Joe Rogan | When Genetic Engineering is Playing God w/Jamie Metzl

How do you think it's going to play out in terms of how people, various religions perceive this? Yeah. So there's a real variation. So there are people on one end of the spectrum who believe that this is quote unquote playing God. And if you believe that the world was created exactly as it is by some kind of divine force and that it's wrong for humans to change, to quote unquote play God, it's hard to explain how you could justify everything that we've done. We've changed the face of life on this planet earth. But I really respect people who say, look, I think that there's a line that I believe that life begins at conception and that any kind of manipulation after conception is interfering. That's going too far. And I respect that. Those people need to have a seat at the table. And that's, and there's certainly very strong religious views. In Judaism, there's an idea called tikkun olam, which means that the world is created cracked and broken and it's the responsibility of each person to try to fix it. And that's a justification for using science and doing things to try to make the world a better place. And then there are now these new kind of, I mean, transhumanism. It's almost like a religion. It's this religion of science. And so we're going to have, we're humans. We're so diverse. We are going to have this level of diversity. And the challenge is how do we make, how do we have a process that brings everybody in? But it's tough. So when we're talking about genetic, any sort of genetic manipulation, we're basically talking about doing stuff to the wetware, doing stuff to the biology. What do you think about symbiotic interactions with technology? One of the things that I'm concerned with more than anything is this sort of inevitable path of technology getting into our bodies, whether it's through nanobots, fix diseases, or through implementation. I mean, we were talking yesterday about chips. Like what would they have to do to get you to put a chip in your body? Like what kind of powers would it have to have before you accepted it? Yeah, well, people are already doing it in Sweden. Sure. What are they doing in Sweden? Yeah, they're just putting just little chips in their hands and under their skin and they're using it to open doors and access things. So it's just starting. So I definitely believe, you know, right now you look at, we look at photographs of our parents and you say, God, look at your hair, your clothes. That's crazy. Definitely. I think that, you know, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, people are going to look at pictures of us and say, what's that little rectangular thing? And you're going to say, that was a phone. What? And they'll say, what? It's like, yeah, we used to carry it around in our pocket. Like Michael Douglas, when you watch him in that movie, Wall Street, he's got that giant brick fall on the beach. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we are, we are all, we are all Michael Douglas because our technology, you're absolutely right, is not going to be something that we carry around. Technology is coming inside of our bodies. That is the future of where it's going. And you know, people say, well, what, what does human genetic engineering have to do when we know that AI is going to get more and more powerful? But the future of technology, the future of all of this, it's not human or AI. It's human plus AI. And that is what's going to drive our, we are co-evolving with our technology and that's what's going to drive our, drive us forward. But you're exactly right to be afraid and to be concerned. And again, everything comes up, how are we going to regulate it? Are we going to have guardrails of how far is, is too far? Are we going to let companies just do whatever they want or are we going to put restrictions on what they can do? I think letting the whole world decide though, you're going to run into those religious roadblocks. For sure. Yeah. And the other advantage is that the science is advancing exponentially, whatever we do. And so we have to have our understanding of the science needs to at least try to keep pace. Regulations need to keep up. I'm part of the World Health Organization International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing. So we're meeting six times this year in Geneva. And the question that we're asking is how do we think about global regulation, at least to try to put limits on the far ends of what's possible? And it's really, really difficult, but that's why we need to have this kind of process. And it seems impossibly ambitious, but every crazy idea has to begin somewhere. So you're doing every couple months? Yeah. Yes. Wow. Yeah. Because they'd want to be on top of it as things change. Well, that's the goal. It's just, it's so hard because- Almost impossible. It's impossible. It's impossible. Even the World Health Organization, which is the lead health organization of the United Nations, it's not enough. The task is so much bigger. And that's why we need to have this kind of bottom up ground squeal that I'm pushing for. And you're absolutely right what you said before. Like because there's not a crisis, people are focusing on other things. Open any news site. Like what do you see? It's not like the really important stuff. Trump did this or Kardashians did that. And we're in this culture where there are a lot of draws on our attention, but sometimes there's really important stuff and people are afraid of it. People are afraid of science. People feel like, I remember science from high school. I didn't like it. I was uncomfortable. This is for technical people. And I just feel like we can't, science is so deeply transforming the world, not just around us, but within us. And so we have to understand it. And people who are explaining science like me, the onus is on us. Like if somebody reads my book and says, well, that was really dense. That was too hard. Like that's my failure. Like I was giving a talk in New York a couple of weeks ago. And so I gave my talk and I tried to make this really accessible for people. People were all jazzed up. They got it. And then there was this wonderful guy, this brilliant senior scientist at this major stem cell research center. And so the host said, all right, Jamie just talked. Can you give us a little background on the science? This guy knows so much. And he started going and it was very technical. And you could just, I could just see the faces of the people in the audience. It was like, oh God, what's happening here? And just like their level of excitement, it just shrunk. Because they couldn't really put it all in the box. And scientists aren't trained by and large to communicate and to see in the future. So a little more than a month ago, I was in Kyoto in Japan. I went to the laboratory of the world's leading scientists who's doing a process of what I mentioned earlier, of turning adult cells into stem cells into eggs. And so this will revolutionize the way humans reproduce. And so I was in a meeting with his top post-doc students. So these are like really the cutting edge of these technologies. And I went around to each of them and I said, here's my question. I have two questions for each of you. One, tell me what you're doing now. And two, tell me what are the implications of what you're doing now for 50 years from now? And the first question goes, oh, I'm doing this and we're doing this with mouse models and people are so animated. And then 50 years from now, people just froze. And it was so uncomfortable. They were like squeezing the table just because that's not what scientists do. They're trained to say, well, this is the thing just in front of me. So I thought I was writing this book for the general public, but I'm being invited to speak to thousands of doctors and scientists because what they're saying is we get that we're doing this little piece of this and whether it's lab research or fertility doctors or all sorts of things, but it's really hard to put together the whole story of the genetics revolution and what it means for us and for society.