Why Jamie Metzl Wrote 'Hacking Darwin' | Joe Rogan

What essentially was hacking Darwin? Like what was the motivation behind it? Was it for a person like me or was it for everyone? It's for everyone. And so what I really wanted to do, so the background, I can give you just a little bit of background. Sure. So more than 20 years ago I was working on the National Security Council and my then boss Richard Clark, who was then this obscure White House official who was jumping up and down saying we need to be focusing on terrorism and Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. And he was trying to tell everybody and nobody was paying attention to it. He was totally marginalized. And when 9-11 happened, Dick's memo was on George Bush's desk saying exactly that. We need to focus on Al Qaeda. Here's what's going to happen. And Dick even before then would always tell me that if everyone in Washington was focusing on one thing, you could be sure there was something much more important that was being missed. So more than 20 years ago I was looking around. I saw these little pieces of disparate information and I came to the conclusion that the genetics revolution was going to change everything. So I educated myself. I started writing articles. I was invited to testify before Congress. And then to try to get that story out, I wrote my two most recent near term sci-fi novels, Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. And when I was on book tours for those and I explained the science to people the way a kind of a self-educated citizen scientist and a novelist would explain the science, all of a sudden people got it. And that was when I realized I needed to write a book about the genetics revolution that people could absorb that wouldn't scare people. But my mission for the book is that this stuff, as we've talked about, it's so important that everybody needs to be part of the conversation. We have this brief window and what I'm calling for is this species-wide dialogue on the future of human genetic engineering. And I have a whole game plan in the book about what people can do, how they can get involved, people individually, on a national level. We have to put a lot of pressure on our elected leaders and say, stop focusing on the crap. There is really important stuff that needs to be addressed and we need leadership. I'm speaking in Congress a week and a half from now talking about these issues. So we need to have, on an international level, we have to have some kind of international system. We're so far away from being able to do that. We don't even know what the standards are, but we have to be pushing. So you think of it in terms of the same way we have with nuclear weapons? Yeah, in many ways, yeah. But the thing is with nuclear weapons, a lot of that happened at the state level, at the country level. This needs to happen at a popular level and at a government level. So the only way that that's going to happen effectively is we need real comprehensive education on the subject. It's not something that people can just guess. They need to know what's the consequences, where we're at right now. Yeah. And that's like Sanjay Gupta had a wonderful quote that's actually on the cover of my book, which is, if you can read one book on the future of our species, this is it. So what I've tried to do is to say, if you just want to go to one place to understand what's happening, what's at stake, what it means for you and what you can do now if you want to get involved, I've tried to do that. But then ironically, I'm now, as I mentioned, being asked to speak to thousands of doctors and scientists because they're all reading this book and they're saying, this is positioning my work in a much bigger context. Sanjay Gupta's a very interesting cat because he was very anti-marijuana and then started doing research on it and then totally flipped 180 degrees, which to me is a great sign of both humility and intelligence. I agree. Because the data was different than his presuppositions. He had these prejudices that were very common. Yeah. Now, when you speak to Congress, do they brief you in terms of what they would like specifically for you to address? No. So this one, I've been asked to go and speak and a lot of members of Congress are going to be invited. And what I'm going to tell them is, look, this is really important. Our Congress is not doing enough and here are the things that we need to do. And what are you going to say to try to really get it into their head? What I'm going to say is that the genetics revolution is here. If we don't have a system, if you don't have a rational system to manage it, if we don't have a system, you talked about public education, the challenge that we face in the United States is we traditionally have had a representative democracy. And now we're transitioning from a representative democracy to a popular democracy. So Switzerland has a popular democracy, but they have really well educated people who have enough information to make smart decisions. We haven't educated our public and yet the public is making big decisions and a lot of it is happening just on a gut feeling. That's what's happening with trade agreements where people just have a feeling it's bad without the ability to really get into the details. And so we are having that transition, which means there's a lot of responsibility on us to educate our public. And it's a tragedy. We treat people in this country, like you can just throw people away. Like if you're in some crappy school system and your chances of success are so minimized, not because of anything that you've done, just because of your circumstances and it's unacceptable. It is unacceptable. I mean, equal opportunity is what we really should all strive for. And I think some people conflate that with equal success and you're not going to get the same equality of outcome. You're going to get different amounts of effort and different people are qualified or more talented at different things. But what I'm worried about is what I said initially, that some people are going to get ahold of this stuff quickly and it's going to give them a massive advantage. The first person that has the ability to go forward in time, five minutes, is going to be able to manipulate the stock market in an unprecedented way. I don't think that that's really possible in our lifetime, but that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. You could get so far ahead that if we're talking about competition, there will be no catching up. But you don't have to travel in time to do that. But I'm saying that if that was a technology. But there's real technologies that are likely to happen, which are going to confer billions, tens, hundreds of billions of dollars of benefit. Of advantage. Yeah, and that stuff is happening now. And this is the concern with getting behind countries like China. Because if they get ahead of us in something like that, when they're already moving in this direction in terms of technology. Yeah, so I am a proud American. My father and grandparents came here as refugees. I believe in what this country at our best stands for. I want us to continue to be the country that's setting an example for the rest of the world that is articulating what are ideals of responsibility and governance, good governance and accountability and all these things that we've championed. And because of that, I want us to get our act together politically. And I want us to be the leading technological country in the world. And so I think that's what's at stake. And we're losing so much time. Because there was a time in the period after the Second World War where we recognized that technological leadership was the foundation for everything else. We had recreated the world out of the ashes of the war. But we realized that we needed to have the economic growth. We needed to have the competition. We needed to have these technologies. And it was a miracle what we've done. And now we've lost our focus. And we have to regain it.