AI and biotech are rapidly changing our world. Superconvergence author Jamie Metzl explores the risks and rewards of this unprecedented era! [Part 1/2 — find part 2 here!]
What We Discuss with Jamie Metzl:
- Technological progress is accelerating exponentially. According to Superconvergence author Jamie Metzl, the scientific advancements made in the next 14 years will outdo those of the last century, followed by another century’s worth in only seven years.
- AI (artificial intelligence) is not just a standalone technology, but will be integrated into every aspect of our lives, boosting the rate of scientific discoveries and problem-solving across all fields.
- Advances in genetic engineering and reproductive technologies may lead to the ability to select and modify embryos for desired traits, raising ethical questions and potentially redirecting the future of human evolution.
- The rapid pace of technological change is outstripping our evolved ability to comprehend it, leading to challenges in adapting and governing these new technologies responsibly.
- To navigate this rapidly changing world, humanity should focus on developing a clear set of values and goals to guide its collective use of technology.
- And much more — continued in part 2/2 here!
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Technological progress is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, reshaping our world in ways our monkey minds can barely comprehend. From AI integration in every aspect of our lives to revolutionary advances in genetic engineering, we’re on the brink of transformative changes that will redefine human potential. But what can we do to ensure these changes don’t outpace our ability to understand and control them?
On this episode, we’re revisited by Jamie Metzl, futurist and author of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World to explore the risks and opportunities of this new era. Here, Jamie explains why we need to approach these advancements with a values-based mindset, how we can harness these technologies for the betterment of humanity, and why staying informed and thinking critically about our technological future is crucial. Listen, learn, and enjoy part one of this two-part episode (part two can be found here)!
Please Scroll Down for Featured Resources and Transcript!
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Who profits from the proliferation of fake science, and what can we do to separate the wheat from the chaff when we’re bombarded with copious amounts of fact and fiction? Listen to episode 745: Dave Farina | Debunking Junk Science Myths to find out!
Thanks, Jamie Metzl!
If you enjoyed this session with Jamie Metzl, let him know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shout out at Twitter:
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And if you want us to answer your questions on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com.
Resources from This Episode:
- Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World by Jamie Metzl | Amazon
- Other Books by Jamie Metzl | Amazon
- Jamie Metzl | Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity | Jordan Harbinger
- Jamie Metzl | Website
- Jamie Metzl | Threads
- Jamie Metzl | Instagram
- Jamie Metzl | Twitter
- Jamie Metzl | LinkedIn
- Science and Myths of the Longevity Rush | Milan Longevity Summit
- Dr. David Sinclair: The Biology of Slowing & Reversing Aging | Huberman Lab Podcast
- What Affects NAD+ Levels and Do You Need to Supplement? | Verywell Health
- Treating Depression: An Expert Discusses Risks, Benefits of Ketamine | Yale Medicine
- Dennis Rodman | The Worm Is Back | Jordan Harbinger
- David Fajgenbaum | Leveraging AI to Cure Rare Diseases | Jordan Harbinger
- What Is Pharmacogenomics (Pharmacogenetics)? | Cleveland Clinic
- Jamie Metzl on Evolution of Technology | Chicago Ideas
- Continuous Glucose Monitoring | NIDDK
- 11 Scientific Advances of the Past 100 Years Gave Us Our Entire Universe | Forbes
- Human Success in the AI Age | Project Syndicate
- How AI Will Shape Society Over the Next 20 Years | Forbes
- Alphafold 3 Predicts the Structure and Interactions of All of Life’s Molecules | The Keyword
- Play Game Instantly! | Pong
- Darwin and Mendel | Ask a Biologist
- Amy Webb | Changing Lives with Synthetic Biology | Jordan Harbinger
- Nature Co-Design: A Revolution in the Making | Hello Tomorrow
- Sorry Hipsters, That Organic Kale Is a Genetically Modified Food | Smithsonian
- What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)? | McKinsey
- An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong | Amazon
- What the Kardashians Can Teach Climate Activists | The Japan Times
- Malala’s Story | Malala Fund
- Scientist Who Gene-Edited Babies Is Back in Lab and ‘Proud’ of Past Work Despite Jailing | The Guardian
- Southern Baptists Vote to Oppose Use of IVF | The New York Times
- Preimplantation Genetic Testing (PGT) | Johns Hopkins Medicine
- Startup Offers Genetic Testing That Promises to Predict Healthiest Embryo | WHYY
- What Is IVG? In Vitro Gametogenesis, Explained | The Bump
- Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity by Jamie Metzl | Amazon
1014: Jamie Metzl | AI Solutions for Hunger, Health, & Habitat Part One
This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!
[00:00:00] Jamie Metzl: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. And every problem, like I was saying before, resets the baseline so that somebody who might have spent their whole life trying to solve this problem, they show up to work the next day, oh, this problem is already solved. What's the next problem that I'm going to solve?
And so that, that's where we are. People think this is about technology. We are unleashing one of the greatest powers in the known universe, and that is human imagination.
[00:00:32] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional cold case, homicide investigator, real life pirate, hacker, Emmy, nominated comedian or extreme athlete.
And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime, and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.
Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app To get started today on the show, my friend Jamie Metzel back for I think the third round here this time to talk about how AI will revolutionize human progress and even our own lifespans. We'll explore why we can't wrap our puny human minds around how fast progress is accelerating and what this perception glitch means about the next couple of decades.
We'll also discuss Chinese engineered super babies, how AI will help us solve problems, not just faster, but in new ways humans have never thought of before. And how AI will revolutionize not only medicine, but agriculture and remove some of the basic limitations of civilization as we know it. A lot of bold claims discussed here today.
Here we go with Jamie Metzel.
Well, glad to have you back on, man. It's kind of cool that you're not a floating head on Skype or whatever,
[00:02:07] Jamie Metzl: you know, sometimes I wonder that myself, but I'm really thrilled to be here with you. But this is the first time we've met in person, right? So that's great too. You're, you're much better looking in person than I, you know, that's virtually you's.
You're
[00:02:16] Jordan Harbinger: right. I am. Uh, th Thank you. There's a lot to be excited about in our lifetimes coming up anyway. Well, I mean, right now, I, yes, but also coming up as, as well.
[00:02:26] Jamie Metzl: For sure coming up. But right now, I mean, what a miracle. Yeah. Just to be alive. The odds of being on this one planet, we don't know if there are others that support life.
True, true. I mean, I'd rather be a human than kind of any other life form. We're already humans, we're fed and we're clothed, and we can have these amazing technology. I'm, I'm, I think it's pretty
[00:02:44] Jordan Harbinger: great.
[00:02:45] Jamie Metzl: It is great. It is great. Our lifetimes might be extended for quite a long time as well. I don't know. Yeah.
I hope so. I lecture a lot about this and I was actually the keynote speaker a few weeks ago at the Milan Longevity Forum, and what I always say is the basic science, I assume that's in Milan, Michigan. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And uh, they have great Italian food there. Yeah. Um, olive Garden. The, the basic e exactly.
The basic science. Mm-hmm. About extending lifespan is actually really exciting. So we've extended the life of roundworms of mice, but humans aren't just big round worms. Right. We're not, we're not too big mice. So the applied science where people are saying, oh, this thing worked in mice, therefore you humans should do this.
That's a bunch of bologna. And so I, I do think that, well, the basic science is incredibly exciting. The applied science is just being massively overhyped. So you have all these people taking these NAD plus, I was say n 80 plus. Yeah. Is like getting blood transfusions from their kids. People doing all sorts of things, Brian.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. My, my friend. All sorts of things that are just, you know, at worst not proven. And some of them, like telomerase are actually harmful. So if you wanna live a long life, do blue blues, own stuff, exercise, eat a healthy diet, have loving, supporting relationships, do all of those things. The other stuff that we don't know whether it will help at all.
And to convert you.
[00:04:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah. The NAD thing, I, you can imagine it. People send me books, people send me supplements too. Yeah. Like, Hey, this is. Scientifically proven to reduce aging. And then there's like a poor mice. If you're a mouse, there's like a star. Yeah. If you're a mouse. But also what we mean by that is your skin will look healthy as you slowly rot inside.
[00:04:23] Jamie Metzl: Yeah. And it's, it's not just if you're a mouse, it's if you are a genetically engineered cloned laboratory mouse because they live in these absolutely controlled condition. So we just, it could work. David Sinclair is a friend of mine and an antiaging doctor. Yeah, well, he, he's the, the kind of the guru of these NAD plus boosters, particularly nmn.
Uh, a professor at at Harvard Medical School, but who knows whether this stuff works. It works. Again, humans, we're not just big mice, right? And so we have all these gurus who are saying, Hey, do this. We have no clue whether it works. Again, it could be harmful.
[00:04:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I worry about it being harmful. It also makes you feel like crap.
You ever done that? Intravenous? You do try intravenous NAD or anything ever? Oh, I, no,
[00:05:06] Jamie Metzl: I don't take do it all. 'cause I, again, if there's a thing I don't know, it will help. You don't wanna be the first person in I agree. In experiment. I agree. You should be like number 10,000. When all these other DIY people maybe listed, probably have tried it out and there's, oh my God, I did it.
And if just an n of one isn't enough, 'cause like, who knows what's happening. But that's why I'm, I'm for
[00:05:25] Jordan Harbinger: proof. I could not agree more. I went into a doctor near me to try ketamine therapy. Yeah. I didn't, which is actually something I did not need. I didn't, I was recommended to try it. It's, I think it's for depression, which I do not have.
But people are asking me about it. So it's like I have a policy, I will never put anything. Alright, sorry. I will never ask you to put anything in your body if I haven't put it in my right. Like that's my supplement rule for the show. Right? Sure. And that's not great because it's not like, oh man, Jordan died taking, well, I don't want, I guess they're not gonna take that, right?
Like me taking it and trying it doesn't mean it's good or safe or useful. Right? Right. But anyway, they put the NAD in there and I just felt absolutely horrible and sick. And I was like, what is this trash? You know? And they're like, oh, it's anti-aging da da. But it's also good for the ketamine thing.
Anyway, I interviewed Dennis Rodman on this show years ago. Yeah. And he was on an INAD IV drip during the show and he was basically falling asleep and hunched over. And I was like, turn that thing down.
[00:06:17] Jamie Metzl: But who? But who knows what he had been doing the night before. Well, yeah, there's so many variables. So we don't even know what this does Anything in people.
And then that's the problem is we kind of go from, Hey, here's, you know, one study in laboratory mice to, everybody needs to take it. And the way they, the reason they can do it is that these nutraceuticals aren't regulated here in the United States. Right? It's like trillions of dollars of sales. Nobody has any clue whether almost all of it works, right.
And I think that's the challenge we all want. To believe that these things are true. Yeah. That, that we can just take these magic pills and, and, and there are some magic pills for sure. But so far these anti-aging pills aren't proven to be magic exercising. Yeah. An hour a day. That's magic. Yeah. Eating a healthy diet, not eating a lot of processed foods.
That's magic. So let's, my feeling is focus on
[00:07:07] Jordan Harbinger: the magic. You know what's crazy is these people take anything, but really it's like if you slept more and you ate more fiber Yeah. You would be 20% ahead of where you are now. Exactly. It's like, nah, I wanna stay up all night partying with celebrities, but then take an IV drip in the morning.
Exactly. I'm not,
[00:07:21] Jamie Metzl: I'm not gonna eat healthy vegetables. Right. But I'm going to do this thing and gonna have a scoop of AG G one, which if they're your sponsor, they are. Okay. Yeah. I love AG G one. Thank you. All I'm saying is, but for me, whoops. I'd rather That's what I was gonna say. Exactly. Exactly. No, I mean, nothing wrong with it.
And frankly, if I wasn't eating a healthy diet. I think it's actually great if you're running around and you don't have time, and you as I take a sip of my Exactly. Definitely good for you. Soda. Soda. If, if you don't have time, like that's a great way to get nutrients. But if you have time, have a beautiful salad from your garden.
A lot of salad or it's, I think it's like we're kind of, we feel like science isn't there to totally save us. Science is there to help us. Mm-Hmm. And we also have to help ourselves. We have to recognize that we represent 3.8 billion years of evolution. Yeah. We've learned a couple things along the way. So let's integrate what we've learned.
And these new capabilities, but don't, we shouldn't all just feel like, oh, the new thing is better than the old thing. Right? We're in the context of ai. The new thing is just going to, gonna replace the old thing of us. We're kind of an
[00:08:24] Jordan Harbinger: incredible species. We have a lot of of tricks up our sleeves. It's scary.
When you think I, I interviewed, do you know Dr. David Feigenbaum? You know who that is? Oh,
[00:08:31] Jamie Metzl: he's my friend.
[00:08:32] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, good. He, I,
[00:08:33] Jamie Metzl: I love him. Such a good guy. What a, I mean, he's just to take Yeah. Your own adversity and to turn your adversity not just into something that saves you. Mm-Hmm. But that saves. An increasing number of other people.
Yeah. Incredible. I love that guy.
[00:08:50] Jordan Harbinger: I had a great episode with him on the show, but it was scary because, and he said the same thing he, he said when he was sick, he thought, surely there's thousands of people working on every conceivable disease that you can get. And the answer is, if you have diabetes, there's a lot of people working on it.
If you have, what would he have? Castleman's syndrome or whatever it's called. Yeah, exactly. Yep. No one is worth literally no one. '
[00:09:10] Jamie Metzl: cause that's the thing is there are these rare diseases 'cause there's so much diversity within humans. Yeah. And if so, if you have something that everybody has, then there's a lot of energy.
Right. There's billions of dollars in profit. Yeah. Well, I mean even, and even things where we're having a hard time treating like Alzheimer's, we know that lots of people are getting dementia and Alzheimer's. The numbers are going up. Right. So there's a lot of money. But if you had something like what David had or, or all, all these other rare disease that he's trying to work on, there's not a lot of money going and that, and that's why I.
I know we're gonna get to talking about my book, but the eventually Yeah, yeah. It's okay. I, I'm just enjoying chatting. The basic thing is we have these new capabilities to see patterns. Mm-Hmm. That would not be possible to see with our unaided human brains. And we're able to see connections between things and 'cause of that, we're able to group.
Unlike things, seemingly unlike things together, and that's what David is doing is to say, all right, so we have these rare diseases that are individually rare, but collectively they're not rare. So how can we think a little bit differently about how we do healthcare? Yeah, so we can solve this bigger category of rare diseases rather than saying that.
Everything needs to go into this one problem of castleman's disease.
[00:10:15] Jordan Harbinger: What scares me though is that there's a lot of stuff where no one's really working on it. Yeah. And rare doesn't mean, oh one in 300 million people got this. Yeah. It means that there's like 20,000 people. Right. Or more, at any given time, probably way more with whatever disease, right.
That you have or that you're getting, or that your dad or mom has. It's like a LS is like this horrible way to go where your body slowly shuts down, but your brain is working horrible, and then eventually you can only blink and then you stop breathing, like, or your heart stops. That's truly awful. And it's not like the one, there's not five people that have this, like there's thousands and thousands, but it's still not enough to make it happen.
So I, these breakthroughs are kind of Right. You know, you don't think about 'em when you're 30. You're just like, whatever. Oh, that's cool. Right. But then when you're 44 like me, or when, probably when you're 54 or 64, you're like, oh, my dad died of that. Oh, wait a minute. He died when he was three years older than I am right now.
Oh, wait a minute. What if I get that? And then you start losing sleep?
[00:11:09] Jamie Metzl: It's a really important, you say point that you just made about kind of awareness at different ages. And I, and I write about this in the book, in the context of my chapter on healthcare. Because of these intersecting AI genetics and biotechnology revolutions, because we're able to start seeing things, seeing patterns differently, we're changing our healthcare systems.
And I'll circle back to the why this is important for the age thing. So we're moving from our world of generalized healthcare based on population averages. Yeah, we treat you 'cause you're a human. To our world of personalized or precision healthcare saying we need to know who you are on an individual basis.
Mm-Hmm. And that's what we need. All of your regular medical information, but also your whole sequence, genome and all of this other systems biology information that we use and that's with gene therapies and these other then personal called pharmacogenomics, meaning we tailor drugs for your biology.
Mm-Hmm. It's not drugs for people, it's drugs for you. As we build these huge data sets and with the basic formula is more and and higher quality data, more computing power and better algorithms, that's what lets us see these patterns. We're going to move them to the next phase of our healthcare, which is predictive and preventive.
And in predictive and preventive, it's not, Hey, wait till you're 65, and then a symptom shows up, right? It's, Hey, this symptom. Maybe if it's a genetic disorder, maybe that if you're 44, maybe that genetic disorder started, the germ of that was 44 years and nine months ago. Right? And if you knew, if your parents knew from that moment, soon after your mother's egg was fertilized, sure.
Or after birth, Hey, this is a concern. There are things that for a lot of diseases that you could do earlier in life as type two diabetes, focus on diet and exercise. It's, yeah, that's true. If it's a genetic form of breast cancer, early screening, rather than waiting until you're, uh, you're forties. So we're gonna move Yeah.
Back into, and so then the goal of healthcare in many ways of life, and it's what your whole podcast is about, is that we have a range of possibility. How do we function toward the upper level of that range? And then are there places where we can go above. Our innate capability. And anyone who's vaccinated, you're already doing that.
If you're wearing glasses, you're already doing that, but maybe there are going to be other areas, not just in healthcare and everywhere. And I think that's really exciting.
[00:13:19] Jordan Harbinger: It is exciting. You're right. I suppose if you knew like, Hey, you're gonna end up with colon cancer almost For sure. Yeah. We figured out how to look for that in the genome and, and there you are.
You would eat a ton of fi or whatever. You did a ton of fiber in your ton whole lifeton of G one. Yeah, yeah. That's right. I don't, I dunno if there's fiber in there, but you, you would eat, yeah. You would be having a salad every day or you'd be taking that Metamucil Yeah. From the time you were three years old and be in your baby bottle for God's sake.
Right. Yeah. And, and then you might be able to dodge that bullet. That's
[00:13:45] Jamie Metzl: such an essential point because I just think that, and it's such a clear thing. 'cause if you knew you were gonna get colon cancer Mm-Hmm. Or you knew you, not that you were gonna get it, you knew you were at high risk. Super high risk.
Yeah. How big of a deal would it be for you to be a vegetarian who eats a bunch of salads?
[00:14:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:14:00] Jamie Metzl: And it's like no big deal at all.
[00:14:02] Jordan Harbinger: It
[00:14:02] Jamie Metzl: wouldn't be a
[00:14:02] Jordan Harbinger: question. It'd be like your religion. Yeah. You would just do it and nobody would do it. Be able to shake you out of it.
[00:14:07] Jamie Metzl: Yeah. Versus not doing that, living a different way.
And when you're X years old, Tableau, you have colon cancer and now you have six months to live. Yeah. Yeah. So I, yeah. So I just think that it's, we just need to, one, start thinking a little bit differently. Two. We need to think, well, what's the, you know, I was, I was giving a, a big talk. We did a science salon at the MIT museum last night.
And, and everywhere I go, people ask like, what's the role of humans in a world of these powerful technologies? And I think there's a wonderful future for humans, but humans have co-evolved with our technologies for thousands of years and more likely small numbers of tens of thousands of years. So it's not us versus our technology.
Our technology is us. It's a manifestation of us. And the question is, what's the best way for us to co-evolve in a healthy, sustainable way with our technologies? And these kinds of examples where you could imagine having sensors in our bathrooms, even inside of our bodies that are just saying, Hey, here's a, a concern.
So like in my, I've written about this, it's like, what I would love is to have sensors all over my bathroom. Mm-Hmm. And they're watching me. They're in the toilet, they're doing breath. And I'm not even noticing it. And then I have a smoothie every morning and my bathroom AI communicates with the refrigerator AI every morning.
I'm just getting my smoothie. Yeah. It tastes exactly the same. Sure. But there's just like a balance of different vitamins and minerals and nutrients and, and I just, I think we need to make it seamless. It's like, oh, I'm gonna go do technology now. It's, there's a healthy ecosystem where the technology supports us.
[00:15:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That would be kind of like a smart blender that says, oh, we analyzed what you did this morning and we You need more fiber, buddy. Yeah,
[00:15:47] Jamie Metzl: no, for sure. And, and we have that, we already have that with basically digital pills where you have kind of all these inputs. And then it says, alright, we'll take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and then it's a pill.
Like why even think about it? I think it's exactly that thing. Yeah, you need a little fiber. Here's where you're, it feels like you're getting a cold. We're gonna put a little more zinc and vitamin C in your smoothie. And you and you, in my dream scenario, you don't even taste it. It's just happening. It's just life.
What are those
[00:16:11] Jordan Harbinger: things called? Those glucose monitors that jab you? But they're a sticker. Yeah. Oh, continuous glucose monitor. Yeah.
[00:16:16] Jamie Metzl: Yeah.
[00:16:16] Jordan Harbinger: So, yeah,
[00:16:17] Jamie Metzl: I Have
[00:16:17] Jordan Harbinger: you done it? I have, yeah. And it was, I thought, oh, where's the part that does the, where's the computer? Yeah. It's so small. It's inside a pin. Yeah, it's incredible.
Yeah. And I could, and I was like, there's literal NFC technology in here where I tap my phone on a piece of tape that's on my elbow, basically tricep, and it tells the phone what my blood sugars looked like for the last nine hours. Like this is nuts. So in 10 or whatever years you're gonna be able to have that, and it's gonna be like, here's the entire vitamin chemical content of your blood.
Yeah. You do need more zinc, or you are really low on vitamin D. So we drop some into. Your smoothie or, or just take a supplement because you're, or go with you, get in the sun. Whatever it is, it's right around the corner. 'cause when I saw that, I thought this is the whole, this is the thing. It's Look at this little disc.
I know. Yep. I couldn't believe it. Yeah. I couldn't believe it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's eventually gonna be,
[00:17:04] Jamie Metzl: I I, I think it's right and, and I think that's a perfect example. Like so many people, they think about the future of technology and it's like, oh my God, it's the Terminator. Yeah. They're coming to get us.
Some of this stuff can be just really simple stuff that leads to really actionable. Outputs that are helpful. And, and so I think that's what this whole thing is about. People feel like this technology question is a yes or no question, right? Yes. We're gonna do it and we're all in and it's the end of humanity, or no, we don't do it.
Mm-Hmm. And then we, we have to go back to the ice ages to protect us against Arnold Schwartzenegger. And the, the truth of the matter, at least as I see it, is there, there's just gonna be so many different manifestations and some of them are gonna be incredibly awesome like this. Yeah. Some of them are gonna be terrible.
Some things we're gonna try something and we're say, oh geez, that was a mistake and we're gonna have to shut it down. And most of them were just gonna be kind, trying to negotiate what's the best use. Like, you know, we all love our cars, but it took a while to have like crappy Pintos that were lighting on fire.
That's right. And we had to figure out how to do cars. And now we're the beneficiaries. And now we're saying, all right, what's the next step for cars? And maybe it's, it is these driverless cars, right, that get in far fewer accidents than we humans. You, maybe it's something else that's the path of humanity.
[00:18:17] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of Chinese products, how about a word from our sponsors? We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Ag One. It's important to me that the supplements I take are of the highest quality, and that's why for a decade I've been drinking a G one. Unlike many brands, a G One's formula has undergone 52 iterations, continually refining their sourcing and testing to ensure the finest ingredients.
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You know, you can trust what's in every scoop of a G one because it's NSF certified for sport, which is one of the most rigorous independent quality and safety certification programs in the supplement industry. You'd be surprised. Most other supplements, they just kind of like throw some stuff into a jar and never test it.
Taking care of my health should not be complicated. AG one simplifies this by making it one scoop a day. Make sure you get those greens and those vices. Ag one's ingredients are heavily researched for efficacy and quality, and every scoop includes prebiotics, probiotics, all the biotics and digestive enzymes for gut support.
[00:19:24] Jen Harbinger: So if you wanna replace your multivitamin and more, start with a G one. Try a G one and get a free one year supply, vitamin D three, K two, and five free A one travel packs with your first subscription@drinkagone.com slash Jordan. That's drink ag one.com/jordan and check it out.
[00:19:41] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Delete Me Identity.
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[00:20:49] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these incredible people for the show, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like, and trust. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free, the same thing that I do. I know you're not booking for a podcast, but this is great for relationship building skills, work, personal, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you.
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You write in the book, when I look at progress, right? I think, wow, look at what happened over the last 50 years. That is amazing. Look how far we've come. It's absolutely incredible. And then someone will say like, well, the iPhone didn't exist at this point. And you're like, oh my gosh, that's true, right? The smartphone didn't exist, you didn't have internet in your pocket, whatever.
There's still a long way to go, but the rate of progress is increasing a ton, and that's something that it's hard to perceive as a human. We're not used to that. So you wrote that the, we will progress more over the next 14 years than we have in the past 100 years, which that has really. Hard to wrap your brain around and then the next seven years will be another century of progress based on that.
Yeah. At today's rate of progress. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll just repeat that over the next 14 years, we're gonna progress more than we have in the last century. And the seven years after that will be another 100 yearsish of progress, which That's insane. Insane. That's insane. That's like steam engine. Yeah.
To iPhone. But it's gonna happen in 14 years. Yeah. What the,
[00:22:41] Jamie Metzl: how as you know, Jordan, I, I write nonfiction, but I also write science. I hopefully, yeah. Yeah. But I also write fiction. I also write science fiction. Oh, okay. Because I just feel like, to think about this point that you've raised, we have to overcome the innate evolved conservatism of our brains.
Mm-Hmm. Tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands. There were two early humans in the savannas of, of African. They were standing together. One of them was your ancestor and one was somebody else. And that other guy was looking up in the sky and saying, oh, there's a bird. Someday maybe humans can fly like birds and wouldn't that be great?
And your ancestor was the guy who said, Hey, is that a rustle in the grass? That could be a saver. Tooth tiger. I remember last time there was a, a rustle in the grass. There was a s I'm outta here. And so your ancestor ran because they were selected for that practical thing. And the other guy, this dreaming guy, that's the guy who got eaten by the saber tooth, right?
And it happens over and over again. So our practical thinking, it's our core survival skill. It's why we've lasted. But now every technology begets every other techno. We have four times more humans now than we did a hundred years ago. We have 85% literacy, global literacy rate now. It was 15% a hundred years ago.
So more educated people were connected to each other. So nobody's solving problems that have already been solved. We have these, what I call, it's the title of the book, super Convergence, super Converging Technologies where every technology is embedded in every other. So we had the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago that made our civilizations possible with their writing systems.
When you look at computer code, what are the letters? We call them Latin letters. They're actually ancient Phoenician letters. Mm-Hmm. That's what makes up the computer codes. With these computer languages, we can have the computing revolution, which enables the machine learning revolution, which enables the AI revolution.
And with the tools of ai, we're interrogating evolved natural systems like how a plant distributes nutrients through a leaf. And using those patterns to design better computer chips that speed up the machine learning ai let us understand, evolve natural systems more so there's just an acceleration because we're learning more, um, with more people, unleashing human imagination.
And we have these incredible tools and capabilities and technologies that are getting better and better. And that doesn't mean everything is going to advance at this rate. Mm-Hmm. But some, anything that can be digitized, anything that's connected to these kinds of scientific and technological capabilities is going to accelerate.
And that's why, again, it's the central point of of the book, if we think this is a conversation about technology. Mm-hmm, we're gonna get lost. This is a conversation about humanity and it's a conversation about values. It's about who are we as we guide these revolutions? What are the values that we seek to infuse into every decision about how these technologies are or aren't used so that we can try to, again, co-evolve with our technology to build the kind of future that we want.
That doesn't mean there aren't going to be twists and turns and problems, there certainly will, but we need to know what we're trying to achieve, right, as individuals and as a community. And that needs to guide us going forward.
[00:26:05] Jordan Harbinger: And this is probably gonna be the clip for YouTube or whatever, or TikTok or whatever the kids use.
Yeah. The whole 21st century. We'll see progress equivalent to 20,000 years. That's a pretty bold claim, man. You know, it's
[00:26:18] Jamie Metzl: just the rate of acceleration is just unbelievable. Yeah. And acceleration begets acceleration. When people think about ai, most people I speak, oh, ai, I just did ai. Mm-Hmm. I went to chat GBT and I did ai.
That's how most people think. Yeah. And then what I say is, tell me how did electricity influence your life today? And people take a step and think, well, I guess I woke up within an alarm clock. Mm-Hmm. Uh, but I was in my house and they had, we had air conditioning and there was a car, and I guess there was food and my clothes.
And then you think, geez, electricity is that Yeah. Everywhere is in everything. It's in my haircut in so far as I have hair. Um, it's everywhere. And that's the thing, AI isn't, I'm, oh, I'm gonna go do ai. AI is going to be just part of everything. It's going to be an accelerant for everything. It's gonna be woven into, uh, everything.
Uh, we have these new things, self-driving laboratory, so we have the pace of scientific. Change is, is has been regulated just by what scientists can do, but now we have new programs like Google Deep Minds Alpha Fold three, which just came out that by my calculations that I described in the book, I. It saved 645 potential 645 million years of human researcher time.
So it, you, it would take just a decade ago, three years for a human scientist to characterize a single protein, which means you to understand a protein, you need to understand the string of amino acids and you need to know, understand the shape. So to characterize one, to match those two things using, uh, the older approach called x-ray crystallography, or, or even electron microscopy, would take about three years.
So there's 200, roughly 215 million proteins known designs. Mm-Hmm. So if you say that 215 million times three years, 645 million years, sure. To characterize every protein alpha. Now we have this program that they can do it in a couple of days. Oh my God. And so it's 645 million years. That scientists and researchers can, can be done by Tuesday.
Exactly. By lunch. By lunch. I've got a lunch. Right. No, but they can redeploy rather than spending your entire career saying, how do we characterize a protein? It's what do we do with a characterized protein? Mm-Hmm. And it's not just that it's, I, well, what are all of the other problems in the world that are at this?
Or a lower level of complexity where there's, there's certain ingredients you need to have a solvable problem, you need to have a, a data set for the AI systems to train on and, and some other things. But there are a lot of problems at that, or lower levels of complexity. And so let's say now we're putting 200 million years of innovation time back into the po.
What are the things that we're going to do? And every problem, like I was saying before, resets the baseline so that somebody who might have spent their whole life, I. Trying to solve this problem. They show up to work the next day. Oh, this problem is already solved. Right? What's the next problem that I'm going to solve?
And so that, that's where we are. People think this is about technology. We are unleashing one of the greatest powers in the known universe, and that is human imagination.
[00:29:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's wild man. It's somebody in 1900, right? They would've, they'd be amazed. By the television, they would just go, wow, look at that flat color picture.
Yeah. Yeah. And they'd be looking behind it like, I just can't believe it. Exactly. Yeah. But AI, even chat GPT in high speed internet, imagine showing that to somebody in the stone Age who's on the ground in the dirt, banging one rock against another one, and sees a spark and is like suddenly like, whoa, whoa.
[00:29:52] Jamie Metzl: Exactly.
[00:29:53] Jordan Harbinger: Or is like banging this out and you're like, what are you doing? He is making a spearhead outta the stone so he can throw it at a wooly mammoth. Yep. And you're trying to show him chat, GPT, and you're like, no, what you do is you ask this thing and he's, how does he's looking behind it. He literally can't even, what are these things that are appearing right.
This written language and you're like, oh crap, I gotta back up the truck.
[00:30:10] Jamie Metzl: You know? So your, your listeners won't know this, but you and I are in this studio, which is appropriately called WTF Studio. That's right. Yeah. And the thing is, how many for this Don Age guy, how many wtf. Would they say, has you tried to explain television to this Stone Age person who doesn't have spoken language?
And you be, let's say W TF in, in that is like err. It's like you'd say, oh, here's this. And it's like, ar it's a lot of gr And then it's like, and here's another thing, ar And you would have to say like, what does that even mean? How is that even possible? And now we, we are more accustomed to internalizing oh, impossible things.
And then they just become normal. Like people for one day are say, oh my God, chat GPT is really cool. And then it's like, what an idiot. It doesn't recognize that you can't have five eggs in chocolate chip cookie recipes.
[00:31:00] Jordan Harbinger: I'm so disappointed. Yeah. Like look, it made a picture where the person has six fingers.
Yeah. Well this thing sucks. Yeah, exactly. It's like, wait, they just generated out of nowhere something that you told it to Exactly. And made a, a Rembrandt style painting. Right? Because you mentioned that. And it's like, but the guy has six fingers. Oh, this thing is useless, man. I gotta fix that. Exactly, exactly.
Yeah. It's really, the exponential rate of progress is really something. Yeah. I mean, we are basically nomadic hunter-gatherers in comparison to our grandkids. It's crazy.
[00:31:28] Jamie Metzl: Yeah. No. And so I write about this in the, in the, that that's why the first chapter of the book, it's called The Nature of Change because you can't understand anything about the second order questions.
Mm-Hmm. About what are the things that are, are going to change, what are the dangers? How do we build the best possible world if you haven't internalized the process of change. And I write about in the, the 1970s, I grew up in Kansas City and in our basement we had this old black and white television. And we, uh, somebody in our family hooked it up.
We had this game pong, which was Oh yeah. And it was like you had two dials and there was like a little bar on each side, and there was a little dot, and it was like a tennis, I guess. Mm-Hmm. And it just went ping a square ball, ping. Yeah. Then it was the coolest thing ever. It's like we would like literally stay up all night playing pong.
Yeah. And it was like, it's never gonna get any better than this. Right. Pong. And so now obviously there's Grand Theft Auto, there's chat GPT. Yeah. There are all, all these kinds of things. But chat, GPT GPT-4, GPT, four O, every technology that we have now is Pong. Mm-Hmm. 10 years ago where, oh, remember when we thought GBT four was so cool?
It was so basic and it's always going to be, this is gonna get better and better, faster and faster. Mm-Hmm. I think that's the thing everybody always thinks, oh my god, like people thought a hundred years ago, this is the height of progress. And that doesn't mean things can't go wrong and things don't twist and and turn and we had two world wars.
But we are beginning this process of acceleration and that really changes everything
[00:33:02] Jordan Harbinger: you mentioned. We'll be able to solve AI will not only solve problems that are complex, but we're gonna solve new ways to solve new problems faster. And then the results will be distributed immediately across the globe.
You gave, in the book, you talk about, is it Mendel and or Mendel men and Darwin. Yeah. They would've figured out not only that evolution exists, but also how natural selection works. Right. Neither of them had both of those things solved. Yeah. Yeah. They were, they were, they were puzzle
[00:33:26] Jamie Metzl: pieces. Right. And so that's what is kind of incredible.
So Mendel and Darwin. Darwin actually had a book in his library that included Mendel's famous paper, which Darwin never read. And Mendel's it took, it took sit on the shelf 30, you know? But Mendel was unrecognized during his lifetime. It was about 30 years after his death. He should watch us be Punnett squares in biology classes to be like, wow, you guys, he was rediscovering.
It's the point I was making earlier when we were all kind of not connected, when people were discovering like the difference between when the Bronze Age started. Mm-Hmm. In different civilizations. It was thousands of years apart. So if you're in a place that didn't have the recipe for bronze, it's 2000 years.
You're just doing stuff in another way. You're making tools in another way, making weapons another, doing all those kinds of things, and you're not contributing your knowledge to the universe of, Hey, what's the cool stuff that we can do with bronze? Now, everything gives you, you have an innovation, it's shared.
The next day, right? And so you don't, you don't have this problem. So we have just collective solve problem solving. So these drivers of evolution, so Darwin, which it was really kind of incredible how he figured out these, that random mutation and natural selection are driving evolution forward. But he didn't really understand what, what could be the mechanism generating that random mutation.
And that's what Mendel was studying with his pea plants. And that was saying, well, there's genetic inheritance and it gets kind of shuffled up and the part comes from the father and part comes from the mother. And so I think that's, I think again, it's this same story of humans learning. We're understanding these natural systems.
It's not, there's a term synthetic biology, which I don't really like. There's two terms that I really don't like. One is synthetic biology and the other is artificial general intelligence. And we can, and the thing I don't like about synthetic biology. The word, even though I, it was just at the SIN Bio conference.
Yeah. In San Jose. That how you hated the name. Well, I, I'll tell you a third thing that I'll say in a sec, but what's happening is not humans generating biology from scratch. Okay. I think a better term, which I didn't coin is nature co-design. There's a natural world and certainly for at least 10,000 years since the dawn of, of agriculture, but even longer, humans have been tweaking the natural world.
In order to drive the kinds of outcomes that we want. So getting plants that we don't have where we don't have to hunt to go and, and gather them from, uh, the wild or doing all but So you're planting the
[00:35:55] Jordan Harbinger: strawberries that you liked near you instead? Yeah. Near, yes. You don't have to. Yeah.
[00:35:59] Jamie Metzl: And most of these things, our ancestors wouldn't have even known what they were.
'cause if you just go into Whole Foods, pretty much the entire. Sustainable organic section is all shit that we humans have essentially invented. If you, if you said like, show me this, show me broccoli. Yeah. 20,000 years ago, like you could look around the world, you would never find broccoli. Yeah. You'd
[00:36:21] Jordan Harbinger: never find corn.
You'd never find any of these. Somebody gave me a natural strawberry and I was like, oh, why are they so small? Yeah. Yeah. He's like, this is what a strawberry looks like. I'm like, no, strawberry fits in my, it's like a baseball. Exactly. And I take a bite out of it. That's why
[00:36:32] Jamie Metzl: I think when French people come here, it's like, what the hell?
Yeah. Is that the one? It doesn't taste good, but it looks, but what did you inject this thing with? No, they grow like that. Exactly. The basic point is science is a team sport. Mm-Hmm. It requires a lot of people coming together and because of that, as our ability to come together increases as our technologies become better, we're just able to do.
Better thing. So I don't like the term synthetic biology. I don't, I don't like the terms artificial and general intelligence because we're not, when I ask people what it is, well it's like ais that can do everything that humans can do. If we create ais that can do everything that humans do, we are screwed humans.
Well, yeah. Like we have an evolved embodied intelligence. It's 3.8 billion years we, you and I are here. Like we've done, this is our third podcast interview that we've done. Uh, first. Oh, I'm glad you know that. 'cause I was like, he's been on once before third, no third. Wow. That's great. Yeah. This is our first one in person.
Yeah. So it's the first time that we've met in personal that we've been in touch for years. There's something different about being in person. Yes, there is. And it's not just intelligence, like our bodies are covered in all of these sensors. We have all these perceptions, some of which get to the point of, oh, I'm analyzing why this is happening.
And some of them are just like, ed y had a great book called An An Immense World where he talks about every animal is like covered with all these sensors and these sensors. Our survival mechanisms. We're just figuring out, you know, what foods am I comfortable eating? Yeah. What person am I comfortable trusting?
Is this a safe environment? All these things, questions that we know to ask. Questions that we don't know how to ask. So if we made an AI that was just an AI human right, I'd actually be terrified. It's brain. It's brain only with all the sensors ripped out, right? Exactly. Yeah. Without, without, without the everything.
And so what we're doing is not creating an A GI, which again, I don't know what that is. We are creating a machine intelligence. No one looks at a dog and say, oh, like, oh, my dog is a really dumb human. Or that dolphin is a dumb human. A dog has just dog intelligence. There's better and worse dog intelligence.
There's better and worse dolphin intelligence. I'm sure. Although it's hard for us to decipher what that is. We're creating that new thing. Mm-Hmm. And that's the conversation that we should have. We're, we're making. So, and then the third thing is apropos of nothing, but I just, I said it last night and then these people got really pissed off, uh, because I was, don't invite him back again.
Exactly. Exactly. Well, no, I, I was talking about how we're entering this new age of technological, rapid technological innovation. It's gonna create all these opportunities and all of these challenges. And we have to really think about how do we govern these? How do we use these powers wisely? 'cause if we use them wisely, we unlock this amazing future.
We can cure all of these cancers and feed everybody and clothe everybody and change our models to, uh, for living. We can do it much more sustainably, even rewild, big parts of the planet.
[00:39:19] Jordan Harbinger: Hmm.
[00:39:20] Jamie Metzl: And if we get it wrong, we're massively screwed in all sorts of ways. And I, and I write about that in the book. And so I, I said, and so if all we're doing is saying, Hey, this is about consciousness raising, we're gonna be screwed.
And then I said the thing that pissed people off. So I, I said, and I, that's why I think that Greta Thunberg has been a net negative contributor to the world. Oh, you,
[00:39:40] Jordan Harbinger: you, she threw shade on Greta Shun. I threw shade that people got really pissed. Pissed. That doesn't work.
[00:39:43] Jamie Metzl: And the reason was in the beginning when she was saying, Hey, we need to be aware of climate change.
Yeah. That was actually really important. She got all these kids around the world and we need these kids. And I certainly work with lots of kids on idealistic ventures like my, uh, global interdependence movement, which she could maybe talk about later. But then everybody becomes an effing Kardashian. Well, yeah.
So Donald Trump realized, Hey, it's an attention economy. If you get attention, you can translate attention into power and money. Mm-Hmm. So he realized I'm just gonna be the most outrageous on every issue I. And Greta Thunberg is like Greta Thunberg Kardashian. It's like first she was climate and outrage climate, then don't go to school.
And now it's like, well, it's about Hamas, right? And it, and it's like, so she saw climate in, uh, education, so now she's bored. No, but, but the thing is, when an attention economy, right? You have to be the Kardashian, you have to be at the far end of extremism. You have to be so outrageous that you are capturing that attention, right?
'cause if you don't, someone else is gonna be more outrageous than you. And so rather than people saying, Hey, what's the North Star? What am I trying to actually achieve? People? And it's on all sides. It's Trump, it's a OC, right? It's Greta Thunberg are saying, how can I be the most outrageous person?
Because then I'm going to get that a attention and money and, and instead, and again, the reason I've written the book, because what we should be saying is what's our North star? So if you're a ancient sailor, he said, I'm trying to get from here to there. There's where I'm going. There are gonna be winds blowing in all different directions.
I'm gonna have to tack this way. I'm gonna have to attack this. I'm gonna have to learn, I'm gonna have to adapt, but I know that's where I'm going. Mm-Hmm. If we don't have that conversation about values and goals, and this is just a, Hey, there's a bunch of technology, let's look at the technology. If it's not about where are we going and how do we get there?
We're going to get lost in a really dangerous way.
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If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code, please just email meJordan@jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show now for the rest of part one with Jamie Metzel. Yeah. There are activists that do not go into the extreme zone and they're still doing a good job.
And look at Malala uses that. She doesn't go wonderful. She's not on TikTok screwing around
[00:44:14] Jamie Metzl: with other causes. Exactly. And, and she's saying, here's what I'm trying to achieve. Right. It's not like, oh my God, the camera's there, I'm going there. Right. It's like run over there. Yeah. It's like there and, and that's why she's amazing.
It's like there are all these women and girls who are being oppressed. I have my personal story. Mm-Hmm. And my courage, which gives me this platform. And I'm gonna really focus on what are all of the things that I can do. So I'm not saying, don't be in front of the camera, obviously. Say that straight to the camera.
Oh, sorry. I didn't know which one We have. One, two. There's a lot. 2, 3, 4. Take your pick. Um, sorry, I looked at camera before. What I'm saying is right. This is about values. It's not about attention, it's not, it's about values. And sometimes getting, and I'm here with you on this podcast, obviously, so fighting for your values, you have to fight for 'em in the place where their fate is being determined.
But we have to say, well, here's what we're fighting for. We're not fighting for outrage, we're not fighting for attention, we're fighting for
[00:45:08] Jordan Harbinger: desired outcomes. You mentioned in the book about these Chinese engineered babies, or maybe I just took that note based on something you No, no. Both. This stuff is amazing and it's a little worrisome, right?
So essentially children are being bred as kind of a creepy word, but whatever, with super high IQs.
[00:45:24] Jamie Metzl: Well, can you explain this? Yeah. I a crap job already. I can tell by your face. I've already blown it. Yeah, no, no, it, it's a few different things woven together. So I'll, I'll even go back. Yeah. The first time you and I spoke was around the time, I think it was 2019 for the launch of my then book Hacking Darwin.
And that book was on the future of human genetic engineering, when a big piece of that was human assisted reproduction. So in the late 2018 when that book was on its way to being printed. I called my publisher and I said, we need to pull this book out of production. Oh, they love, they love that. And I've got bad news and good news.
And so the bad news is that in the book I write, it's about the future of human genetic engineering. And we can't publish a book about human genetic engineering after the first CRISPR babies have been born. And those were the were genome edited babies that were born in China. The good news is that in the book, I predicted that this would happen.
I predicted it would happen in China, and explained why I thought it was going to happen in China. Mm-Hmm. And I included a list of five specific genes that I thought were going to be the first targets of this genetic manipulation in China. And CCR five, which was that gene was one of the genes on my list.
And so for this, which was the hardback version. All we need to do is I just need to add a couple of sentences saying, and this thing that I've exactly predicted has, has happened. It's easier to change a child's unborn, an unborn child's gene than it is to pull a book outta print and add something. So, but, so, but here's you found out, here's, here's where we're potentially going.
And that is just week and a half ago I was in Lisbon. I was the keynote speaker for the International Embryologists Association, which actually in my mind is an fascinating field. But we're Lisbon, Ohio's really nicest time of year. Yeah. What's that? Ohio is great society. Exactly. I think we're, we're traveling to all the same places.
Um, so we are moving to a world because of all of our new capabilities, including genome sequencing, we're able to understand process and understand these vast amounts of data. Right now, actually yesterday the Southern Baptist had a vote. They saw that and they were, yeah, they're voting against IVF, which is in my mind, deeply unfortunate 'cause so much beautiful life has been brought into the world in in IVF.
And so with IVF in vitro fertilization, which has now been around for 45 years, the mother's eggs are extracted from her body fertilized with the biological father's sperm grown for a certain number of days and then put back into the mother. And that's why I'm sure there are lots of people who are actually listening to this podcast.
Who are IVF babies and IVFA Wonderful Miracle for Life. There's a more recent tool called pre-implantation genetic testing. And what that means is. So when you have this fertilized egg, you first, you have to grow it in a laboratory environment. And so you, everybody knows this from high school biology or even before is you start from one cell and then you're two cells, then your four cells, then your eight cells.
And so after about five days of that kind of replication, you extract a few cells from that little zygote, that little ball of cells, and then you can sequence them. And so because the, essentially the genetic recipe for us is in, is in every cell, then you can understand something about that future, what it would be a future child.
So right now that's used to say, all right, this child is going to have some deadly single gene mutation disorder. There's some kind of diseases and disorders where it's just one letter's off. Mm-Hmm. And then you could have a deadly disorder as a result of that. And so if you're doing IVF and you're choosing seen 10 embryos, you could say, well, I'm just going to, I'm not going to pick one of a kid that's gonna die when they're three years old, right?
I'm gonna pick one of a kid who's not gonna die when they're three or five or whatever years old. But because there's so much potential information in that cell, when you sequence it well, what can you learn from that extracted and sequence cell? Well, the question is, what can you learn from human genetics?
And the answer is a lot. And so we're moving up the complexity scale. Of being able to say, all right, in addition to these single gene mutation or simple genetic patterns for things like eye color, how complex of traits can we predict? And I'm actually on the advisory board of a company genomic prediction that's doing that.
But there's, it's called polygenic risk scoring. But really it's just gonna be polygenic analysis where you say, alright, so we have these 10, we can now order them roughly from likely tallest to likely shortest. Maybe we can rank order them likely highest genetic component of IQ to lowest genetic component of iq, which would have big implications for all sorts of things.
And then there's a newer technology, and I was, it was not so long ago in Kyoto, which Kyoto, of course is in Pennsylvania. Yes. Um, and I went to the, the, the laboratory where they're, um, pioneers, uh, in a thing called in vitro gametogenesis. But basically what it means is you take. An adult cell, like a skin cell.
So you do a skin graft, you have millions of cells just from a, a little scrape of your skin. You use a thing, you induce those adult cells into stem cells. So it's called induced pluripotent stem cells. You're taking a cell backward, well, you can reverse it backward and evolutionary time. So now you have a stem cell.
Then you take it forward in time by inducing those skin cells into stem cells or stem cells or cells that can become anything. And then to egg precursor cells and then to egg cells. So now wait a minute. You have a million egg cells, like I talked about those 10. This is real. This exists right now. It exists now, not yet for human applications.
I see. This is in in mice. This is incredible. Incredible. It's incredible. So now you have a million. Eggs
[00:51:33] Jordan Harbinger: instead of like the 12 that got taken out. Exactly. You know,
[00:51:35] Jamie Metzl: every, we all have friends mean we're, I'm older than you, but we all have these friends. So I went and I had my eggs extracted and I had three eggs and I'm so depressed or whatever.
Now you've got 3 million, you've got a million or three. It's, it literally disguises the limit. There's trillions of cells in your body. So now you have a million cells and you have an automated system in this, this is still a hypothetical, but you have an automated system. You grow those million cells for five days in an automated way.
You extract a few cells from each of those million. You sequence each one of those, and now you're choosing from a million options. So forget genome editing when we have that happen with these CRISPR bees. You're choosing from a million options just within the random mutation. That is just part of biology, right?
That's how we evolve. You say, or what am I selecting for? What are my priorities? And say, well, I, you know, I want to have, you know, high, whatever genetic component of iq. I want tall, I want short. I want somebody who's more likely to be an Olympic sprinter than somebody else. There's a lot of choice. Our ancestors took chickens, wild chickens, laying one egg a month and knowing nothing about the science of genetics, just with using the power of, of reproduction and pushed reproduction, turned those into domesticated chickens, laying one egg a day.
How far can we go? Who knows? But certainly if we decide that selecting for the genetic component of iq, and there's a whole debate on what is IQ and whether it's valuable or biased or anything like that. But we'll leave that aside for now. We can really, really push evolution. And then on top of that, we already have this capability, which has already been applied unethically, in my view, to humans of then going into the genome.
Let's say you pick that one in a million embryos, pre implanted embryos that you hope to implant, then you can go in and do genome editing on that to say, all right, here are, you know, some number of changes. And again, everything is moving up the complexity scale. So. Five years ago, would you say? Well, you could go in and make one change, like change, you know, one letter to another letter.
But now there are growing capacities to make multiple changes at the same time. Obviously these are very complex, evolved biological systems. It's 3.8 billion years of trade-offs. We don't even close to fully understand how these systems work. Wow. But these are capabilities that we already have. And as we were saying before, these capabilities are getting better and better every single day.
So, you know, our biology is about as complex as it's been for millions of years. This is why, but our capabilities Yeah. Are increasing at this
[00:54:16] Jordan Harbinger: exponential rate. So eventually, do you think most people will be born like this? Because it'll be like, look, you can take your chances. And maybe like super conservative religious people will be like, look, I'm gonna let God choose fine.
But for the rest of us, it might be like, nope. Uh, six four, no diseases, no degeneration over time. Super long lifespan. Yeah. Just, I mean, pick, I like light green, blue-ish eyes. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like you could pick everything. No leg hair on the female, like you could just pick anything you want.
[00:54:48] Jamie Metzl: Yeah. Yeah. So, so it's crazy. My, uh, my partner, my girlfriend is younger than I am, and so that is the only exposure that I have to TikTok that TikTok exists. Geez. And so she had this thing where she was showing me that it was like this meme, I'm looking for a man in finance six five with blue eyes and it, and apparently it's like young people around the world are like doing versions of this.
So in my last book, hacking Darwin, I have a chapter called The End of Sex, which is exactly about this, that nature has an error rate. Mm-Hmm. When somebody, and I hope this happens to nobody, but when somebody says, oh, I'm having this child and this child has a deadly genetic disorder, right? You don't say, wow, that's Darwinism at work, that disorder, that's just part of being a human being, right?
Natural selection didn't work out for you. Sorry about that. It's like, but that, that's just the thing. 'cause we're always mutating some help, some hurt, and some do nothing. And so it's a distribution. And so you showed up here on the No, we say F that we're gonna do everything we can to fight it. We're gonna do everything we can to save your, your child, which is the right answer.
So nature has a built-in error rate. And so if and when we get to the point where having a child through the application of science IVF. Pre-implantation genetic testing, and if appropriate, genome editing of pre implanted embryos. If people come to see that as a safer option than reproducing the quote unquote old fashioned way.
And the old fashioned way isn't even the old fashioned way. I mean, like when we say the old fashioned way, it's like all of these technological interventions and ultrasound and going to a hospital and the incubator and all those kinds, like that's not the old fashioned way, that's the new fashion way.
That's true. If it gets to the point, which I, I think is already happening in, in some parts of the world where people perceive. That doing this through science is better and safer than people are going to do it. And then when we have this optionality of like picking embryos, maybe picking from more embryos, maybe making a small number of, of edits, people are going to do it and people are going to do it more.
And as people perceive benefits, they're going to wanna do that. And that doesn't mean this should be unrestricted. Actually. I think that societies should restrict some of these things because not everybody understands what's good for them. Yeah. We talked about, in the beginning of our conversation, we talked about these, these interventions where people are so desperate to slow the aging process.
You could read something in Men's Health Magazine and they go, um, I'm gonna do that systemic. Sure. Life changing intervention. 'cause I read something in Men's health. Right. So I think, I think we're going to get there, but we need to be cautious.
[00:57:21] Jordan Harbinger: You are about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about junk science.
[00:57:26] Clip: There is this anti-establishment sentiment that leads to blanket science denial, which is enormously problematic and seems to be growing. There is so much false information on the internet. It's very easy to just facelessly claim that legitimate information is false. We're having to reckon with the fact that the internet is doing this to us.
It's very much a double-edged sword. It's giving us all the information and so it's very hard to like censor things, but then also we have all of these. You know, lies and charlatans and this stuff propagates like wildfire and it's an enormous problem. It's just such an alluring narrative. It's so easy to pedal.
We want it to be true so bad, but it's not real. You need to be equipped with some ability, some set of skills to be able to discern the validity of information, right? It particularly scientific platforms like YouTube have had to make adjustments to their algorithm because they have come to understand how much they have been facilitating this destruction of our sociological fabric by allowing people to travel down these rabbit holes.
It's very attractive narrative, right? It gives you sense of purpose. It's a big problem. That's why we're in the post-truth era. Whatever you wanna find on the internet, it's there all the truth and all the lies. When you wrap your identity around a, a false cause, you are eliminating yourself from some other possible contribution that you could be making.
I'm crusading against this thing. Yeah, we should remain driven and, uh, encourage others to, to do the same. I think it's the biggest problem facing mankind.
[00:58:55] Jordan Harbinger: If you wanna increase your scientific literacy and not get suckered into believing, weaponized, hogwash, and passing it off to your friends and family is fact, check out episode 7 45 with Dave Farina on the Jordan Harbinger Show.
Alright, that's it for part one. We're gonna be back in a few days with part two. All things Jamie Metzel will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show.
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