Joe Rogan | The Impact of Genetic Manipulation on Athletics w/Jamie Metzl

How do you think this is going to affect things like competitive athletics? Hugely. So, right now, we have this problem. Someone like Lance Armstrong, who is manipulating his body. And what he's basically doing is adding more red blood cells so that he can carry more oxygen. And people feel that that's cheating. It's a different topic that probably everybody in the Tour de France was doing exactly that when he won. But what if, which will be the case, we're going to be able to sequence the people, let's say nobody's doing drugs, and we sequence all these athletes. Some of them will just have a natural genetic advantage. Their bodies will naturally be doing what Lance Armstrong had manipulated his body to do. You know that's happening with a sprinter right now? Yeah. That female sprinter that has high levels of testosterone? Yes. Yeah. And I feel really sorry for her. But we have categories. I mean, with your world in mixed martial arts, I mean, I think I remember in the past there was some person who was kind of a borderline between genders and was just kicking the shit out of all of these women in cage fighting. And it's like we have these categories of man and woman. We know that gender identities are fluid. But how do we think about it when these genetic differences confer advantages? So if your body is primed to do something, maybe you could have like a Plato's Republic world where everybody fulfills a function that you are genetically optimized to do. And that you could imagine that being a very competitive kind of environment. But what do you do for now in something like the Olympics? If somebody has this huge genetic advantage, should we let somebody else manipulate their bodies? There's a thing called gene doping in order to change the expression of genes. So your body to act like you're as naturally genetic as somebody else, it's complicated. Are they capable of doing certain physical enhancements through gene doping right now? Yeah. Like what can they do right now? So the way it works is so your genes instruct your cells to make proteins. That's how the whole system works. So you can change genes or you can trigger the expression of proteins. So you can get people's bodies to behave as if they had these genetic optimization. Yeah. And so that's why now the world anti-doping agency, I mean, they are now starting to look at gene doping. And this is the first time that that's even being considered as a category. And then there are... Have there people that have done that? Are there people that have done that successfully? I don't know the answer to that. But I know that WADA is looking for it, which makes me assume that it must have done, but I haven't seen it. I've looked for it. I haven't seen any reports. If China starts winning everything. Well, China is. So I wrote one of my sci-fi novels, Genesis Code was about this. So China, as you know, has their system of their Olympic sports schools. And the way it works is they test kids all around the country. So let's just say it's diving and they identify what are the core skills of a diver? What do you need? And then they go around the country and they test kids and then they bring a bunch of them to their Olympic sports schools. And then they get them all involved. And then some kids are the best of those kids and then the best of those kids. And then you get with these champions. That's why China advanced so rapidly. But what happens if they're doing that, but it's at the genetic level? And there are countries like Kazakhstan that are already announcing that they are going to be screening all of their athletes. So the science isn't there yet. So it's really, it's impossible right now to say, well, I'm going to do a genome sequence of somebody. And I know this person has the potential to be an Olympic sprinter, but 10 years from now, that's not going to be the case. Wow. Yeah. It's sort of going to throw a monkey wrench in the whole idea of what is fair when it comes to athletics. Yeah. What is fair? What is human? Right. What is human? Yeah. I mean, look, it's not like people don't already alter their bodies by training, by diet, exercise, all sorts of different recovery modalities, cryotherapy, sauna. All of it. You know, high elevation training, all these different things that they do that manipulates the human body. But it's not like, it would be kind of crazy if you had sports, but you couldn't practice and you couldn't work out. Like we want to find out what a person's really like. No practice, no working out. And that's the thing is like, we are moving. It comes back to what we were saying before about nature. It's like, we have this feeling of nature somehow feels comfortable to us. That's what we're used to. All this stuff that you're talking about, nobody was doing that 10,000 years ago. It's like, hey, I'm running after a buffalo. And so as these boundaries change, as the realm of possibility changes, then we're going to be faced with all of these questions. Even now, look at a sport like competitive weightlifting. And they have these like the real competitive bodybuilding. And you see these guys and they're monsters. And then they have these drug-free guys and everybody looks like a yogi. They still look pretty big. They look pretty big, but not compared to these other guys. The only way to get to those freak levels is just their moments. Yeah. And so like, how are we going to police this? And I think it's going to be very difficult. And so maybe we can have some kind of natural area of life, but I think that our model of what's normal is just going to change. Because like I was saying in the beginning, we set our baseline based on how we grew up. And that it seems about right. Like it seems about right to us that everybody gets immunizations. But immunizations are a form of superpower. Imagine if our ancestor, they couldn't even imagine immunizations. It's an unfair advantage when you have a hundred million people dying of Spanish flu. So all this stuff is scary and it's going to normalize, but how it normalizes is that's what's at play now. Well, the world has changed so much just in the last 20 years, but it feels like this is just scratching the surface in comparison to what's coming. People misunderstand and they underestimate the rate of change. And the reason that they do that is since the beginning of the digital revolution, we have experienced a thing called exponential change. You've heard of Moore's law, which is basically computing power roughly doubles every two years. And we've internalized Moore's law. And that means that every new iPhone we expect to be better and stronger and faster and all these kinds of things. But now we're entering in a world where we're going to have exponential change across technology platforms. And so we think about, well, what does exponential change mean in the context of biology? Well, at the very, very beginning, its genome sequencing is going to be basically free, but we're going to be able to change life. And because we're on this J curve, like when you think of what's a 10 year unit of change, looking in the rear view mirror, that amount of change is only going to take five years going forward and then two years and then one year. And so that's the reason why I've written this book is we have to get that this stuff is coming fast. And if we want to be part of it, we have to understand it and we have to make our voices heard.