1015: Jamie Metzl | AI Solutions for Hunger, Health, & Habitat Part Two

1015: Jamie Metzl | AI Solutions for Hunger, Health, & Habitat Part Two

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. If you aren't investing on autonomous killer robots, you're committing treason against your country because your people are gonna be taken over. Your lives are are going to be lost, your kids are gonna be kidnapped. But if you do, you're also pushing forward something that's gonna be very hard for humans to stop.

'cause once there are all these autonomous killer robots everywhere, can we guarantee that we're going to control them forever? That's Skynet. We can't.

[00:00:31] 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 and performers, even the occasional legendary actor, four star, general rocket scientist or arms dealer.

And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and 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. Part two, with Jamie Metzel on AI and the medical revolution slash progress revolution that that all entails. If you haven't heard part one yet, definitely go back and check that out before playing this part.

Otherwise, it's not gonna make any sense. Alright, here we go, part two with Jamie Metzel.

Tell me about how they grew a new ear for that woman in Mexico. Yeah. This is pretty amazing, right? Because right now, you know, people get bad kidneys or their kidneys go bad. That might not be that big of a deal. Yeah. You know? So

[00:01:46] Jamie Metzl: I'm gonna tell you about that and then I'm gonna talk, I'm gonna pivot to the future of animal agriculture.

'cause it's the same thing. Sure. So as we understand these complex biological systems, Mm-Hmm. You're talking about stem cells. A moment ago we realized that stuff grows, like humans grow and parts of humans grow. And that's just biology at work. And so as we understand more of how biology works, our ability to grow things and to manage how things grow is increasing.

So there's a whole new field of regenerative medicine. And so there are people who are saying, well, how do we take a tissue? And, and it could be any tissue, it could be skin, it could be blood, it could be cartilage, it could be whatever. And say, well, how do we grow it? And then how do we steer and manage the growth?

So in regenerative medicine, there are people who are creating new, for example, tracheas or parts of humans that maybe yours doesn't work or maybe it's, it needed to be removed because of cancer. And, and then you, you, you can 3D print a scaffold and then you can populate that scaffold with cells and it could be your own cells, right?

Which are taken from your body and manipulated so that you can basically grow an organ. And we're still in the early days of that. And so there is the thing of somebody who grew from cartilage, they grew an ear and somebody had had their, they lost their ear through an accident. Mm-Hmm. And so they basically gave them the new ear and they stretched the skin over the ear.

Now this crazy, this young woman has a new ear, and it's just an ear. It functions like an ear. It, it's an ear. But then. You have these physicians who were working in regenerative medicine and then they said, Hey, wait a second, we're just growing tissue. We're just growing animal tissues. 'cause as your listeners know, humans are just animals.

We're we're magical, wonderful animals, but animals, we could grow anything. And they said, well, why don't we, rather than killing 72 billion land animals per year, which is what we do, that's crazy. 72 billion, 200 million metric tons of fish. What if we could grow those animals from stem cells? Right? And if we could do it at scale and at a competitive cost.

We could change everything because right now, half of the arable land on Earth is used for agriculture. Three quarters of that, and about a quarter of all human greenhouse gas am emissions come from industrial animal agriculture. When people think about agriculture, they think about old McDonald's farm, right?

That's not where the animal products that you use come from. These, they come from these massive industrial animal farms where the animals are pumped full of antibiotics. Mm-hmm. To keep them from dying, from being crammed together and to facilitate their growth. Uh, huge environmental climate implications, huge implications for deforestation.

All the, and not to mention the cruelty. You extract a few cells, which can be done just with a simple biopsy. The animal can have a wonderful day. Mm-Hmm. Even while that is, is happening and, and keep on living. Then you grow those cells in a laboratory and transfer them to an industrial bioreactor. And feed them with the appropriate nutrients.

And then you can grow these animal products. 11 years ago, the world's first cell culture, now they like to be called cultivated, but hamburger, uh, was developed by Mark Post in the Netherlands, and the total cost of that was about $325,000 for that one burger. It's a pricey burger. Now it's $10 to do that exact same thing.

So everything is on this cost curve and there's huge energy. There's a whole industry that's going into this cell cultivated animal product. And, and just for every, in everything, whether it's milk or meat, even human breast milk, there are companies that are saying all, we're gonna do this and we're gonna grow.

It's not an impossible burger where we're mimicking a burger. It's actually biologically Yeah, the same. And so that's this whole field that, and if we do that, let's just say we take half of our, so we go from those 72 billion land, uh, animals to 36 billion. We just cut it in half. And because half of the, certainly the beef that we eat is just ground beef.

When you go to McDonald's or Burger King, who knows what's in those, who knows what that thing is. Yeah. So if, if, if, if it was the exact same animal products, but it was just better and safer and it didn't have all the bacterial infections that we come, it didn't have all of the cruelty, we could replace the animal fats maybe with healthy, uh, omega, omega plants.

Sure. People's lives would be unchanged because like, deprivation doesn't work right. People say You should do this 'cause it's the right thing. People won't, uh, won't do it. But we make it easy for people. And let's just say we, we were to cut back our industrial animal usage by half. We would be forced.

We'd have so much free land. Yeah. We could say, all right, I can't build more shopping malls and soccer fields. 'cause not, not everybody gets their own soccer field. We'd be forced to just rewild huge, like just grow some trees and put some wolves in there. Huge meaning like the size of Canada, huge. Really parts of the world just because we couldn't use them.

And that would go a long way toward solving, um, huge problems like environmental degradation and climate change. Actually, in the book I talk about, um, one of my, my very, very dear friends is this wonderful, um, Spanish and now living in, in, in the United States National Geographic Explorer Sure. Named Enri Sala.

I went back and forth with my editor 'cause I kept adding something that was in the original manscript. It kept getting edited out and I kept right. I talked to him about a s felt Spaniard with an amigo montoya ponytail. And so your listeners may know they didn't like that from the princess bride. You know that little swordsman, I'm Nigo you killed my father prepared.

So they kept taking it. I said, no, no, it's gotta be there. So Enri, he's one of the leaders. What started out as an effort to try to turn 30% of the oceans into protected nature preserves where people can't do industrial activities, particularly fish. And they did these calculations that if you protected those 30%, the actual availability of fish in the other 70% would go up.

Like you would get more fish by not fishing in these protect areas just right, because they're breeding grounds and stuff. They're breeding v we're just decimating them And, and in, in this relentless way. Now that's grown to 30% of the entire face. So if you have 30% of the entire face of the Earth is designated as not for commercial activities, you could have tourism, you could do all these, these other things.

It would help go a long way towards solving climate and environment, all of these other things. And so just thinking a little bit differently about two things, and I write about them in the book. Um, one is food supply. Yeah. And particularly animal products. How do we source them differently? And the other are industrial raw materials.

So in our, the world that we benefit from, it's all about cutting down stuff and digging up stuff. Like that's how we get most of the things that we need. And it's taken us a long, a long way. But there are new models. How do we grow the kind of materials that we just One example, which I love, this is, this is good news before,

[00:08:58] Jordan Harbinger: because we don't all have to become vegetarian.

Sorry, Gabriel, my producer's vegan. He is like. So we don't, we don't need to do that. No,

[00:09:04] Jamie Metzl: but bless Gabriel. It's a, it's a great

[00:09:05] Jordan Harbinger: thing. He's doing his part. He's

[00:09:06] Jamie Metzl: doing, and I'm

[00:09:07] Jordan Harbinger: not,

[00:09:08] Jamie Metzl: if you could, and I'm, I'm not. I, I write about it in the book. I'm from Kansas City. Yeah, you gotta eat. If you don't eat Kansas City Barbecue, that's like, you know, being at the Vatican and saying, yeah, the Pope is bullshit.

It's like, you know, gonna get emails about that. Thanks a lot. Yeah, exactly. No, thanks a lot. Jamie. Greta Thunberg and the Pope, by the way, speaking of the Pope, I just tweeted this morning. Incredible. So the, the G seven meeting is happening right now in Italy and the Pope has gone to, I think it's in Puglia because he wants to talk about AI safety.

The Pope has gone, the pope wants to talk about a i safety, which is amazing because, and I, that's why I think it's so great. I don't think the Pope is like coding, right? This guy this's this guy who probably doesn't even know how to use a OL, but he gets that it's about values to VOL, that it's, you don't need to know coding.

Yeah. To know that something really big is happening and you don't need to know coding to say, I want my voice. To be incorporated in how people are thinking. Sure. About how the future should be. So, so coming back to what I was saying about spider silk. Spider silk is like the coolest substance in the world, at least according to me.

It's stronger than. Stronger than Kevlar. Yeah. By weight, right? Yeah. Yeah. Stretchier than our stretchies elastics. And you could say, oh my God, that's so great. Why don't we just do for spiders silk, what we do for silkworm silk? You just get a bunch of spiders, put 'em in a big box and just let 'em do their thing.

What? They'll eat each other probably. Exactly. 'cause they're cannibals. So, exactly. Right. And so then well, how do we do it? And so that's where the, these tools of, again, they call it synthetic biology. It's not synthetic biology, it's nature co-design. We're tweaking biological systems. So we, and I didn't do it, but we, we've developed e coli bacteria that generate spider silk proteins.

Wow. Just like we have these bacteria that generate insulin that everybody takes. Isn't that also e

[00:10:52] Jordan Harbinger: coli?

[00:10:53] Jamie Metzl: It just like, yeah. Yeah. We call it, it's like a workhorse e coli and bakeries and things like that. Uh, and then now we have goats that in their milk. Are producing spider silk proteins. I, I feel like I've

[00:11:05] Jordan Harbinger: read

[00:11:05] Jamie Metzl: about this a few years ago.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

[00:11:07] Jordan Harbinger: So this goat milk has spider silk proteins and it can later be Yeah. Spun into Exactly. Yeah.

[00:11:13] Jamie Metzl: And now there's genetically engineered silk worms. Rather than producing silk worm silk, these silk worms produce spider silk. I see. And so that's the thing is, it's like we live in a world of manipulated natural system.

You could say, Hey, let's let silkworms be silkworms. But that's not what we're doing for thousands of years. Right. We've effed with silk worms. That's why we have, have you rip a hole in your

[00:11:36] Jordan Harbinger: silk shirt? That's not gonna happen. Now you wearing a, a spider shirt.

[00:11:40] Jamie Metzl: Exactly. Exactly. And somebody tries

[00:11:41] Jordan Harbinger: to stab you in the knife bends or, right.

Exactly. Exactly. That's not how it works, by the way. But

[00:11:45] Jamie Metzl: now there's so many different materials, right, that we can think of, well, how do we generate them in other ways? And there's, for all of these things, there's issue of cost and scale. 'cause we, it's not just doing it. It's doing it better, faster, cheaper than these other ways.

And so that, I don't wanna undersell how difficult that is the problem, but there's, there's a path and, and the reason we know there's a path is because we have these natural systems all around us. So Carl, Ben, I write about this in the book, in the 19th century, he was in his little workshop in Germany and, and he was kind of imagining the car.

Yeah. If he had a Porsche parked in his workshop and he could just go look around the Porsche and take pieces apart and analyze it and sequence its genome, machine genome, it would've been much easier for him to do that. So we already have. These biological systems, we have systems around us that have already solved problems that we're trying to solve.

We're trying to solve the problem of data storage. Mm-Hmm. Because we talk about the cloud as if our data's floating up. So, but it's all in these massive data centers that are taking huge amounts of energy and every two years we're creating more data than all of human history up to that point. Really, we're doing it over and over and over.

So we're gonna have to build a world of data centers and then we're gonna have to build nuclear reactors to power those data centers. It's like the old lady who, who swallowed the fly. Or you can say, Hey, nature has already evolved. The greatest data storage mechanism in all of history, which is D-N-A-D-N-A, under the right conditions, can store data for 5 million years versus 40 to 60 for magnetic tape.

It's a million times denser. Mm-Hmm, than silicon. We could store all of the data. In the world in one chipping container.

[00:13:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I read so, and what's funny is I read about this probably five years ago. Yeah. And back then it was, I think it was all Data on Earth can fit in a shoebox, but now there's more.

Yeah. You mean the shoebox can go in the shipping container? Yeah, that's right. It's the shoe. It's a shipping container full of shoebox.

[00:13:42] Jamie Metzl: But, but that's the thing is, and so again, that doesn't mean that DNA data storage is now better than Silicon data storage. It's not yet. Maybe there, there's all kinds of innovation about using graphene and other substances and computer chips and transistors, and that's all exciting.

But we have these evolved natural systems that have their own type of genius. And as I was saying before, we have these new capabilities of understanding that genius, interrogating that genius and saying like, well, how can we manipulate it? To our purposes. Mm-Hmm. And how can we do so in a way that's sustainable?

I know there are some people who are gonna maybe listen to this podcast and say, well, I don't wanna screw with nature. I love nature. Yeah. And it's like, I love nature, I love, you know, going hiking in the canyons in la and it's like, which, it's such a preposterous argument because the reason you love going hiking in those canyons is that there are no predators there who are going to eat you.

Right. Your ancestors are gonna say, oh my God, I'm so excited. I'm just gonna be totally go walk alone. Totally, totally unexposed with my Lulus, you know, going and walking in those canyons so I can get eaten by a saber tooth tiger, a pterodactyl or, or whatever was there. It's because we've entirely manipulated these environments because we can just eat food that we buy at, at the store, have it delivered to our house, keep it in your backpack, that we don't spend our entire life desperately chasing calories.

So we live in. A manufactured world, a manufactured by. So the question is not technology, yes or no, or even radical technology, yes or no? We're already there. The question is, which radical technologies I. Do we apply and how to build the kind of future that we want. That's true. I noticed all those people hiking or wearing shoes,

[00:15:26] Jordan Harbinger: so Yeah,

[00:15:26] Jamie Metzl: exactly.

Yeah.

[00:15:27] Jordan Harbinger: The argument breaks down at some point. Exactly. When I hear about DNA being used for storage. Yeah. And being able to take bits of our DNA from our skin and use it like this, just. All makes, and I'm not that guy. It all makes me go like, okay, we were designed by aliens. Come on man. This is all just super high tech stuff and we're learning how to emulate it, but it's a few years out, a few more years out.

It's like, and I'm, if you're new to the show, I am not that guy. Right. I'm not, I usually bring that stuff up, never. Right. Because I leave that to the stoners who do six hour podcast with a guy, the aliens guy from the history channel. . It just absolutely blows my mind. I mean, it's really, it's really something.

[00:16:03] Jamie Metzl: It's incredible. What, what I would say is, I mean, I am, I think the design of biological systems is incredible. Hmm. But I'm you making guess I'm not an intelligent design person and I have actual mathematical proof, which I'll tell you in, in, in a second.

I think it's pretty incredible that these systems evolved. I mean, that is just wild. Amazing. It's wild. You don't need, can people say, oh my God, the human body is so complex and if one thing goes wrong, you're dead. It must be intelligent design. It's like, can you imagine somebody at a whiteboard and saying, all right, we're gonna design a humans.

If humans were intelligent, design zero, fail safe. I know how to break it. It's like, yeah, so there's a body and then there's a head and you just twist off the head and you can just twist it on someplace else and it snaps in and snaps out, and then you, and then you can keep going. Can you imagine somebody at that intelligent design white product?

It's like, I, I, I've got a plan. And they go, yeah, what's your plan? Well, as you get older, you lose hair on the top of your head, but random hairs start growing sideways out of your ears. Yeah. 'cause oh yeah, that's intelligent design. That's a great, so that's my one mathematical proof against it. The second thing is like someone said, I've gotta design your brain is really important.

So we're gonna put it like right in the middle of your head so it can be protected. Mm-Hmm. And we're gonna have, you know, all this armor of your cranium that's just protecting 'cause that's where it needs to be. And then we have your testicles, which are really important for reproduction and we're just gonna dangle them in a sack.

Kind of totally exposing you just walk around with those things in the middle, it's like, oh yeah, that's a great plan. If it would. Okay. If it was me who's int intelligence's, like, no, we're gonna make like a armor with spikes. Mm-Hmm. And that's gonna protect your testicles. Yeah. So we've evolved.

[00:17:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Tell me about, well on that note, tell me about living cement.

This is fascinating as well. Yeah. So it's

[00:17:51] Jamie Metzl: like I was saying before, we have these products that are part mm-Hmm. Of modern life and cement. Concrete, fertilizer, all of these things. We live the lives that we live because of these super materials. VLA writes very convincingly, uh, uh, about this. And so with cement, I mean, cement is everywhere.

That's why our cities can grow so rapidly. China in like three years, about a decade ago, use more cement than the entire United States using the entire 20th century. So these things are just, and cement is really useful. It takes a huge amount of energy to make cement. So cement is, is a massive contributor to climate change.

And yet when we look at the natural world, you see stuff happening so quickly at scale. And so for example, in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a 50 mile blob of Sargassum, which is a form of seaweed. And basically there was run out through the Mississippi River of fertilizers coming through. I see. And it just spurred, this goes so 50 miles of sargassum that grew relatively quickly.

So we have these materials that grow really, really fast. And so there are research being done, and I talk about this in, in Boulder, Colorado and in Amsterdam and, and other places of saying, alright, can we use natural systems to come to cement? So the US Air Force is now, um, working with these biological materials and basically all what you do is you're in a desert.

Let's say you're at war and you need to create a runway. You spray these biological materials on the sand and they form a bond, a natural bond. Mm-Hmm. Connecting the sand and turning that sand into a hardened runway. And so if you have these kinds of source materials, this company Prometheus in in Boulders is working on this, you can say, all right, we're gonna start with Santa and we're gonna add these things.

And then one. Essentially bio brick is gonna become two, and then until you turn off, two will become four, and four will become a kind of like the cells that we talked about in, in the body. So it's not that we're gonna not use cement. We live in a world where we need cement, we need we, it's not that we're not going to use fertilizer.

We're gonna have to have some kind of stimulant to help our plants grow. The question is, can we think of new and better and more sustainable ways of doing those things? Yeah. And that's where these tools, and again, it's not just biotechnology, it's the intersection of genetics, ai, biotechnology, and other technologies that give us these superpowers that feel like magic.

But just like you were saying, the stuff we're doing now is magic to our ancestors. Yeah. It's if you had gone to our ancestors who were doing Home Spun or Wine Plus and said like this shirt. The cloth was spun in a factory. I think this one's from India, and it was just on a machine. It was again, how many WFS would it take?

Just like how is that even possible? Yeah. What kind of machine? How is the machine run? Everything. So we live in a WTF world and we're moving toward an extra WTF before genetically modified

[00:20:57] Jordan Harbinger: pigs. Kill us all. Spoil yourself with the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

This episode is sponsored in part by Transcend. You've probably heard me rave about all sorts of tools and techniques I use to stay at the top of the game. It's usually a little, the hack here and there, but today I wanna share something that has been a game changer for me. My experience with Transcend, these guys are the leading telehealth name in the us.

They've got the credentials to back it up nationwide in all 50 states with a solid reputation in quality care. But let's back up. What is telehealth? ID didn't really know that this was even a thing. Think of it as expert doctors that you retain to help with specific issues like hormone replacement, fertility.

I don't want more kids. Plenty of you out there are trying to jump into that. I get it. Lord help you. Every medication is made right here in the us so this is not like shady. Wee wee pills from Pakistan or whatever. It's not stuff that somebody made in a storage locker. I'm really careful about what I put in my body.

So I went through this journey with Transcend myself for several months. This is not something where they went to sponsor me and I was like, okay, this is something that I sought out. And I was like, Hey, we should partner up. They are legit. I'm ready and excited to share them with you. I started with this simple but really thorough health assessment, so blood work and yada yada.

Based on that, a double board certified neurosurgeon, along with a team of regenerative medicine specialists, crafted a personalized health protocol just for me. So the focus was on prevention longevity. I'm not talking about like weird injecting my kids' blood into me type stuff. Look, maybe that has legs, but that's not what we're doing here.

I wanted joint health and some hormone stuff, and I wanna prevent other stuff before it starts. And in today's world where biohacking and proactive health measures are more important than ever, transcend is at the forefront. So look at the rise in medical weight loss solutions like Ozempic, which we've talked about on the show.

Or the discussions around testosterone levels in men Transcend is they're offering natural methods in the latest science to tackle these. I'm not talking about, when I say natural, I'm not talking about like essential oils. Okay. I am talking about like, I. Ways to do things without just mainlining tons of drugs.

But they also use, of course, science and pharma to tackle these issues without just sticking you on stuff that you don't understand. And that is untested. And by the way, if you're wondering why you should get a blood panel when you feel fine, that's what I did. Transcend undercovers. What you can't see. I was massively vitamin D deficient.

I had some hormone janky stuff going on. It's all about knowing your body inside and out. No big surprise here, I suppose. But I'm 44. I had some pretty low testosterone levels, uh, and now I don't, and I didn't have to go on the juice. I used some other methods to get back on track and I have the blood work to prove it.

So that's been a game changer, of course in the gym for my joints, for my body, uh, for my waistline and other areas where I will spare you the details for the time being. So if you're like me and you think about what you invest in your health, I recommend you get started with an intake form by going to transcend company.com/jordan.

You'll get 15% off your first order. Alternately, if you're just like, what the hell are you talking about? But it sounds like it might be for me, email me. With questionsJordan@jordanharbinger.com. I am a long-term partner at Transcend and I'm happy to help where I can. If you're wondering how I book all these amazing folks for the show, it is about my network.

I know you're not booking a podcast, but for your work or personal life, nothing beats a stronger network. It is the best insurance policy that money could never buy. I'm teaching you how to build that for free for yourself over its six minute networking.com relationship building skills, all down to earth, non cringey, super easy stuff that just takes a few minutes a day and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to that course.

So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, it is free. No credit card nonsense necessary over@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Jamie Metzel. We are running out of the type of sand we need to make concrete so this bio cement can't be we. I did an episode on sand with this guy Vince Bier and he talks about like Sand Ma.

Well Lincoln in the show, oh no, people are Seal sand Mafia and

[00:24:41] Jamie Metzl: steal it. Incredible. Yeah, it is incredible.

[00:24:43] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I saw, I got a whiff of that when I was at the Dead Sea in Israel like 25 years ago. Yeah. They put these giant stones in there and I was like, oh, what are two bad? There's all these rocks, you know?

And they're like, we had to do that 'cause people were dredging the mud out and selling it for like cosmetic use. Yeah,

[00:24:57] Jamie Metzl: yeah, yeah.

[00:24:57] Jordan Harbinger: And then there's these beaches in India where there's just no sand. Yeah. And there's people stealing it. And if you go there and you try and like the people who need to use the water, they're getting killed by the pirates who are still, it's like sand pie receipt.

It's crazy. Yeah, yeah,

[00:25:09] Jamie Metzl: yeah.

[00:25:09] Jordan Harbinger: Absolutely nuts. I know that there's enviro pigs and salmon that mature faster. I mean, this is all Yeah. It's amazing. It's, it's the same

[00:25:16] Jamie Metzl: kind of thing is so people say, I just want pigs to be pigs, or I want chickens to be chickens. Mm-Hmm. It's like we are late to that. Yeah.

We've been effing with these animals. These are domesticated animals and we've supersized them. We've hacked them, we've done everything. So enviro pigs, uh, that are genetically engineered to make them impervious to many viral infections. Mm-Hmm. And in some cases, to grow faster and to process different nutrients differently, it can just save a lot of life, actually, even of pig life.

Because when they have these pathogenic outbreaks among pigs, sometimes we have to kill millions. Tens of millions of pigs get slaughtered. The same thing is true, uh, with these essentially super salmon. So the basic story I is that, forgive me if I, I get this wrong. Pacific salmon grow faster, Atlantic salmon tastes better.

And so we've gone, because it used to be that most of us ate beef and pork, and then there was the fish as the new white meat. Sure. So now everybody wants to eat fish. And so we started eating so much salmon that we couldn't take it naturally. Right? And so now we have all of these salmon farms and we have to eat something.

And so fish seems like a good idea, at least to me for now. But then the question is, well, how can we make these systems more productive? 'cause even the salmon farms where most of the salmon we eat come from have become quite horrible places. Yeah. Where they're full of antibiotics, they're full of salmon swimming in, in waste.

And so it's, it's the question, if we could, and which we can make the delicious Atlantic salmon grow 50% faster by giving them a few genes from the Pacific salmon and, and a few small other genetic modifications. So you'd have bigger salmon and more salmon, you'd have to kill less salmon. Is that a good idea?

Mm-Hmm. There's not a complete answer to it, but it seems like a, something that we have to consider. And, and there's a company, Aqua Bounty, Aqua Advantage, that's already doing this. Now, there are these companies that are growing salmon essentially in these massive inland aquariums. So if you have these genetically altered salmon that grow bigger, faster, and you have them in filtered systems so they're not exposed to all these bad things, so they're not getting these infections, it seems to me it's a pretty good way to get the salmon.

Is it better for everyone to become a vegetarian? Probably in some cosmic way. Mm-Hmm. Yes. But it's just It's not happening. Yeah. For now, it's not going to happen. So if you say, well, our strategy is we're gonna be all in. On a utopian, a wonderful utopian vision, and that's all we're going to do. I think that's really dangerous.

The thing is, we're we need these animal products for the foreseeable future. How do we get them in the most sustainable way? And the tools of the intersecting ai genetics and biotechnology revolutions have to be part of that story. Are we

[00:28:03] Jordan Harbinger: worried at all about unforeseen consequences? Like someone goes, oh, I'm gonna take one of these salmon and the, you know, keep it as a pet.

The guy's mom says, you're not keeping that crap in here and throws it in the water. Yeah, yeah. And now this thing is breeding. Yeah, yeah. In wherever this, yeah. So

[00:28:16] Jamie Metzl: I've, I've done the Lake Placid Iron Man like 10 times and so, you know, the movie Lake Placid, it's exactly about, sure. Someone throws an alligator and the alligator becomes like this monster eating people in, in like, there is a 100% chance of unforeseen consequences.

Yeah. Life is full of un unforeseen consequences and so it should not be, oh, this technology could be cool. Let's just race for it and everything is okay. That that's, and it should not be, this is so scary that we should Mm-Hmm. Somehow if we could pull the plug just because it's so scary, what it must be is these are capabilities, incredibly powerful techniques that have great potential upsides and real potential downsides.

Mm-Hmm. What do we need to do now to increase the odds of good outcomes? That's what I say all the time. It's not just some kind of fluke that evolution has preserved the emotion of anxiety in humans and other animals. That's part of our survival. It's like we worry about stuff maybe sometimes too much, but we worry about stuff because that's our biological way of saying, Hey, this is a scary thing.

You better start planning so that this scary thing isn't realized. So I, there will be unforeseen cons. There will probably be terrible, unforeseen cons right now. If you're the defense minister of Ukraine and things have turned Ukraine's really struggling in its war with Russia, if you aren't investing in autonomous killer robots and drones and other things, because Russia is jamming these drones and the control systems are, are unreliable.

If you aren't investing in autonomous killer robots, you're committing treason against your country because your people are gonna be taken over. Your lives are are going to be lost, your kids are gonna be kidnapped. But if you do mm-hmm. You're also pushing forward something that's gonna be very hard for humans to stop, right?

'cause once there are all these autonomous killer robots everywhere, can we guarantee that we're going to control them forever? That's Skynet. We can't. And so that's, that's why this isn't an a abstract. These are, there are very real pressures. We need to be honest about them and we need to try to navigate.

And in the book, I have a whole kind of preliminary framework. For how we can think about, how do we navigate at least in the direction of where we'd like to go.

[00:30:31] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned this thing in the book and it's chat, GPT, right? Listening to, I'm gonna get this wrong, listening to people Speak and it can sort of predict Alzheimer's.

[00:30:39] Jamie Metzl: Basically, human beings, there's all of this, what we call data from our perspective, but there's all kind of messaging. Human biology is a system of systems. And so the more that we look, the word technical word is biomarkers. Mm-Hmm. But there's all kinds of places where you can look and you can see clues of something else.

So they have these retinal imaging, which you can do, which with really cheap technology. But using ai, you can just look into your retina and you can say, Hey, you have this problem with your blood pressure, with your whatever. And so certainly ai, I mean, there are already programs where an AI system can just listen in to your speaking on the phone.

Mm-Hmm. And just say, Hey, here's a shift in these kind of nanoseconds between your words. And it's showing some kind of decline. And what we're going to find out is that there's so much information, as I talked earlier about our shift from precision to predictive and preventive healthcare. There's so much information that's coming out of our bodies that these sensors can understand us in ways that we can't understand ourselves.

Ourselves. Sure. Like you and I are talking right now. There's the stuff that we know consciously that's happening, but there's a lot more information that's flowing, flowing back. But just imagine, I had an AI that was monitoring my bio rhythms, and you had an AI that was monitoring your, your BioRim, and let's just say that I wanted to know more through of what was happening with you, and I answered a question and then I, you could say I'm causing, you know, anxiety.

There's this kind of reaction in, it's like things that we just don't perceive because we can't focus on everything. Like right now we're, we're in this room, there are these cameras here, you have your producer over there. There's a lot of things that are, are happening. There's a, you know, a little hum of the air conditioning.

I'm not thinking about those things. I'm in this conversation with you. But these sensors can think about a lot of different things and then say, all right, what's of all those things, what are important things that we should know? I was doing a Fox interview last week, and somebody was, actually, was for a different story, but during the break they were asking me about how the, the CIA, uh, is using AI for its satellite imagery.

They thought it's like up there. And I said, no, no. Basically these are, we have spy satellites that are taking gazillions of pictures of the world. Mm-Hmm. Over and over and over. And the job of looking at those pictures to figure out, well, what's important? It's so much bigger than it. So once in a while I say, all right, there's a, you know, a North Korean missile launcher and it's moved from here to there and we know we're gonna focus on that thing, but there's so much data we just can't focus on it.

Right. But to have a machine and say. Hey, here's what we're looking for. Look at all of these billions, maybe trillions of photos and say, all right, what are the patterns and how do we see 'em? And so that can apply in, in analyzing satellite imagery. It can apply in looking at biomarkers and learning things about ourselves.

Your question about Alzheimer's, but it really, it's just across the board for all sorts of things. Is this something that people can use The Alzheimer's thing? Is that something So right now, you know, I'm my, I have, my parents are in their eighties. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Um, uh, so now they're doing great, but getting older.

So every time I'm on faculty for a, a thing called Next Me Health that Daniel Kraft runs. And so every year we're talking about these things and there are these different programs that you can use that people put on their parents' phones Yeah. That are just kind of listening to their parents and looking for patterns.

And I think that those things right now, it's like I was saying before, it's like, oh, we're gonna go and do ai. But I think they, the way it should work is there's just a suite of technologies that are integrated into things that we're already doing. They're just part of our iPhone. And when they see something that's concerning, then they alert you or maybe alert your, your physician.

So those technologies exist for sure. They haven't been mainstream. I see. So it's like how the watch will go, Hey, you have AFib events. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a file.

[00:34:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:34:34] Jamie Metzl: Send it to your doctor. And I think, so right now, you know, people go to their doctor when they have a medical moment, right? Like, I had this symptom, I'm going to the doctor.

And again, I, I write about this in the book. It, it should be just seamless that we have. Right. Even now you have, I'm just wearing a $20 Timex. But you actually, I have a fancier watch. I was

[00:34:52] Jordan Harbinger: gonna say, man, you are very, that's a dumb watch.

[00:34:55] Jamie Metzl: You know, it really is. 'cause I, you know, I have a rule on I live in, I don't mean stupid, I just mean it doesn't have agree anything fancy in it.

No agree. You know, I live in New York City and you see, you know, not far from here. All these people you in the finance where you walk into a meeting. And it's like, it's, the watch is like the handbag and it's like, oh yeah. People are saying, oh. And so I have a rule, you can never spend more than $30 on a watch.

'cause otherwise you're kind of buying into the thing. You're in the game. You're in the game. Yeah. But I have, I I do have one watch, which is, this is an an aside, but, and I'll come back to the thing about medical sensing, but I have a, a really beautiful IWC watch. Yeah, sure. Um, and the reason why I have it is, so my father, uh, was born in a little village in Austria.

And so in 1938, he and my grandparents escaped from Austria to Switzerland where they were displaced persons for 10 years. Sure. And they were unable to work by law, though. They were grateful to get asylum in, in Switzerland for the 10 years before they came into America. And so just when the war ended, they, my grandfather was looking ways to feed the family and so he, I guess you could call it a business, but he would just go on the train where there were the American soldiers were, and he would try to like sell people watches or buy watches.

Sure. He had this little thing and the Americans mostly didn't speak German, but my grandfather German was his native language, but he spoke also a little bit of Yiddish.

[00:36:22] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:36:22] Jamie Metzl: And so there were the Jewish American soldiers, some of them spoke Yiddish from their parents in growing up here. And so my grandfather would walk up and down these trains with the American soldiers saying, re lotion, do you speak the mother tongue?

And he'd find these soldiers who spoke Yiddish. And then he had this little business selling people watches, buying watches. Then once in a while when he found a, a nice watch to keep, he would keep it. And so this, watch that, wow. That my grandfather got in 1945, I was moving my parents first. We moved them from the home in Kansas City where I grew up to their apartment in Denver and then an apartment in Denver to the assisted living where they are now in, in Denver.

And then we came across this watch and it was like all scratched up. Yeah. And it was a million years old. Sure. I thought, oh my God, this is such a beautiful watch. And my dad said, no, you have to take it. So I took it to the, I live on the Upper East Side here in New York and there's a little watch store and I took it and they had this, this old guy I.

Who told me that his great-grandfather, he, he was like fourth generation watch repairman. His great-grandfather had done it in the Ottoman Empire. Geez. In what's now Turkey. Wow. And they took the entire watch apart, cleaned it, oiled everything, cleaned it, gave a new crystal. I got a new band. And anyway, so it's still under That's incredible.

It's still under $30. It's free mean that

[00:37:38] Jordan Harbinger: that is right up there with your father kept this watch in his ass for five years or whatever it was, right? Oh, that, that, that old chestnut. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not it. It, it was in a nice, a nicer place. I think. Your watch. That's incredible. That's really something.

Yeah.

[00:37:52] Jamie Metzl: Sorry. So lemme come back to medical sensing. Well, so, so do you have an

[00:37:55] Jordan Harbinger: Austrian passport? You can basically file a letter and get one overnight?

[00:37:58] Jamie Metzl: You know, I could, you know, I, I have mixed feelings about Austria. We kinda left under negative. I wonder, I wonder why. Yeah, so I don't, you know, I have to say with all the problems they're having in, in Europe, there is an appeal of having a European passport.

But, and again, I'll come back to medical sensing. Sure. There is nothing like being the son of a refugee to make you love this effing country of America with all of its problems. And so I'm kind of here, mm-Hmm. I really want to fight to make this the best place. And it really just pisses me off. Frankly, when I see people who are here who aren't valuing what we have, that doesn't mean we, part of valuing what we have is fighting to make it better.

But people not just planning your exit strategy when it Yeah, yeah. And, and the bad that, but I also mean, you just see all these people, again, I, I support free expression, people burning American flags. Mm-Hmm. You know, pulling down monuments, you know, marching with Hamas flags. Yeah. Calling for death to America.

We have such deep flaws. There was a horrible genocide against the Native Americans slavery, but this is a country that's trying Mm-Hmm. To get better. And it just pisses me off when I see, and, and no matter who is, is doing it. Yeah. You know, during the BLM stuff, I was upset that all these monuments were being pulled down.

Even monuments of people who I thought were bastard. Yeah. Horrible people. But we have a democracy so that different people can work together. If we want to take down monuments, by all means, let's have a process. And that's true. Then the, these, whatever you want to call them, people marching behind Hamas flags.

Yeah. And it's just, it's just, I call 'em traitors, but yeah. There's other words. You know, I, I don't know who your listeners are, but I, but I've been very, very clear on my Twitter, you know, being in an en encampment harassing students on a college campus behind a Hamas flag saying there's no solution into fo revolution is just the exact equivalent of being in a KKK robe and burning a cross on a college campus.

And I think both of them are, are not acceptable in my, in my view. So I love this country. I want to do everything I can to make this country and our world as great as it can be. And now circling back to Yeah. Medical sensing, but your watch is a medical sensor. Yeah. And there's so much, I, I don't know whether your heartbeat is being monitored.

I'm sure it is. Yeah. But, but it should be, and it could be, even now that it's being monitored and you don't even know, you never pay attention. But someday, if something goes wrong, you get a, a little alert. We could have that, like you were, you were talking with the glucose monitors. We could have kind of everything monitors, you could have your glasses.

Now there's the thing of meta with RayBan where these, it's much better than these Google Glass early versions. So we maybe we'll have just things that just look like glasses. It'll look like contact and we don't even think about having them, but they'll be kind of watching us and that, I know that scares people.

Yeah. But if there's something that's wrong, like I, if I'm developing diabetes type two diabetes, I wanna know right away. I don't wanna wait until something goes. There's a lot of things right. And so I think that kind of smart, appropriate sensing and whether it's animals, whether it's our food supply.

Right now there's a fear a a danger of H five N one bird flu, and we don't have enough sensors. In our animal farms to give us the early warning that, that we need, we need to be building all of those systems and we need to balance our need for that and our, our very justifiable desire for privacy and our very human need to recognize that the story of humans isn't just these simple data flows and it's something more complex.

You told me before that math

[00:41:29] Jordan Harbinger: is the language of physics. Yeah. But biology doesn't have an equivalent language yet. And maybe AI could potentially become this. So the, explain just briefly math being the language of physics for people who have Yeah. Are jogging and not their mind, mind around this.

[00:41:42] Jamie Metzl: Basically, when we try to figure out how are we gonna get to the moon, how are we gonna get to the moon, how are we gonna make a loop around the moon and we're going to come back? We have to do these mathematical calculations to just understand what's happening. And if you, it's not like, oh, we have a feeling that the moon is this far from the earth at this particular time, because if we do that, these spaceships are gonna crash.

Right? And so. It's true with all of his, we've developed these systems and we use math to understand those systems. The issue with bio, so biology is also based on a language, but we don't yet speak that language. Actually, last night at this MIT event, and I, I ask this question a lot. I ask people if having a complete understanding of human biology that's 100 and having no understanding is zero mm-Hmm.

Where are we now in our understanding of the full complexity of human biology? Four. No, exactly. That's exactly right. I say 3, 3, 4. Oh, really? I think you're exactly right. No, I, I think I, I think that is the low balling. Wow. I think that's it. I, I think that's exactly right because there's so much that's happening.

It's not just one thing. It's not like humans are like genetics and other stuff. Right. It's like we have all of these systems. Some of them we understand pretty well. Some we don't understand at all. Like if someone said, well, can you fully explain how one cell functions? We can't even do that. We, we know some of the basic architectures, but we don't even know what we don't know.

I mean, there was a long time when humans didn't know that viruses even existed. So how could we have done analysis of viruses if we didn't even know they were there? But as I was saying before, human biology has, and all of biology is roughly as complex as it was a million years ago, but the sophistication of our tools is increasing at an exponential rate.

So we're going to move up that understanding from four to five to six, and it just, even if it takes a hundred years or longer at every level, we're going to understand more. Mm-Hmm. We understand more, we're going to be able be able to do more, and we're gonna want to do more because that's the history of our species.

And so because these systems are so complex. We need a language and understanding the language of biology, which already exists for us to understand it, we need these capabilities and AI with all these other technologies will be that. So then we'll be able to do the

[00:44:13] Jordan Harbinger: biological equivalent of going to the moon or going to Mars.

[00:44:17] Jamie Metzl: Yeah. Yeah. And we're doing it now every day. And it's, and the thing is, with going to Mars, there will be a day, I hope, when we go to Mars. As a matter of fact, yesterday I was one of the co-hosts of this event with my friend Jeff Hoffman, who is an MIT engineering professor, but former astronaut. He's done five space missions.

And so he was one of the leaders of, first there was a project of building a helicopter that could fly on Mars. Then they proved that you could actually generate oxygen on Mars using. Materials that are, are already there. There will be a day. Yeah. I hope when humans make it tomorrows and we'll say, oh yeah, that happened on this day.

But that will have been possible because of all of these incremental steps that we made along the way. And we are making those steps very, very rapidly in understanding biology. So where we are in our understanding of biology, coming back to the exponential point you we discussed earlier, is way more than it was 10 years ago.

And that was way more than it was 10 years before that. But if you look at the, all of the scientific progress of the last hundred years. And you compare that to the a hundred years before that and a hundred years before that, we see this rapid acceleration. And the big takeoff point was the scientific revolution in Europe, because I write about this in, in the book, the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.

The enlightenment. We learned how to learn. Mm-Hmm. Like that's the thing. It's learning how to learn for humans, for our machines. And as we as humans and as our machines learn more about how to learn more learning becomes possible and more learning about how to learn becomes more possible. Again, it's this same acceleration point.

We talked at the start of the show.

[00:46:04] Jordan Harbinger: I don't need my genome sequence to know that capitalism is in our DNA. How about a word from our sponsors? We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by ramp. If you're looking to tighten up your business finances from managing expenses to simplifying accounting, you should definitely check out ramp.

It is a corporate card and spend management platform that not only saves you time, but also Money Ramp gives you incredible control over your company's expenditures. You can issue cards with specific limits to employees and streamline the whole expense reporting process. No more Chase and Receipts RAMP automatically collects and categorizes them in real time, letting you close your books up to eight times faster.

Plus RAMP is not just about saving time, they also cut costs. Businesses often see an average savings of 5% in their first year alone, and it's super easy to get started. You can have it up and running with full functionality in about 15 minutes, no matter the size of your team. I wish I had RAMP in my previous business.

We struggled with spiraling expenses, monitoring it was a nightmare. By the time we got around to reconciling everything, it was too late. Ramp would've been a game changer.

[00:47:00] Jen Harbinger: And now get $250 when you join ramp. Just go to ramp.com/jordan. That's ramp.com/jordan. RA mp.com/jordan. Cards issued by Sentin Bank and Celtic Bank members.

FDIC. Terms and conditions apply.

[00:47:14] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Via Tour. If you're planning a trip, you've gotta try via tour. We went to Taiwan and we booked not one, but two different night market food tours through Via tour. The highlight of our trip for real, when we had to reschedule at the kind of the last minute, it was totally hassle free.

Thanks to their flexible policies like free cancellation and rescheduling 24 7 customer service pay later options via tour is our go-to for planning fun travel experiences. I know a lot of people are like, I can just walk around on my own. I highly recommend using Via tour. We used Via tour on our trip to Istanbul.

I just booked some tours into B Georgia where I'm headed soon for a wedding. Yes, I'm gonna the caucuses, which is totally random, and I. Yes, I could walk around myself, but I'm excited to take these food tours and city tours with Via Tour's app, which by the way has over a hundred thousand five star reviews and Via Tour's website.

You can find over 300,000 options to find the perfect activity, no matter your destination or interest. Check out real Traveler interviews to ensure you can book with confidence and get the most outta your trips. So whether you're after Adventure, relaxation, a taste of the local culture via tour helps you plan the perfect trip effortlessly, give it a shot.

Make your next travel experience one to remember.

[00:48:17] Jen Harbinger: Download the Via tour app now to use code via Tour 10 for 10% off your first booking in the app. Find travel experiences for you. Do more with Via tour.

[00:48:25] Jordan Harbinger: If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the sponsors that support the show.

All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. You can also email meJordan@jordanharbinger.com. I'm happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Jamie Metzel,

[00:48:52] Jamie Metzl: I've written the book so that people can take this book to the beach and enjoy reading it.

Yeah. It's not heavy. And then think, oh my God, I really enjoyed it. That was a fun read. That's right. And I accidentally learned something. It's unfortunate that people who are writing about technical stuff and scientific stuff don't make it accessible to people because this is about all of our future.

And I've written the book because every single person has a role that they not only can, must play in deciding how these technologies are used or not used in your life and and in the world. And if, if we see this just. As an elite thing and you need to have all this technological knowledge and lingo and whatever to join the conversation.

That's really a mistake. I, for my last book, I was speaking at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Yeah. Which is very close to where you live. Uh, and I was a guest of the director and, and the director invited me to speak to the top 300 scientists at Lawrence Livermore Wow. About the future of biology.

And I said to them at the outset of my talk, I said, I'm really honored to be here. You're among the top scientists in the world and I'm honored to come to speak to you about the future of biology. Right. But if you hear something that doesn't sound quite right, please raise your hand, because I'm entirely self-taught in the sciences.

And the last biology course I took was in 11th grade in high school at Kansas City. Oh man. And I wouldn't say that if I didn't have a lot of confidence in my, in my thing, but Sure. But the reason I say it now is because I've had to teach myself all of this. And so I have haven't had the shorthands that I would've had.

I mean, I have a PhD, but it's not in this, the shorthands to get to the next level. I, I feel like I have to kind of understand this concept. Say, all right, this concept leads to this concept. And so I've tried to translate that into just explaining this stuff. So it's not like you, you don't have to know this background.

I'm, my job in writing the book is explaining something to you years like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And frankly, that's what my last book Hacking Darwin. Before that, I'd written my two science fiction novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. And when I was on my book tours for those books and I just explained to people the underlying science mm-hmm, that you needed to understand for the story.

And I just explained it in my way, kind of natural language. And then I could just see in people I was like. Oh, that's what genetics is. Mm-Hmm. Like I'd heard this word, DNA, that sounded scary. And these other things sounded like foreign concepts. Oh, that's what it is. It's relevant. It's about me. Right?

It's part of my story. And so that's, I, my whole goal for doing all of this, this work that I do, is to bring every, it's our story. We're writing that story, and that's why everybody needs to be part of it. And to be not just welcome. The only way we're going to succeed is if everybody says, I'm writing this story.

I have a role and I want to, I don't wanna play that role.

[00:51:51] Jordan Harbinger: That's a great place to end. However, I don't wanna end right there. Even if I, now we're gonna have a clunky ending. Uhhuh, I don't care. Uhhuh. You were one of my turning points on the whole lab league theory with Covid. Oh. Because at first it was like only kind of kooky.

Yeah. Folks. Yeah. And they'll write in and they're like, we were right. You were wrong. Yeah. And they're really angry about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But people, it's important to come to conclusions for the right reasons. Right? Not because you had like a really good gut hunch that the story didn't add up. Yeah.

Because you have a lot of those people I've noticed, have a lot of hunches about other things that are total nonsense actually. And so it's called resulting, right? Yeah. When the, you get the right result in one thing and then you go, surely I must be right about all of the other things where I have absolutely no evidence, but it makes sense to me.

[00:52:33] Jamie Metzl: Yeah.

[00:52:33] Jordan Harbinger: When you started saying it, I was like, well, he's not nuts. Yeah. And is, I

[00:52:37] Jamie Metzl: have some people who can come and give you a kind, they will give you counter

[00:52:39] Jordan Harbinger: example. Yeah. And I talked with Allison Young, who's a journalist who talks a lot about the lab leaks. But tell me about this because it's, you weren't like, early in on this, it was kind of like, let's figure out the origin and you were actually looking for the truth not to prove an agenda, and then you started leaning in a different way.

Yeah. I,

[00:52:53] Jamie Metzl: I haven't been part of any conspiracies. I, you know, I think the, that's just, I somebody in a conspiracy to say exactly like I think the earth is round. I love science. I think that Lee Harvey Oswald was, as far as I can tell, acting on his own. Like, I'm, I'm not a conspiracy oh man person, but in January of 20.

20. I remember this very well. I was in our dining room at home and I was just telling my, my partner, I said, you know, I'm looking at the available evidence. Mm-Hmm. About COVID-19 origins. And I'm looking at the news reports about Covid origins and I'm seeing two different stories. Yeah. And the news reports are saying it comes from a market, it comes from the wild case close.

But in the evidence, I'm seeing a totally different story. 'cause it was in late January of 2020, there was a, a paper in the Lancet by Chinese scientists saying that more than a third of the early cases of Covid were of people who had no exposure to the market that Juan on seafood market then. Well, if that's the case, that means the market.

Is a super spreader location. It's not the origin. Right. And I just started digging I'd about a year before I'd been in Wuhan, I'd been invited to give a keynote talk for a conference. But once they realized what I was gonna say after I'd arrived, they canceled my talk. I, I have surprise, surprise. Yeah. I have a whole blog post on this.

It's for a different day. So I knew that Wuhan wasn't a place like Cambodia, where I actually used to live, where you had these crazy wild markets with all these wild animals. The people in Wuhan actually looked down on the people in Southern China who eat the wild animal food. I mean, the few of them do.

They eat that stuff. And I knew that this was the center of biotech, a center of biotech, uh, research in China. I knew they had the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Very quickly learned in about two seconds, they had the world's largest collection of captive coronaviruses. They were doing very aggressive research on these coronaviruses, trying to train them to better infect human cells at the point of the ACE two receptor, which is exactly the point where the SARS-CoV-2 viruses.

So this is gain of function, this is research. Yes. Gain of function and serial passage and and other things. And then, you know, soon after we learned that actually the Wuhan Institute of Virology had worked with the EcoHealth Alliance and the University of North Carolina had proposed a funding application, which was denied by, to DARPA the Defense Department to genetically engineer a SARS co coronavirus.

To make it able to give it a furin cleavage site, able to infect human cells at the point of the ACE two receptor. As I told, uh, vanity Fair, if I submitted a proposal to paint Central Park purple and was denied, I. The next morning we woke up and Central Park had been painted purple. It would be very logical for someone to say, Hey, let's, maybe this guy has something to do with, and instead of that, starting in February of 2020, you had all these people who were saying, we know, which they couldn't have.

We know it comes from nature and anyone raising the possibility of a lab origin is a conspiracy theorist worthy of conant. And it just pissed me off. This is what people who

[00:56:01] Jordan Harbinger: are respectable disease researchers told me. Yeah. So that was why I was like, look, I have it on good authority that this is Yeah.

For people who understand how these things work, that this isn't true. So that made it even more, even more ridiculous. And frank,

[00:56:13] Jamie Metzl: and I'm not one of these people who's said like, oh, experts are bullshit. I'm of course not let my entire shows world based on the idea that that's not the case. It's like, it's like people, oh, experts are bullshit.

Yeah. I'm, I'm gonna go get a brain surgery. I'm just gonna have, have the guy Starbucks here. Exactly. Like we need experts. But in this one case, I just because the right answer. And now with the Fauci testimony and I've, I've been, you know, deeply involved on this topic, not just on podcasts. The lead witness in the first congressional hearings, I was the lead author of these open letters that really opened up the question of pandemic origins.

Starting in 20 21 60. Leslie Stall did a, a big piece, the right answer in 2020 was, we don't know where this came from, right? It could very well come from a research related incident. It may come from some kind of natural event or a spillover in the market. We just don't know. That's why we need a, a full investigation and we categorically condemn the Chinese government for destroying samples, hiding records, imprisoning Chinese journalists, gagging Chinese scientists, and blocking any meaningful mm-hmm, international investig.

That was the right answer. But I think these guys, in their mind, I don't think it was malicious, I think they thought science is under attack. Remember, it was the Trump administration. Yeah. Science was under attack. And that if we get people jazzed up about a possible lab origin, the Trump administration is gonna go crazy.

And there are all these kinds of things that were natural impulses. Yeah. But that's not what the scientific method is about. The scientific method is we're going to follow the evidence even if it takes us to an uncomfortable place. So I'm a liberal Democrat. Um, I served in Clinton administration, but my feeling was I'm not gonna say something is wrong because, I mean, Donald Trump initially supported Xi Jinping, but later when he, when he shifted.

I'm not gonna see something is wrong because Donald Trump, for whatever mixed motivation is saying is right. I'm gonna look at the evidence Mm-Hmm. And say, Hey, what is right? So it's been a crazy journey over the last four and a half years, but we've went from four and a half years ago. Yeah. Literally, I did not know a single person who thought this to now where I think people are, I very least recognizing that a research related origin is a possibility.

Yeah. And I think most people intuitively believe it's the most likely, and I personally believe that the overwhelming weight of the available circumstantial evidence, and it's circumstantial because China won't allow an investigation. Right. So it's like, so we're, we're never gonna really like know, well, maybe we will, maybe we won't.

But it's not like you're gonna have a trial of a mafia dawn and say, well, all the witnesses got knocked off. He must be innocent. Right. I mean, it's like if, if with, if you're blocking everything, it's like that also is should add to perceptions of guilt. But 27 million people are dead as a result of COVID-19.

It's excess death if we don't get to the bottom of saying, Hey, what went wrong? How do we fix our problems? We're gonna be facing something much worse. And we're gonna say, you know, we didn't have the courage to ask the tough questions. Yeah. Even though they were politically difficult.

[00:59:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Man, it's, this is one of those big areas where I changed my mind, but it also was a big lesson in, even experts can be wrong.

And sometimes there's motivated reasoning and everybody has their cognitive bias. It's very, but it's unfortunate, right? Because those, a lot of those same people are now going and the vaccine is toxic and it's designed to kill you. Yeah. And it's like, what are you gonna say when you are wrong about lab lead?

[00:59:35] Jamie Metzl: Yeah. And, and, and that's why for me, it's the same point I was making earlier about an ethical and even a procedural North Star. Mm-Hmm. And to say, this is what I stand for these values. And, and one of those values is if you're a scientist, it's following the scientific method. Right. I think, like I said, people wanted to protect science when science was under attack.

And that's laudable. But if your North star is follow the evidence, then you have to kind of stick to that. Yeah. And sometimes you're gonna have to say things and do things that are really uncomfortable and that, that just is Jamie Metzel. Thank you very much, man. It's really my great, great pleasure. And I, and I wanna say, Jordan, I really value what you do because in science there's a, the concept of translation.

So the way the cell works is your, your genome is inside the nucleus. It has the genetic information. It then translates that information into the RNA, which leaves the nucleus. 'cause you want your genome connected to the nucle, it goes outside of the cell and then it communicates to the ribosome to say, Hey, let's make this protein.

So there's like a process of like, big ideas becoming life. Mm-Hmm. And I think that the work that you're doing and, and these kinds of conversations that are made accessible to people. It's not just entertainment, although I hope it's entertaining, it's allowing people and empowering people to be part of these really important conversations.

And that's why I do the work that I do. And that's why I know you do the work you do and you're doing a great job. And it's my honor to be here. Thank you very much, man. Ribosomes out

[01:01:09] Jordan Harbinger: there. Yeah. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. All righty. Bye. What could happen if humans mess with genes and if labs leak superbugs In this clip, Rob Reed chats about DNA.

Printers that could either save us or well, not by turning out vaccines or viruses right from our living rooms.

[01:01:28] Clip: The terrifying thing is covid is pretty damn benign compared to what could have easily happened this time around, or what could very easily happen next time around, particularly if the next bug is maliciously designed.

Society produces a certain small but terrifying percentage of people every year who, for whatever reason, go to such a dark place that they become suicidal mass murderers and their death toll is limited only by the weapons that they have. Technology is the force multiplier, the 1918 flu virus, which killed at a much, much, much greater scale than Covid and the smallpox genome.

Both of those are online and anybody could find them within a short number of message. Minutes. The time would soon come where somebody could take that and reanimate that. And something which scares the bejesus out of me, which is an influenza virus on a coronavirus, is H five N one flu that kills 50 to 60% of the people that it infects.

Two independent research groups, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, took it upon themselves and they basically made it capable of aerosolized transmission through the breath. No lab is secure enough to keep this stuff running out right? And this is a pathogen that could quite literally topple civilization.

If it's contagious enough, if the lights shut off on a countrywide basis, after a shockingly small number of days, civilization starts to teeter and eventually topple.

[01:03:04] Jordan Harbinger: For more things that'll keep you up at night and whether we can handle the power we're playing with. Check out episode five 10 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Whew. Okay. Quite a show close here. 'cause there's so much we didn't cover from the book. That I think is really interesting. Solving problems is actually not just about Genius iq. So I was really worried about the sort of designer altered babies from China, but it's actually about connection. Connection is what solves problems.

So AI beats humans that are disconnected, uh, that has nothing to do with China. I'm just talking about the idea that AI can massively solve these problems. So larger, better connected societies, innovate more. There's actually an equation for this. The internet has helped with this. Overpopulation has helped with this, but it's the example that Jamie gave during the show.

If Mendel and Darwin had known each other, they would've solved their problems, their questions that they failed to solve for their whole life. So much faster and so much more easily. In addition to medical innovations and the agricultural stuff we talked about today, software will actually be written and updated much, much faster.

Probably like 99% done by ai. So instead of big annual updates or biannual. Iterations might come out every single week based on feedback gained from users and things like that and usage. AI could write and rewrite all of the software from scratch if it needs to. And I don't know much about software development, but I have advised companies in the space as a board member, et cetera, and it seems like the bottleneck is often very much the number of engineers working on something.

So imagine if you don't need engineers, but you can just plug in another couple of GPUs into your AI and you can solve problems and innovate and work around solutions and build, add-ons to things like that. I, I used to think it was computing power or figuring out what users want and sure there's some of that, but apparently that usually trails engineering capacity, AKA, the ability to actually build the thing and the roadmap is always stretching out ahead of you.

Even if you have a zillion engineers, there's always a zillion things that they still have to do, even if they have unlimited time, they'll never finish. But AI, on the other hand, could actually catch up and then find new things to do and solve and build. To give you a sense of how the price has reduced for technology like this.

If coffee had followed the same trajectory as genome sequencing, you'd be able to get 9 million coffees for $1. That's how much cheaper genome sequencing has gotten. I found that to be striking and just absolutely incredible, and it just shows you what the power of AI is going to be able to do for us.

Think about it. We didn't have AI develop genome sequencing for us. That was done by humans. What happens when AI can do that with a lot of things in a very, very short period of time? Now, some folks, of course, like me, we do worry how our DNA might be collected and databased and housed. What does this do for us?

What are authoritarian regimes gonna do with this? Are we gonna see eugenics programs that say, Hey, you know, this person. Shouldn't have kids because they have this genetic issue. We kind of do that already, but what if it becomes, this person who's got a bunt in the oven right now shouldn't have a kid because they're not gonna be as smart as other kids.

They're gonna be a little bit shorter. We could have a eugenics movement that crosses a few moral and ethical lines, and it could be a very slippery slope. Jamie was talking about agriculture, and we are at a crucial point where there's just not enough farmland to grow food for the world, and that problem is only getting worse, especially with rising sea levels and all that.

AI and innovations in agriculture could actually fix this problem. I know that we won't be able to get cacao for chocolate because of climate change. That was one of the examples in the book. We could fix that kind of thing. And it's, I, I thought that was a funny example because it's like, thank God we can alter genomes, otherwise we might have to forego cheap chocolate.

Maybe we can engineer it so it doesn't require literal child slavery to be a profitable crop. We've done a few episodes on chocolate. If you search the feed and child slavery is a real problem. We actually did a skeptical Sunday on chocolate. We interviewed Miki, miss Ratti about chocolate and the slavery used in chocolate.

Very harrowing stuff. We'll link to those episodes in the show notes, which reminds me you can always go to any episode and actually click the app icons and the episode will now open in that app before it just took you to the show. Now it actually opens that episode. So we've actually fixed that for you.

We can actually make crops fungus resistant. We can make them pest resistant. We can also make them mold resistant. We can make them fungus resistant. No more moldy berries. AI's gonna have to figure that sort of thing out, but it's definitely possible. I know some folks are scared of GMOs. Are they safe to eat?

And, and people will say, is that real science or is that Monsanto funded science? We are going to do a skeptical Sunday on GMOs. I, I might have to lean on Jamie for some subject matter expertise here. We do, of course, have less arable land due to overuse and climate change. We have less water because of pollution and water use.

We can solve these issues in part with GMO and this is the part where I start getting emails from people accusing me of being a shill for Big Ag in the CIA. But I get those every day. So what's the difference? You can send those emails by the way to Off my meds@jordanharbinger.com. Animal agriculture, by the way, more emissions than all cars, boats and trucks combined.

Gross, that is a lot of cow farts, man. Airplanes not included in that. It probably skews things, but holy crap. Literally, animal agriculture. It has more emissions than cars, boats and trucks combined. There's a lot of cars, boats, and trucks, which means there's a lot of cow farts and a lot of cow poop. Just gassing off antibiotic resistance in animals, of course, breed superbugs for humans.

We're hearing more on that lately. We're gonna, we're gonna do a couple more shows on that. We've got a lot more of that to look forward to before we crack this as well. Maybe even a couple more pandemics here and there. Who knows? Sky's the limit. All things Jamie Metzel will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, wee bit wiser, something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions. Your Psychology at relationships in under two minutes every Wednesday.

Sign up at Jordan harbinger.com/news if you haven't done so yet. Six minute networking over@sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram where you can join me, where all the sane people are on LinkedIn. This show is created an association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in ai, agriculture, the pace of human progress, definitely share this episode with 'em.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.