biotechnology to nature, we are applying biotechnology to biotechnology. And now we just have greater knowledge in how biotechnology works. And exactly as you said, the difference between corn and its wild forebear is we have a. Anyway, it's big. My arms are spread wide for those people who are just listening on your earphones. And the difference between corn and genetically modified corn, which are the ways that farmers use to increase the use of pesticides and insecticides, is nothing. I can't get my fingers close enough to say how small that is. And yet people are deeply terrified about that. And I'm not saying that there aren't reasons to have some concerns about genetic modification, but it's completely overblown. And now with the tools that I write about in the book, one thing is this transgenic, like what the GMO and BT corn and other things are where you take basically genetic snippets from one species, like a bacteria, and you put it inside of corn so you can grow the corn without needing so many insecticides and pesticides, which are frankly also of which should be of greater concern to people than this genetic modification. But now we have capabilities of going into the genetics of these plants and doing what we were already doing. I mean, most of the fruits and vegetables that we have, certainly the ones that have been developed over the last 80 years, we basically bombard these seeds with radiation. And then you do it enough times and you just kind of freak out these seeds and a bunch of weird things happen. And you grow these seeds and it's like, oh, hey, that's kind of interesting. This grape has smaller seeds, and that's how you get seedless grapes. And then you just keep doing that. So that's a lot of work, and it's a lot of trial and error. But now we have the ability to go into the. And you can just turn up, turn down, turn on, turn off different genetic markers so that you can have these plants. And maybe it's a plant that can actually grow in a part of the world that is now being newly stressed as a result of global warming. And so if you're going to some farmer, which is now the case in Africa or parts of South Asia, you could say, actually, no, things have gotten hotter where you are. You should no longer grow the traditional varieties of these crops that have sustained you for a very long time. And maybe you should grow something else, or maybe you should move to some other place that's less climate stress than the place you are. Or you can say, well, you need a lot of help in order to maintain your lifestyle. And part of that is, well, we can develop seeds for exactly the plants that you're already growing, but that can grow in hotter climates or with more salination because of sea level changes or all kinds of things. So in my view, that doesn't mean that people should just say, oh, I'm all in for GMOs. I'm all in for using CRISPR and other genome editing tools to manipulate plants. We need to do everything carefully. And that leads to your last question. Why is there so much anti GMO sentiment? In my view, part of it is that there are some legitimate concerns. Part of it is that the scientists starting in the 1970s were so confident that the things they were developing would be such a pure good for humanity that that good would make its own case. And part of it is just a really cynical misinformation campaign by organizations like Greenpeace who have a business plan of scaring people. And we see this not just here, but really across the board is you have these individuals and organizations that live on one end of any spectrum, whatever it is, and that's their business model is defending that end of the spectrum. So if Greenpeace starts saying, actually, GMOs aren't bad in all circumstances, and we need to have an informed debate weighing risks and benefits, but there could be very important situations, like with golden Rice, where the benefits massively outweigh the risks, then somebody else, some other organization, is going to attack Greenpeace as a way of seizing the apex of that hill. And so it's kind of this crazy thing. It's across the board of our societies now, where the moderate people who are trying to say, hey, why don't we come together and weigh the costs and benefits and arrive at an optimal answer that addresses the legitimate concerns of the skeptics, but also helps realize at least some of the aspirations of the people who are doing things like developing this golden rice, that can help a lot of people. Those people seem to be drown out. And I think that we need to invest in a culture and in a political culture where we can just come together and say, how do we get, how do we work towards an optimal answer? And to have the politics of social media is the politics of Extremism, the politics of actually solving problems is the politics of give and take and listening and compromise. And it's a bigger point than GMOs. But if we're not able to do that, we're just going to really do a lot of harm to ourselves.
- [71:59]
A
Yeah. I think a lot of this comes down to yuck is not an argument. Right. And yeah. What do I mean by that? I mean, people are icked out by the idea of genetically modified food. Just saying the word, it even makes my skin crawl, even though I know that it's a good thing.
- [72:14]
B
That's like food. Genetically modified food is called food.
- [72:18]
A
Yeah.
- [72:19]
B
All the food that we eat is genetically modified.
- [72:21]
A
Right. Technology as well. I mean, every Hollywood movie right now.
- [72:26]
B
Yeah.
- [72:27]
A
Every hastily written script is just make AI somehow the bad guy.
- [72:32]
B
Yeah.
- [72:33]
A
Right. Because just the notion that technology can control the world and that anything that approaches our level of intelligence will displace us and be hostile is so easily accepted, it just slots right into something in human psychology that's really easy to exploit for these organizations. And so I think that's. There's going to be a. It's going to be a constant and difficult task to actually educate the public out of hysteria that can easily be ginned up by demagogues and organizations and dovetailing on that. My final question for you. You're a futurist, so I have to ask you to predict the future. Is artificial intelligence going to lead to mass unemployment?
- [73:23]
B
So, like with all technologies, some jobs will be lost, some jobs will be created, and lots of jobs will be changed. This is happening quickly. So there are absolutely are people who have jobs now that will be. The jobs will be made redundant. But I also believe that AI and humans working with AI is going to really increase the opportunity set. So I am fiercely opposed to people who are saying, oh, we're on the verge of artificial General Intelligence, where AIs will be able to do everything that humans can do. People who say that humans are the new Neanderthals, I believe that nothing is further from the case. We are in the beginning of a new renaissance for humanity. So I lecture to organizations around the world about this. Certainly some jobs will be lost. But everybody, and certainly everybody listening to this podcast and every company should be saying, what are the things that we do that are wonderful human things that our machines aren't going to be able to replicate? And so every person will be able to. To harness these AI and technological superpowers. And if we all keep investing in the most human side of our skill sets. I think that there's going to be a lot of opportunity. So I think there is going to be displacement, as there was displacement when we mechanized agriculture. Do I think this is going to be that same level of displacement, meaning the number of people who were pushed off of farms in a relatively short number of decades and had to reinvent themselves as industrial workers? I don't think it's going to be percentage wise of that level, but I think big, big changes are coming and we need to be ready for them.
- [75:24]
A
Okay. Jamie Metzl, thank you so much for your time. The book, once again, is super convergence, and I hope to have you back again maybe when your next book comes out.
- [75:33]
B
Wonderful. Thanks so much, Coleman. It's been a pleasure.