Joe Rogan | The US/China Technology Rivalry

Many people have a concern that someone else is going to do what we're not willing to do first. Yes. Right? They're worried China and Russia. Those are the big ones, China and Russia. Especially China. Yeah. They're very technologically advanced and their innovations off the chain. When it comes to like Huawei just recently surpassed Apple as the number two cell phone manufacturing in the world, five years ago they had some like a single digit share of the marketplace. Now they're number two on the planet earth. I mean they hustle. And if they just decide to make super people and they do it before we do, that's what people were worried about, right? They're worried about, there's trivial things seemingly trivial like athletics. And then there's things that are really, like what's to stop people from just becoming the hulk? What's to stop people from becoming immortal? What's to stop, I mean what is... Well, there are two questions. First is China. I think it's a really big issue. The story of the 21st century, one of the biggest stories of the 21st century will be how the US-China rivalry plays out and the playing field will be with these revolutionary technologies. And China has a national plan to lead the world in these technologies by 2050. They're putting huge resources. They have really smart people. They are really focused on. And it's a big deal. In genetic technologies, last year, my book Hacking Dorm was already in production in November when it was announced that these first genetically engineered babies had been born in China. And so I called the publisher and I said, we need to pull this back out of production because I need to reference this. But it didn't require much of a chain. Because I'd already written, this is happening. We're going to see the world's first gene edited humans. It's going to happen first in China. And here's why. I had to add a few sentences saying, and it just happened in October of 2018. So China is on that path. And we need to recognize that on one hand, the United States needs to be competitive. On the other hand, we don't want a runaway arms race of the human race. And that's why we need to find this balance between national ambition and some kind of global rules. That's really hard to do. Yeah. And the other thing is that we're competing with them. And so if they decide to do it first, we're almost compelled to do it second or compelled to try to keep up. How far away do you think we are from physically manipulating living human beings versus fetuses versus something in the world? So physically manipulating living human beings, we're there. So that's often it's called gene therapy. So for example, there's a whole class of treatments for treating cancer called CAR-T therapy. So you have a cancer. When you're younger, your body is better able to fight cancers. What you can do is somewhere with the cancer, you take their cells, you manipulate their cells to give them cancer fighting superpowers, and you put them back into the person's body. And now the person's body behaves like you're a younger person. You have the ability to fight back. So gene therapies are already happening. A relatively small number of them have already been approved. But there is a list of thousands of them with regulators and applications to regulators around the world. So the era of making genetic changes to living humans, that's already here. Like what can they do with it so far? So so far, most of it is focused on treating diseases. But a lot more is coming. Because when people think about the human genome, our genome isn't a disease genome. It's not a healthcare genome. It's a human genome. And so we are going to be able to do things that feel like crazy things, like changing people's eye color, changing people's skin color to funky things. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that we're not doing now that we will be able to do.