Jamie Metzl reveals his daily chocolate ritual—45 minutes of hot cacao with mood-boosting ingredients—while critiquing the WHO’s rushed dismissal of the lab leak theory, citing suppressed Taiwanese expertise and Wuhan’s gain-of-function research, funded partly by U.S. NIH grants. He warns China’s authoritarian control over science and dissent, like silencing whistleblowers or retroactively imprisoning He Jiankui after CRISPR babies, risks unethical global genetic arms races. Metzl argues America must address systemic failures—polarization, poverty, and education—to avoid losing its competitive edge to China’s centralized, effective model, urging young people to demand accountability before democratic values erode under censorship and tribalism. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, every single morning I have hot chocolate and it takes about 45 minutes of preparation time, has about four different ingredients, so I start that and then I have some chocolate over the course of the day.
Dark chocolate, especially, has all kinds of very positive health benefits.
I'm not saying that everyone should just eat chocolate bars all day and you're going to live forever, but actually, the woman who lived longest of everyone in recorded history ate two pounds of chocolate a week, Jean Calment in France, so at least...
It's a lot, but she lived to 122. But chocolate's different in terms of, like, some chocolate is, like, really sugar-based, and some chocolate is more of, like, kind of...
I really like dark chocolate and peanut butter together.
So you were a part of this open letter recently about COVID-19, where you want to get to the bottom of the origins of it.
And this is something we've talked about on the podcast before, and a lot of people have been talking about it lately.
Now that Trump's out of office, it's sort of freed up the discussion.
For the longest time, discussing that in terms of it not being just some sort of a random mutation from bats, And coronaviruses, that it may have been a lab leak, was so taboo because it was what Trump was pushing.
And it's so crazy that something, which is science, it's a scientific discussion and inquiry, that it could be stunted by these political ideas when someone is so polarizing, like Trump, that people just completely want to reject very plausible and possible ideas just because of him.
I was the lead drafter with a community of other people and lead scientists around the world of this letter.
And since the beginning of last year, 2020, I had maybe the leading website in the world that was just stating what is the evidence about the origins of COVID-19, particularly the evidence for a lab leak.
And the evidence is actually really strong.
It's all circumstantial evidence, but we don't have any evidence of the other hypotheses of where COVID comes from, like this series of jumps through different animals in the wild.
And so I, for a long time, more than a year, have been saying, hey, we need to look really seriously at this.
Not because we know or certainly I don't know for sure that's where COVID comes from, but in my view, it's the most likely hypothesis worthy of a full investigation.
And so there was a World Health Organization organized an independent advisory committee, and they went on a study mission to China in earlier this year, 2021.
And then they came out with a – they had a press event in Wuhan, which was a joint press event between this committee and their Chinese government counterparts.
And in that press event, what they said was, we don't support investigating the possibility of a lab leak any further, but we should investigate what seems like a much less likely hypothesis that COVID started with frozen foods being shipped to Wuhan.
And so we already had a community of scientists and others who'd been meeting virtually For a while, trying to really say, where does this come from?
What's the evidence?
We had academic presentations challenging the data, trying to figure out where are the gaps.
And we looked at that and we said, that can't be right.
And we decided we needed to put out an open letter, which we recently released, and it was covered in newspapers all around the world.
And the letter made kind of key points.
One is that this is a terrible pandemic.
We have to understand where it came from.
Two, that this current investigation is not the kind of full investigation that's needed.
And three, here's what a full investigation looks like, and we call on governments to do it.
But your point that it's been taboo for the year is exactly right.
And it's just crazy because it seems this is a really, in my view, likely possibility.
I can't say for sure.
We should be investigating all hypotheses, not saying we can't even look at something that really could be the real story here.
He logs off and then comes back on, and then she asks him again about Taiwan's response to COVID-19, and he says, well, China's done an amazing job, and let's just change subjects.
The woman keeps getting back to Taiwan, and he won't recognize Taiwan because China doesn't recognize Taiwan.
And China has some sort of strange, I don't know what it is, but there's some sort of political influence on the World Health Organization.
So first, full disclosure, I'm a member of the World Health Organization International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing.
And so I'm actually a real supporter of the World Health Organization.
But there's a big problem, and that problem is being realized, and we're seeing it through the course of this pandemic.
So first, in the earliest days of the pandemic, why was it that World Health Organization inspectors weren't able to go to Wuhan?
And the reason was the Chinese government wouldn't give them visas, and there was nothing the WHO could do.
Why was it that the WHO was just essentially, unfortunately, parroting the reporting from the Chinese government in the earliest days?
And part of that, at least, is because they don't even have the authority to have their own surveillance network.
Why is it, referencing your point about Taiwan, that Taiwan has all kinds of expertise in treating and responding to terrible outbreaks like this, which is why they've only had nine COVID deaths in Taiwan since the very beginning?
And why is it that the WHO is in this weird position?
It's in part because the WHO is created by these member states that have a lot of influence.
We're all suffering because Taiwan didn't have a full voice.
On December 31st, 2019, Taiwan declared a national emergency.
On COVID. That was way before we did.
I wish Taiwan had had a bigger voice.
So WHO is in a really, really difficult position because on one hand, we're asking them to investigate and call out a member state.
On the other hand, their governing body essentially is made up of member states, including China.
I mean, it was politics that made it so that you could have this outbreak.
And we can talk more about where the outbreak started.
But wherever it started, whether it was a lab leak or something else, if you had had a fully functioning system, if it hadn't been Chinese politics and the national instinct or the natural instinct, Hadn't been to cover up, to silence the whistleblowers, to lie essentially to the World Health Organization and the international community.
It could well have been possible to suppress COVID in the first few weeks, and we wouldn't be having any of this.
And then it was politics that made China...
Again, whatever the origin, carry out this massive cover-up over the course of the last year where they destroyed samples, eliminated or removed databases, imprisoned Chinese journalists asking tough questions and put a universal gag order on their scientists, making it impossible for them to speak about any of this stuff.
So for me, it's been more than a year, and I have it on my Jamie Metzl website, and I've been trying to tell everybody, not to point fingers, but to say, like, we have a real problem here.
Unless we can just be really honest about what's the problem that we're facing, how are we possibly going to address it?
We know we have a long history of these pathogenic outbreaks and they tend to happen in more tropical parts of China and Southeast Asia and just tropical parts of the world.
So when SARS, when this outbreak began, For me, I had a little bit of background.
One of the reasons why I started to get suspicious very early on is I'd recently, before then, been in Wuhan.
And I knew Wuhan wasn't a place where a bunch of yokels are eating bats.
Wuhan is a really sophisticated city.
It's their Chicago.
And I knew that they didn't have horseshoe bats in Wuhan.
As a matter of fact, when the outbreak happened, it was winter there.
And so there weren't bats there.
And I knew early on that this whole story of the wet market was a lie.
And as the Chinese government knew, and they for many, many months pushed that story, even knowing it wasn't true.
Because there was a paper that came out in The Lancet in January of 2020. And in that paper, it made clear that around a third of the first COVID cases had no exposure to that market.
And so if everything started in the market, you would have expected all of the early cases to have had a market exposure.
And so that was known—their government knew that in January, but they didn't admit it until May of last year.
Now, so the finding patient—so-called patient zero, that's the essential— The essential question.
If the lab leak hypothesis is true, then either patient zero would be someone who works at one of these Chinese virology institutes, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or it would be someone who was exposed to a virus that had somehow escaped from that, whether it was through waste or maybe an animal escaped or something like that.
If the alternative story that many scientists believe and could well be true, that the patient zero, it comes from a series.
There was animal to animal, what are called intermediate hosts.
It started with a bat and then went back to a pangolin or whatever and eventually to a human.
Then you would find a patient zero somewhere that was that first human.
I think this is a really important point.
If that's the case, you'd have to say, well, what are the chances that that patient zero from this series of animal-to-animal-to-human transmissions?
It just happens to be it shows up in Wuhan, which is the only city in China with a level 4 virology institute.
That has the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses that is doing gain-of-function research trying to make those viruses more virulent, particularly by making them more able to infect human cells.
If patient zero is just somebody who had an exposure to an animal, you have the mathematical odds of that person just showing up in Wuhan would be actually kind of absurd.
Well, this is a virus that is ready-made for getting to humans.
For the first SARS, we were able to track how it jumped, and you could see, in retrospect, how you could see it got closer and closer, and as the virus mutated, it became more able to infect humans.
This virus showed up As a matter of fact, in the comparative studies of different animals, including humans, humans are the most susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
So somehow, you have to explain how this virus shows up, kind of seemingly out of nowhere, in Wuhan, ready for action, ready to fully infect humans.
Yeah, it's a really important question because there are a lot of people who are saying things that I don't agree with, that, oh, this is some kind of military bioweapon.
Say what you want about Chinese government.
They're not stupid.
And so for them, I truly believe, if you had to ask me what's the most likely story, I believe that they recognized that these kinds of pathogens are a big threat to humans and that we're getting more and more, the frequency of these kinds of outbreaks is growing.
And rather than being behind the curve and waiting for some terrible outbreak, the idea was, well, can we predict how these viruses will evolve?
Can we get ahead of the game in developing treatments and vaccines for what we think may be coming?
And that's what this gain-of-function research is about.
And so we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing this kind of gain-of-function research.
Some of it was actually funded with the United States government money through the NIH.
And I know you'll get a lot of action in the Twitter sphere on this.
But so we know, and I truly believe that there was well-intentioned work trying to develop vaccines and treatments, trying to understand how the most dangerous pathogens might develop it.
And if my hypothesis is true, I think there was an accident.
And there's a whole history of people who are warning, saying, well, we're trying to prevent some kind of future threat.
But in our effort to prevent it, we're actually increasing the likelihood of it happening.
Have any of the people that were initially skeptical or pushing back against the idea that it came from this Level 4 lab, are they coming around or are they still digging their heels in?
It's a really interesting story because in the earliest days of the pandemic, there was a concerted effort by a relatively small number of high-profile There were scientists, virologists, who recognized that if the story was that this came from a series of what are called zoonotic jumps between animal hosts in the wild,
that was going to lead to a kind of a positive outcome where we'd say, hey, let's be very mindful of our encroachment into wild spaces, climate change, all those things that we should be very mindful of.
But they were, I think, probably worried that if this story became dominant of an accidental lab leak, I mean, that would have huge implications for all of the research that people are doing.
And a lot of it is very well intentioned.
So early last year, there was a process where a series of scientists did two things.
One, they came out with a letter in the British medical journal, The Lancet, which we've subsequently learned was highly manipulated by a small number of people who may have had vested interests.
And there was an academic paper in a journal called Nature Communications, and both made the case, oh, this isn't a lab leak.
And then there was a concerted effort to label Anybody else as a conspiracy theorist.
I spent last year in that uncomfortable space.
I don't live my life as a conspiracy theorist.
I try to be data-driven in everything that I do, but I really felt that this was a very real possibility and it deserved a full investigation.
And it was only in the beginning of this year, 2021, that that started to turn.
I wrote some things.
Someone named Nicholson Baker, he had a great piece in New York Magazine.
The Wall Street Journal did a great job covering this.
And so the space was starting to open up.
Then they had that really, in my mind, ill-fated press event in Wuhan, where it was this independent committee and the Chinese government.
And they said, don't investigate lab leak, investigate the frozen food hypothesis.
And then in every newspaper around the world, the headline was, World Health Organization says lab leak is not possible, essentially.
And so I immediately...
Sent messages to my friends at the World Health Organization and saying, look, this is being misreported.
The World Health Organization hasn't said this, and the position of the WHO must be we have to investigate all hypotheses.
And I was very pleased that three days later, so the press event was on a Tuesday, that Friday, Tedros Adhanom, who's the director general, he then said in a press event that we believe that every hypothesis needs to be investigated, which implicitly meant the lab leak hypothesis.
And then our letter came out, which was just last week.
I mean, it feels it's been such a whirlwind since then.
And that's been picked up in I think we're good to go.
It's a thorough, unrestricted, unpoliticized investigation into what happened with access to all the lab records, all the samples.
There's tons of scientists in China who were working on these issues.
Very, very few of them have been interviewed.
We don't have access to them.
And frankly, I think a lot of them are afraid that if they speak up, they'll be imprisoned or worse.
The people that were initially very vocal and biased towards the idea that it wasn't a lab leak, and you said they were highly motivated and they labeled all the folks a conspiracy theorist.
And so there's been a lot of controversy around a guy named Peter Daszak.
And Peter is an interesting figure, because if you had asked me a year ago, A year and a half ago, who are the people who you respect most in the field of virology?
He would be really at the top of my list.
He was one of the heroes of understanding where the first SARS came from.
He has an organization called EcoHealth Alliance that was really trying to get ahead of the curve on understanding these But he also, through EcoHealth Alliance, was a funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically the gain-of-function research that was being done there.
And I truly believe it wasn't anything nefarious.
The idea was, well, if we want to understand dangerous pathogens, we have to do it in the place where those dangerous pathogens are.
Then, under the Obama administration, there was a moratorium on this kind of gain-of-function research, and then it was lifted in the Trump administration.
So that's one piece of it.
And so for Peter, I understand that his whole experience of his life has been, well, this is where these kinds of outbreaks come from.
But this could be just a very different story.
And for me personally, that's, I think, one of the reasons why I was able to see this a little earlier, perhaps, than other people, is that part of a big chunk of my life has been in the world of science, but another big chunk of my life has been in the world of understanding China.
And so I think if you're just in the world of science, you don't understand China, you think, well, the Chinese government says that this isn't from a lab leak.
It must not be from a lab leak.
But I know That in the Chinese government, they've totally suppressed the entire basically history of Mao and all the millions of people who died under Mao.
When they got their speed trains going, the first train had this terrible crash, and they just buried the whole train and pretended like it never happened until there was an outcry and they had to dig it up.
So I feel like I understood a little bit more about the pathology of the Chinese government.
But coming back, I think there were people in the kind of more traditional virology world who felt like we're going to open up a whole can of worms if we say, well, maybe it was a zoonotic jump and maybe it was a lab leak.
I wouldn't say it's one guy, but it was, I think, a relatively small number of people.
Because they certainly, the Lancet letter, and it was all kinds of big luminaries who signed it, that really shaped things.
Definitely, if the story in the beginning had been, maybe this comes from a zoonotic jump, maybe it comes from a lab leak, we need to look at both options, I think that would have been a much healthier place because there would have been more pressure on China.
It wasn't just one guy, but Peter certainly was very influential.
Then, in spite of this conflict of interest, He actually was selected as a member of this World Health Organization Independent Advisory Committee.
So one of the people who went on this mission to China was Peter.
He also is the chairman of The Lancet, the same British journal that I mentioned.
They have a study group.
He's the chairman of that.
And I'm not saying he's doing anything wrong.
I'm just saying if you have that kind of conflict of interest, you shouldn't be in those kinds of roles.
It's just always so disturbing to someone like me who's a non-scientist who relies on scientists to be unbiased and to just look at the data when you find out that things are being influenced by very human factors like ego and financial gain and relationships with foreign powers and laboratories that they're involved with and That scares the shit out of me.
Well, you know this better than most anybody, Joe, because you kind of are here every day looking into people's psyche and people are people, even scientists.
And everybody in the world has a story that explains what they're doing and why.
And so I'm sure that you could, maybe even should, have Peter on the show and he'll give you his story.
But at least from the outside looking in, the way I would see it is, well...
He's invested his entire life into doing the right thing, trying to protect us from this terrible threat of a pathogenic outbreak.
He correctly recognizes that encroachment into wild areas and climate change are big threats.
Wherever COVID-19 SARS-2 comes from, still those are good things to do.
He has a longstanding relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a friendship with the people who work there.
My guest, and I can't speak for him, he's become kind of a stakeholder in this story.
But this isn't just about Peter.
I mean, there are lots of very prominent scientists.
I would say there are more prominent scientists Who believe that this comes from a series of zoonotic jumps through intermediate animal hosts in the wild than there are who believe that it's more likely to come from a lab leak.
But what I will say, I'm in touch with lots of people who are world-famous scientists, scientists who many, many people will know who are privately telling me We think that there's a 90% chance that it comes from a lab, but really don't want to speak up because we don't want to get pulled into the muck.
You were talking about Trump before.
People remember the Iraq War, where there were all kinds of experts who were saying, oh, they definitely have nuclear weapons.
We invaded the country.
It's like, oh, oops, they don't have it.
So people didn't want it to justify any kind of bad things.
And as scientists, I mean, the problem is the scientists rely on data, and there wasn't data because China was covering it up.
And the journalists require scientists to legitimate claims about the origins.
And so there was this weird thing that's lasted for a year, and our hope is, and we're starting to see, that our letter...
Has opened up some space where we can have a real honest conversation about let's look deeply into all the possibilities and try to get to the right answer.
What has started to be discussed mainstream, like Newsweek had the cover where it talked about the lab leak hypothesis and people were talking about it more often.
Brett Weinstein, who was very vocal about it very early on, And Heather Hying were just on Bill Maher talking about- I loved it.
Yeah, that's a problem that we have with our culture today is that we've fallen into this very strange situation where we really have two sides of America.
We have a left side and a right side.
And I don't understand how it happened this abruptly, where it even has an influence on the way we view this pandemic.
It has an influence on the way we look at scientific inquiry.
Don't want certain results because those results would somehow or another solidify this political party that's, you know, so polarizing.
Or would go against this other party that is more to their liking.
And it's just...
Such a strange situation to be, again, as a non-scientist, someone who relies on scientists to figure things out, to go, hey, what the fuck is going on?
Why is this politics?
We're talking about a pandemic.
We've got to know what this is and how to fight it and where it came from.
And if you think it's just jumping from animal to human that quickly, how often can this happen?
It's happening with more frequency of viruses going from, let's say, bats through intermediate hosts to humans.
We've seen it with Hendra virus and Nipah virus and other viruses.
That's real.
But it's really unfortunate exactly what you're describing is that people, we live in these kind of information cul-de-sacs where we just are stuck.
And it seems to me we should just say, well, let's try to be open-minded.
And that doesn't mean we don't have views.
We all exist on some kind of spectrum kind of for everything.
But if we're just stuck there and we can't even look, we can't even hear what other people are saying, we're going to drive ourselves to not just to ignorance but terrible decisions.
We just have such a tendency to buy into narratives, and I think now more than ever, because there's almost, not almost, there's too much information out there to pay attention to everything.
So we find the information that fits our narrative, we lock into it, we hold onto it, and then we just stick with it and argue against anything that opposes it.
And I'm mindful of it because especially with all of this conversation about the origins of the pandemic, I'm now on Twitter more than I was before all of this because there's a lot that's...
I mean, it's great in a way, but now every time when I go on Twitter, it's like all these people who I really respect, who agree with me, I see their feeds.
And obviously, I like their feeds.
And because I like their feeds, the next time I go on Twitter, I see more of it.
And so that's why we all have to kind of challenge ourselves because social media is kind of pushing us into two things.
One, into these little realities that are self-reflective.
And two, into a world where conflict is rewarded more than finding middle ground.
Like if you say reasonable things on Twitter, you get like three people like what you say.
If you say the most incendiary things, you start like a whole you-know-what storm.
And I just think that being mindful of the environment in which these ideas are being shaped is as important as the ideas themselves.
Now, moving forward from here out, what do you think needs to be done in terms of opening up inquiry, being able to completely figure out the origins of this virus,
and what could be done to So the next step is going to be when this joint committee that I mentioned, made up of the Independent Advisory Committee to the World Health Organization and their Chinese government counterparts, they are going to be issuing their preliminary report within a couple of weeks.
As I said very publicly, I hope that the report is much better than just the really just atrocious press event that they had on February 9th.
In the best case scenario, they'll say, just exactly like we did in our open letter, that one, This wasn't a full investigation.
I mean, they essentially had four weeks on the ground in Wuhan, two weeks in quarantine, and two weeks a fully chaperoned, highly curtailed study tour.
But if they were to say, here is what a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation, the origins of the pandemic, with full access, To all samples, records, and personnel would look like, that would be a start.
But they're in a real bind because it's going to be a joint report.
If they say what needs to be said, just in total honesty and fearlessness, this is the full investigation, examining all hypotheses, including the possibility of a lab leak, it's very likely the Chinese government isn't going to sign off on that letter, on that report.
But if they do another compromise, like they tried to do in the February 9 press event in Wuhan, where they try to throw out some tidbits, have a little more information, but not too much upset their Chinese counterparts, then that process is going to be delegitimated.
So I don't know how they're going to get out of that bind, but I certainly hope that they're honest.
But let's just say, hypothetically for now, that they're honest.
The Chinese government is unlikely to say, oh, sorry about that.
We've been doing this full cover-up for a year.
We've destroyed the samples, eliminated the records, imprisoned the journalists, gagged the scientists.
Are bad.
Just come in and do what you want.
So then we can say, well, what are the next options?
We can try to renegotiate the terms for a new investigation, maybe with different skill sets of people.
You still run into the China problem.
You could try to go to the United Nations for a stronger mandate.
You still run into the China problem.
To tell you the truth, I don't know whether we're going to be able to have the full investigation that we need to get to the bottom of this, but at very least, we should articulate what that is.
And if China wants to tell the rest of the world, essentially, screw you, we have millions of people dead from this totally avoidable pandemic, the future of our species depends on understanding where it comes from, But we don't want you to look deeply at what happened.
At least, at very least, there should be a political cost for that.
But at most, we'll get as much information as we possibly can.
I was reading that if China had been honest about it from the beginning and let everybody know about the pandemic, like the moment they knew about it, it would have saved 95% of the lives.
It could be less, but I really think it could be more because these viruses...
I mean, you talked about patient zero.
So there was one person who had this.
Then it became two.
That's what we call viral growth.
The earlier you intervene, the greater the possibility to stop it.
This is certainly a highly contagious virus.
But in those early critical days, I mean, China, they silenced the whistleblowers, they started destroying the materials they didn't share immediately, even the genomic sequence of the virus.
China was absolutely atrocious and there's a percentage, not the full percentage, but every single person who dies from COVID, part of that is attributable to the failure of the Chinese government, particularly in the first month.
There's other parts of it that are attributable to the massive failures that we had here in the United States and elsewhere.
It's such a fascinating country, you know, because they have this weird mix of the government and business.
They're intertwined inexorably, right?
And they have influence over the media, they have a full lockdown on the internet, and if anybody promotes anything that's negative about the Chinese government, whether it's bloggers or journalists, they just arrest them and make them vanish.
Well, so what I would say is it's the Chinese government.
Even business is subject to the Chinese government.
And it's an authoritarian system.
And we've experienced authoritarian systems before.
The Soviet Union was one.
But never one as sophisticated as these guys.
And it's not like, you know, I traveled in former Eastern Europe in the old days.
We talked about it last time I was on the show.
I've traveled all through North Korea.
And there's one thing when you go to an authoritarian, or in this case a totalitarian system, when it's totally dysfunctional.
And you see that when you see people pulling plows on their backs in North Korea.
It's another thing to go to a place like China where it's an incredible level of sophistication.
I mean, one of the reasons why we're even having this conversation is their level of scientific acumen and artificial intelligence and genomics is incredible.
But they have a real level of control.
And if you stay out of politics, there's a lot that you can do.
But that's why I am certain that there are many people in China right now who have lots of highly relevant information that could tell us a lot about the origins of the pandemic.
Those people don't dare speak because they know that if they do, the cost to them and maybe even their families will be extremely high.
Well, it's spooky for them and it's spooky for us.
I mean, one of the things that this virus has shown us, if we didn't already know, is that all of our fates as humans are connected.
And so – You know, a virus that starts somewhere and spreads, it affects all of us.
So our fate is dependent in this and in many other ways on the behavior of governments like China's.
And so when they have these kinds of terrible I don't even want to call it a breakdown because maybe the government was working as designed to prevent the Communist Party from losing face.
Then it affects all of us.
And so this idea that, well, what happens in your country is your business, it doesn't really make sense when we're talking about highly contagious viruses and lots of other things.
I have a very strong view that not just that I think lab leak hypothesis is the most likely, but that what we need is a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into all of this.
But I would certainly encourage your listeners not to take my word for it, but to really read the evidence.
And that's why on my website, on jamiemetzel.com, I've just laid out the evidence.
I have lots of links.
And I would encourage people just to go there and look and read and disagree.
I mean, I think we have to have a space for the conversation.
He's so polarizing, unfortunately, because if he did a lot of the things that he did in terms of policy but didn't have this sort of polarizing personality, we'd have a very different discussion about all these different things.
I mean, I don't agree with a lot of the policy things, but there was a style.
And I think people have always had a sense, I think, for a long time, that if you don't pay attention to government, by and large, at least in the United States, you know, Some good things are going to happen.
Sometimes there'll be screw-ups.
And I think that when you don't have the faith that your government is going to do things right, or just what to expect, or just that when you hear the voice of the president, it should kind of soothe you a little bit.
Like Joe Biden, my former boss, when he speaks, I mean, he's an exciting enough guy, but you think, like, all right, I'm going to listen before bed, and then I'll fall asleep.
But to get back to my point, data, we have to be able to look at these situations like the pandemic outbreak and look at it.
And not have rhetoric, not have these polarizing conversations, not have a vested interest in it being one way or the other.
It has to be just looking at it and analyzing it and experts looking strictly at the evidence and discussing the evidence without any bias, without a need for one conclusion or the other to be...
Yeah, exactly.
I don't feel that that has been the case.
There's been so many articles.
I mean, there was an article written about Brett Weinstein after he came on my podcast about how I was having this guy on to promote this conspiracy theory that's been widely debunked.
And I remember reading that, and there was no data in that article, but it was basically a smear article.
But I think that even in the response to our letter—I mean, we've had the media response has been great, but there are a lot of people who've been saying, well— There are more prominent scientists who are saying that the zoonotic theory is more likely.
And my feeling is they may even be right.
And I welcome the conversation, but we have to have the conversation.
So is there a possibility of getting those prominent scientists that do have this opinion and matching them up with prominent scientists that believe the lab leak hypothesis and having some sort of an actual scientific debate?
Yeah, so it's funny that you mentioned that because there was a private thing, but I will now make public in our conversation.
So I sent a note a few days ago to Peter Ben Imbaric, who is the person who leads the World Health Organization Organized Independent Advisory Committee.
And when I said to Peter in that note, and I haven't yet heard back, but I imagine I will now, I said, why don't we have a private Zoom dialogue between the members of your committee and the signatories of our open letter, and let's just have this conversation.
And I think that's the kind of thing that we need to do.
And I hope it's possible, certainly in writing this letter, our goal wasn't to shut down conversation, but to open space for it.
The best case scenario is scientific inquiry is supported and this becomes something we could all look at and say, okay, these guys are acting rationally now and let's figure out where this came from and how does this stop?
How do we make sure that this doesn't happen again?
The Level 4 Virology Lab in Wuhan, are they still operational?
I mean, the first thing that happened after the outbreak is that the Chinese military came and took over.
And it's not only that, there are lots of other virology institutes around China and around the world.
Right now, Singapore, for example, is building A level four virology institute.
So there's a real conversation to be had.
One is how should we think about safety in these kinds of virology institutes, these kinds of biolabs?
Second, should we have them at hub cities like Wuhan or Singapore?
Or should we just put them out in the middle of Siberia or someplace like we put nuclear waste?
And those are the kinds of conversations that we need to have.
And that's why, coming back to your earlier point, This issue of polarization is so significant because, again, if we can't have the conversation, we're screwed.
And there are people, like there's a scientist, Mark Lipsitch at Harvard, who have been traditionally one of the big opponents of gain-of-function research.
And they said, you have the danger of realizing the thing that you're trying to prevent.
So there were academic papers that, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, that said, oh, hey, it is possible to make coronaviruses more able to infect human cells.
That was, I guess, it's useful information.
Now we have lots of evidence that coronaviruses can mutate in ways that make them more able to infect human cells.
We have hundreds of Millions of examples and more than 100 million examples.
But I think that they made progress in identifying the problem.
As far as I know, there wasn't any significant, like, were we that far ahead in developing vaccines?
No.
Were we that far ahead in developing treatments?
No.
And that's why I'm a little more sympathetic to the people who are critics of this aggressive gain-of-function research than to the people who are its proponents, like Peter Daszak, another scientist at University of North Carolina named Ralph Daszak.
Barrick and others, because I just think that there are almost an infinite number of viruses that can threaten us.
If we are going to try to push these viruses to make them more dangerous, I mean, we have to question, is that the right thing to do?
And if we do it, we just need to make sure, do we have all of the safeguards in place?
And that seems to me as an international question.
I mean, if China, with all of its problems and all of its Insufficient safeguards and this culture of pushing science ahead as a vehicle for national greatness.
If they're just making their own decisions about safety for these viruses that have the potential to kill as many people as they've potentially now killed, that's not just a Chinese issue.
First, in terms of a public health response, I mentioned that China was absolutely atrocious, particularly in the first month or two of the virus.
They also mounted the most aggressive and, in many ways, highly successful We're good to go.
China has been more helpful.
Now, even with this idea of, well, where does the virus come from?
So China has been very aggressive trying to look for animal hosts.
They haven't found any.
There's no evidence of it.
They've been even more aggressive with this, in my view, somewhat nutty, but maybe worthy of exploration idea, that it came from frozen foods shipped from someplace else.
I mean, there's absolutely no evidence that that's the case.
But not helpful with this, and certainly not helpful with providing access to the scientists who've been studying, just to your point, who've been studying this for years.
And so that one, it's called a Trojan horse vaccine.
And basically, you get a virus that is basically a non-harmful virus.
You kind of neutralize it by taking out its kind of delivery package.
And then put the gene that's delivered through that other virus into the body.
Whereas the mRNA vaccine, what that's doing, it's hijacking the machinery of your cells and saying, hey cells, the mRNA is the messenger, messenger RNA. We kind of hijack and say, hey, here's a new message.
And we say, the message is cells make this spike protein, which is something it's not part of normal human body, but we make this little protein.
And then our body says, our immunological system says, hey, this is an alien thing, and it mounts a response.
So I just want to be clear that all of these vaccines, certainly the American ones, I think are very effective, great vaccines, and everybody should be happy to take whatever ones they have access to.
There were some Catholic bishops, and the Vatican was not fully this way, who said that because the Johnson& Johnson vaccine was derived in part, in small part, from a cell line taken from an aborted fetus in the 1980s, if you have a choice, you should avoid that.
I think, in my view, that was an unfortunate statement.
I think this is about health and safety.
If anybody has access to a vaccine, it's my view that they should take it, not just for themselves, or they should do it for themselves, but it's also the faster we can reach herd immunity, the more the people who can't take vaccines will be protected, whether it's people in chemotherapy and other things.
I mean, all of these vaccines have, at least the American ones and pretty much all of the vaccines, have very, very minimal side effects as far as we know.
I mean, these are all vaccines that have been rushed, but I see no reason to—I don't think there's some kind of hidden thing that two years from now we're going to find out that these vaccines are more dangerous than— No, not saying that, but the side effects were some people have been pretty extreme.
I mean, what we're doing is we're getting our body, like if your body, if there's some kind of alien invasion, that's what we've evolved for, And that's why every time you get a fever or whatever, it's your body's fighting something.
But in that fight, your body is getting stronger.
So I definitely think that there are – I wouldn't even – maybe you can call them side effects, but it's like your body is mounting this kind of response.
Let's talk about, because we got into a little bit about China and genetics.
There was an article that I read recently where there was some sort of program to try to make Chinese men more manly, that the government was instituting some sort of a program.
And I read that, and see if you can find it, because it was a weird article.
I guess aggressive weightlifting or something along those lines.
The real ethical dilemma, and this is your area of expertise, right?
In terms of genetic engineering.
There's many ethical dilemmas, right?
One of them is the haves and the have-nots.
That's the big one to me.
It's like if really, really wealthy people Can figure out how to genetically manipulate their children and their bodies before it's available to anyone else.
They'll have such a massive advantage that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots will grow ever wider.
But my question is, when does it lead to genetics?
It says, while Chinese government has signaled concern that the country's most popular male role models are no longer strong athletic figures like, in quotes, army heroes.
Anyway, we welcome all Koreans on Twitter to give us your thoughts.
But my guess is that Chinese modern history, it all comes out of this mythology of the Long March, this kind of fake history that the Chinese government has, that they fought and defeated the Japanese, where in fact the nationalists were the ones who actually fought the Japanese.
So my guess is that with this story is they're afraid of kind of their society becoming quote-unquote soft like they maybe see the Koreans, the Japanese, and us.
If you don't mind, I'll just go back a little bit.
So last year, 2020, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier, who are scientists who developed the tool that you just mentioned called CRISPR. In 2012, they had their famous paper came out, which was essentially describing a basic science tool, something that you would do in a lab.
Six years later, in 2018, the world's first three genetically modified CRISPR babies were born in China as a result of highly, in my view, unethical human experimentation by a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui.
As a matter of fact, The World Health Organization Committee on which I serve was created in the aftermath of that.
So what He Jiankui was doing and trying to do was to change one gene to try to give these two, and then it became three kids, greater resistance to HIV later in life.
It doesn't look like he succeeded.
But we've entered the era of genetically modified humans and it's just in this little way and more broadly we're entering this period where our species has the increasing ability to read, write, and hack the code of life.
Well, there were stories that it may have from some experiments that were done in mice, and there was some analysis that was later partly debunked from the UK Biobank that had suggested that.
But the short answer is nobody really knows, and that was why it was— So unethical to do these human experimentations because the outcomes were so unknown.
Having said that, even though this was a terrible first step, it's my absolute expectation that in the future, and whether that future is 10 years from now or 20 years from now or 5 years from now or 50 years from now— We will begin a process of genetic modification of humans that will start very small.
It will certainly start with changing single mutations that would otherwise condemn a child to die of a terrible, deadly genetic disorder.
That will be the starting point.
But over time, as we increasingly understand the complexity, not just of the human genome, but of systems biology more broadly, we will move from that smaller bit of engineering to bigger.
We'll also use tools of embryo selection.
Right now, an average woman going through IVF has about 15 eggs extracted.
Let's say you have 10 viable pre-implanted embryos in in vitro fertilization.
So now you can screen each one of those 10 embryos, and you can rank order them roughly in the tallest, likely tallest to likely shortest.
In a small number of years, likely highest genetic component to likely lowest genetic component of IQ. It's all highly, highly controversial stuff, but this is where we're going.
So I do think that it will be possible that we'll have embryo selection and then very likely we'll be able to use stem cell technology called induced pluripotent stem cells to turn adult cells into stem cells.
So just to make it practical, let's say...
A woman has a skin graft and there's millions of skin cells.
You induce those skin cells into stem cells, stem cells into egg precursor cells, egg precursor cells into eggs.
Now let's say you have 10,000 eggs and average male ejaculation has hundreds of millions or sometimes little billions of sperm.
You fertilize those 10,000 eggs, use high-throughput screening to extract a few cells and sequence them from each, and now you have 10,000 options.
And then you have real possibilities, and you don't even need to use genome editing.
Our ancestors took chickens laying one egg a month and turned them into chickens laying one egg a day, not knowing anything about genetics, but just through this kind of selection.
And what does it mean for humans, for agriculture?
For so many other things when we are the drivers of that evolutionary process.
Our evolutionary diversity, in a Darwinian sense, we talk of random mutation.
That's just diversity.
That means that something that seems really good now, like being a big T-Rex, in some future environment is actually a disadvantage.
So if we start making even well-intentioned decisions, even to eliminate terrible diseases, it may be that we limit not just our diversity, but through our diversity, our resilience as a species.
But there's also, human beings tend to, we like to innovate, right?
And the more time people spend on innovation and the construction of new methods, technology, new things, the more time they spend on that, the better they're going to get at that.
If they're more sexually viable, if they're more aggressive, if they're more athletic, there's going to be less time being spent on those things.
It's the weird balance.
You don't get no knock on the rock, but he's not out there inventing CRISPR. You know what I'm saying?
I just think we're fucking around with the way the universe works and the way biology works in a weird way.
I don't necessarily think we understand the consequences of each individual action.
Right now, it hasn't It hasn't become a factor because there's a couple babies in China and there's a few experiments done in America.
But once it actually starts happening, that you can pick what kind of child you have.
Not just what kind, but if we...
Go forward 100 years or 200 years from now.
There might be some super sophisticated methods of engineering the type of person.
So we might be able to create people that, as of right now, don't even exist.
People with extraordinary vision, bulletproof skin.
I mean, we might be changing the human race.
Maybe that's good.
Maybe if you grabbed a monkey or Australopithecus and said, hey man, one day you're going to be flying in a plane and you're going to be floating around in a boat.
And the hard part is, yes, we can imagine some earlier time where our ancestors like Australopithecus, because we were just animals.
There were other animals.
We kind of lived like animals.
We've left that world.
It's now...
Of all the species that have ever lived are one little group of monkeys.
We're not just taking over.
We are reshaping all of life on this planet, and we're reshaping our own biology.
So, yeah, it's scary.
It should be scary.
And that's the work that our World Health Organization committee is trying to grapple with, is how do we try to create a governance system that can transform We try to prevent terrible abuses, because it's clear we can identify what feel like, at least for now, terrible abuses.
And we can identify some things where we think, well, that seems pretty good.
I mean, if someone's kid is going to die of a terrible genetic disorder and we have the ability to prevent that, well, let's do it.
And there's a lot of gray area in between, and our sense of what's okay and not okay Changes over time.
And that's why it's a dynamic process.
Just like you were saying before on politics, if we kind of force ourselves into one extreme or another, we'll end up with the wrong answer.
But the challenge is, how do we negotiate this part in the middle that helps us advance the beneficial science but prevent abuses?
And that's why the ethics are so important.
But it's really hard to define what the abuses are because people think differently about them.
It's exactly right that countries, just like in the United States in the Second World War and immediately after, we had all these wise people like Vannevar Bush and others who said American leadership in science and technology is the foundation of American power.
Right now, that's what the Chinese government is saying.
When I went to the Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI, which is not in Beijing, it's in Shenzhen, and I saw they have the world's largest collection of sequencing machines, there was a Chinese flag on every one of those sequencing machines.
When He Jiankui, the scientist who I mentioned before, Manipulated these embryos for the first CRISPR babies.
When he did his application, it was all about bringing glory to the Chinese state.
So we are in that environment.
And that's one of the problems that we face is that human beings, we've become this species with a global reach that just like we're seeing with the virus and so many other things.
Small numbers of us are doing things that have big implications for everybody, but we don't have a system, a global way of solving these kinds of problems.
The concern is that other countries are going to do what we would consider to be unethical, but through those decisions, they're going to gain some sort of an advantage, whether it's an advantage in terms of intelligence or advantage in terms of athletics.
I mean, we already know that countries manipulate people's bodies in order to win the Olympics.
Have you seen the documentary Icarus?
Have you seen that?
It's amazing, right?
Well, we know Russia will go balls to the wall to try to win the Olympics.
They did, and they got caught, and they've been eliminated from the Olympics.
In my book, Hacking Darwin, I have a whole chapter on this, which is called The Arms Race of the Human Race, and I play out some of those scenarios.
So imagine you are a country That your population has decided, you know, this stuff, it's too scary.
This feels like we're playing God.
It's ethically uncomfortable.
And there's another country that has made a different decision.
And let's just say that you start to see evidence and maybe it won't work.
I mean, maybe you just do nothing and it turns out that these guys are taking too big of a risk and then they've got some kind of big problem.
Or maybe it actually starts to work.
So then what do you do?
Do you just say, all right, we're sticking to our guns, and we recognize that maybe we'll be less competitive than them in the future, and that's a price that we're willing to pay?
Or do you try to stop them?
And maybe you can, maybe you can't.
If it's a big, powerful country, you probably can't.
And if you can't stop them, and you don't want to pay the price of not doing it, do you feel that you have to match them?
And just like in the Olympics, I mean, there are different societies that make different decisions of how they're going to do Olympics.
Some say we're just going to let a bunch of kids play sports and the best ones will emerge.
Some say we're going to measure all these kids and test them when they're five years old.
And then we have a way of measuring those outcomes, which is gold medals.
And maybe it's the case that these different collections of societal decisions will lead to different outcomes.
There's nothing that's set in stone of why we in the United States have a higher standard of living than people in Venezuela or whatever.
But if there's like a lot of little decisions that add up to these things called national competitiveness and the application of revolutionary science is one of them.
The concern for a lot of people is that we're going to get to some situation where in order to become more competitive, people are going to do things that are very questionable or very unethical and ultimately very dangerous.
And if you wanted to look at biological life objectively, you would imagine that there's some sort of – there's these competing elements, right?
You have disease and you have immune systems that fight off the disease.
And through this sort of selection and natural selection and mutations, some people develop and – Continue to breed and advance their lines and other genetic lines die off because they weren't able to compete or to handle these environmental stressors or these viruses or these various things.
On one side you would say, I don't ever want to see someone suffer and die from a disease.
But on the other side you say, how many people do we need on this planet?
And that's where people get scared with eugenics.
When you say, you know, what we need is the strongest, most healthy, most disease-free version of humanity.
So does that mean people with diabetes should not be allowed to breed?
So the whole history of eugenics is a terrible one.
I mean, I think everybody recognizes the horrors of Nazi eugenics, but the Nazis actually learned a lot from the eugenicists here in the United States who in the early 20th century didn't present themselves, oh, we're a bunch of racist radicals.
They actually presented themselves as these progressives wanting to create a better society.
So we must derive extreme caution from that history.
Having said that, we won't always frame these questions as eugenics, yes or no.
I lecture a lot about this stuff and about the future of biology and reproduction, and a lot of people say things like what you've just said, or even say things like, you're saying that in the future there'll be far less incidence of Down syndrome.
I have a kid who has Downs.
Are you saying that kid has A lesser justification to live than somebody else.
And what I always say is, I would never say that it's not what I believe.
But that's not how the question's going to be framed.
It's going to be framed, all right, you're having a, you decide to have a child.
You're having a child through IVF and embryo selection.
You have your, extract your eggs, fertilize them.
You have these 10 pre-implanted embryos, fertilized eggs.
And you know that one of them has Down syndrome.
Will you pick that embryo to implant in the mother?
Or will you pick an embryo that doesn't have Down syndrome to implant in the mother?
Maybe a better analysis or a better analogy, rather, would be if you gave a person an option and all you have to do is check a box and your child wouldn't have leukemia.
Yeah, and so, you know, I always struggle when people use that term, playing God.
I mean, without sounding disrespectful, I feel like if God were playing God, we wouldn't have to do it.
How disrespectful to me.
But if you think that, all right, I believe in God, God is making decisions about my children, and God has for some reason decided that my kid is going to have a deadly genetic disorder, I'd say, well, I'm not down for that.
But that's why we can't pretend like we don't have these powers that we increasingly have.
And that's why I call these powers godlike powers in biology and AI and in many other areas.
It's inevitable that if we survive and we don't blow ourselves up or there's not some sort of a natural disaster, that human beings are going to get better at virtually everything that we do currently.
We're going to figure out more innovative ways to do things, we're going to invent better technology, and we're going to figure out ways...
I mean, we already have figured out, if you look at...
versus what people died of 200 years ago there's a radical difference in a very very short but biologically speaking a very tiny frame of time but a radical increase in lifespan and a radical increase in the possibility of surviving infection disease injury where we're already playing God yeah no for sure And the rate of that increase is accelerating.
Do you ever stop and think, do you ever just sit alone by yourself and wonder where this is going to lead?
Yeah.
There's a video that I put on my Instagram yesterday that my friend Eddie sent to me.
It's Walter Cronkite from the 1950s.
And he's talking about the future.
And it's amazing.
It's really interesting.
Because it's a short video.
we can play it real quick but it's walter cronkite talking about the the household of the future and what technology would be available to us and it's so dead on it's really i had never seen this before because most of the time when people talk about the future they talk about jetpacks and flying cars and time machines but in the 1950s it's see if we can pull it up because it's pretty wild But I want to apply the same sort of thinking.
The way I've described this from the beginning, it's the future is crashing into the present.
There were these trends that would have played out over 10, 20, however many years.
It suddenly crashed in, and it's in weeks and months.
And it's not just virtualization.
And I think it's here to stay.
What I said at the start is this isn't a snow day.
Whatever happens with the vaccines, it's not like we just go back to our old lives.
Our lives are going to be a hybrid of the kind of physical and virtual lives.
But also in the realm that we were discussing with the biotech revolution.
I mean, this mRNA platform isn't just about vaccines.
It's going to be a whole new delivery mechanism for all kinds of health interventions.
And the genetics revolution isn't just about human health care.
It's going to fundamentally transform agriculture and how we think about materials.
I know you've talked about This precision fermentation, where it's basically the way that we brew beer, we're going to be brewing all sorts of things, this cellular meat, plastics, energy.
And so it's really, I think we're going to look back at this moment as a quantum leap.
And some of those changes we'll think as negative, but some of them will actually, I think, end up feeling pretty positive.
Like World War II, I mean, it was a terrible experience, but...
The technology of rockets and electronics and space travel were just massively pushed forward.
I was actually telling somebody the other day when their microwave broke, like, do you know that the microwave comes out of this crash MIT effort to build the radar in the Second World War and the microwave technology was just a side effect?
The exact what World War II was to electronics and space travel, I think that this pandemic will be to the genetics and biotech revolutions.
When we were talking before, I showed you the Walter Cronkite clip.
Do you sit alone sometime and think about all this genetic engineering and the possibility of manipulating human beings and wonder what the human of three, four, five hundred years from now is going to be like?
I mean, I'm also a sci-fi writer, so I spend a lot of my time kind of imagining.
And one of the things, it's just what you said before about Australopithecus.
I mean, it's 500 years, given what I said about exponential change, particularly if we don't blow ourselves up.
That's a long, long time from now.
And I think we're going to think very differently about how all kinds of biological systems work, about what makes a human, about how we interact with the environment.
Certainly, we aren't all going to be living on the surface of this planet 500 years from now.
But this space hotel thing, if you see it, Jamie, it looks like what happens is some sort of shuttle-looking thing docks at the end of each one of those little ports, and you let people out.
I mean, sometimes you see a thing where you think, like, how are they going to do that?
I mean, looking at that, there's no technology there that you think, well, that whole technology needs to be invented in order to make this vision real.
Like, we have pretty much every one of those technologies.
I don't know, but my guess is it has something, my guess, and I'm not a physicist, but something to do with gravity and holding a position in space, but I really just don't know.
But the thing is, with this, like I was saying before, I think that technology is fully realizable.
But what we learned from the Kelly brothers—I don't know if you've had one or both of them on the show—is that there are biological changes that happen to humans when we're in space for a long time.
And so let's just say that future generations are going to live their entire lives in that space.
So we may need to think about, well, what are some biological differences that could be engineered to make that possible?
There's a guy named Chris Mason at Cornell.
Who's studying this?
You've had my friend, our mutual friend David Sinclair on the show, who's thinking about what are the kind of interventions that could be made to reduce the threat of radiation.
Building this infrastructure is possible.
Changing who we are to make living there for our full lives possible, I think that's more advanced.
And the same thing with, I know you recently had Elon Musk on again, and I think that's the same thing with Mars.
Our human bodies aren't built for Mars.
Maybe we can be there for a while.
If we want to stay, we may need to think differently about how we're constructed.
Well, that's where it gets spooky, because what if you make a commitment to adapt your body to the environment of Mars, but then you can't go back to Earth and survive, because the gravity is stronger and the radiation...
So we have to figure out a way to evolve past biological competitiveness, like the primate DNA that we have that wants to dominate and control things and that makes someone want to be the governor of New York.
Anyway, so chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives, and what is it when you see chimpanzees in a community?
I mean, part of it is curiosity, and part of it is this kind of jostling.
And I think that both of them are part of the story.
So if we just had jostling without the essential...
The impulse of curiosity and learning that you've mentioned, I think that would be bad.
If we just had that curiosity and there wasn't that competitive drive that made us want to be the fastest runner in the world or win the Nobel Prize, would that take away some of our edge?
I want to say this is my biggest fear, but one of the things that I think about in terms of humans is that one day we're going to realize that one of the things that holds us back is these animal drives to reproduce.
And that there is this sort of our built-in sexual selection and then emotions and ego and all these different things that have served us well.
Over the millennia to get to 2021 that ultimately we're going to realize like these are a bottleneck to progress.
And then we're going to turn ourselves into one of these little guys.
We all have giant heads, too, and no one has any advantages physically because they're all basically the same thing.
When you look at primates, if you look at a chimp and their small skull and small brains versus our large skull and large brains, and you go extrapolate, you look at the future and you look at like, well, where's this trend?
Where's it going?
It seems like the heads are getting bigger.
It seems like the bodies are getting smaller and more frail.
You know, we're far less strength.
We have far less strength pound for pound than chimpanzees do.
A grown chimp is like a 400-pound man.
And they're 150 pounds.
And as we continue to quote-unquote evolve or change, I wonder if that's what...
When we see this...
Human beings have this iconic image of an alien, right?
Yeah.
I don't know why they have that image.
I don't know what that is, but all these people that supposedly experienced alien abductions or sightings, it's always the same thing, for the most part.
There's some variation, but there's a lot of this one thing, which is a small body with a large head.
And you look at what humans are now versus what ancient primates used to be, If you keep going, that's what happens.
Again, I write science fiction, so I try to think a lot about these kinds of things, and that's certainly one possibility.
Or you could say, well, maybe we're going to supplement our brain function through technology.
And so I know you talked with Elon Musk about this, of whether there's some kind of brain-machine interface so that not all of the activity happens in your brain.
Certainly, that's one possibility.
Maybe the sexual competition and sexual reproduction will be a driver, and maybe it won't.
We have lots of experience in the past from societies that have tried to restructure the family, restructure the way men and women interact.
In most cases, it hasn't gone well.
But one of the key points, and I think why this moment in history is so interesting and it's so pregnant, is that for our entire history as a species and in our earlier incarnations, about 3.8 billion years, We've evolved through the Darwinian principles of random mutation and natural selection.
And so all of these decisions weren't decisions.
They just kind of happened, and you're born with a certain set of attributes.
Now we have the ability to actually make decisions about our evolution that could push us and will push us in one direction or another.
And then the big question is, do we have the wisdom to make those kinds of decisions wisely?
I don't think we have the pure wisdom, but I think that we have pieces of it.
I mean, we have ethical traditions that have evolved over many thousands of years, and they're applicable.
You talked about the Catholic Church and the vaccines.
I've been a critic of the Catholic Church on a lot of things, but I was certainly honored just before the pandemic, I was invited to the Vatican to give a talk on the future of human genetic engineering.
And I had really amazing conversations with cardinals and others.
And then they commissioned a report from me, which I wrote for them.
It's also on my jamiemetzel.com website about these kinds of trade-offs.
And what I said is, we have these ancient traditions.
That doesn't mean that just applying one-to-one, which is why I'm a critic of a number of things that the Catholic Church has done, including this recent statement on the vaccines.
But we can't jettison these ancient traditions because there's a lot of wisdom in there, not just in organized religions, in all of these traditions.
And the question is, can we apply them?
And my guess is we won't do it perfectly.
We're going to make big mistakes.
I mean, certainly with human genetic engineering, the first three CRISPR babies was a massive, terrible mistake.
But there is a process of learning and growing.
And so I think we'll always be one step behind.
But I do have hope.
Whatever happens, humans so far have just survived.
I mean, 75,000 years ago, there were maybe 1,000 humans left just in the southern tip of Africa.
But it was terrible, and yet we kind of made it back.
So here's the ideal scenario of how I would have liked to see, because I'm not opposed to using genome editing tools on pre-implanted human embryos in principle.
It's just it needs to be done safely addressing a very real need That can't be addressed in any other way.
And so the reason was, one, it wasn't transparent.
Two, it wasn't trying to address a need.
I mean, these were otherwise perfectly healthy babies.
To be babies.
And the engineering was to try to confer on them an increased resistance to something that they may or may not be exposed to in the future HIV.
And when people, mostly Northern Europeans, who have a disrupted CCR5 gene, on average have greater resistance to HIV.
And so they basically was trying to make this, it was a one single letter mutation with the goal of conferring that advantage.
But again, that's very different from saying, all right, this is a kid, this is an, I'm sorry, a pre-implanted embryo that is carrying a single mutation that is almost certain to cause a deadly, untreatable genetic disorder.
And so if these parents want to have their own biological child and their genetics dictate that either all of the embryos have that same mutation or they just have one embryo that has it, This one intervention will change a child's trajectory from dying young of a terrible disorder to living a full life.
If that had been the first story Then I think it would have said, all right, how can we build on that?
It was gonzo science, unregulated, sloppy science, non-transparent, and not addressing a need that couldn't be addressed in some other way, like condoms.
So our World Health Organization Advisory Committee, one of the things that we're doing is calling for a registry.
I mean, other than a very small number of people, including some scientists at Stanford and elsewhere, but nobody knew that this was even happening.
So it was in 2008, in November, I remember this really well, All of a sudden, this story just emerged out of nowhere, and most everyone had no idea.
And if you had asked me, I was doing a bunch of interviews then, and someone said, well, when will the world's first genome-edited babies be born?
I would have said in 2018, I'd say maybe about Ten years from now, not because it wasn't possible, because scientists were already doing it in animals, but to go from something that works in animals to humans, especially embryos that are being brought to term, you need to be really careful, because otherwise it's like Nuremberg-style human experimentation, which is what I think this was.
So in our committee, our WHO committee, we were already meeting, and then there was a report that this scientist, Denis Reprikov in Russia, was planning on doing it.
And so we issued a statement, and Dr. Tedros, I don't know, the WHO director general, he issued a statement, and then apparently they backed off.
But it could be.
It could be done in China.
It could be done in Russia.
It could be done somewhere else.
And again, that's why there are a lot of things that could be done, like even now using synthetic biology to create a pathogen more deadly than SARS-CoV-2.
It's possible, but that's why we kind of want to try to create cultures and regulations to decrease the likelihood.
But you're absolutely right.
For all we know, there are more than three CRISPR babies in this world.
Well, what I can say is that when the news came out in November 2018 about these first CRISPR babies, in the first hours, there was a lot of crowing in the Chinese media, including state media, saying this is showing that China is leading the world.
And then there was a massive international backlash, and then China flipped because they realized that if they became a pariah state, especially within the application of this kind of revolutionary science, they would lose more than they would gain.
How so?
I think that China really sees itself as being the world leader.
For them, with this science, they don't want to be seen as some kind of rogue bad actor.
They want to be seen as the leading cutting edge science power, like the United States has been since the Second World War.
Then they actually created a pretty strong law.
They actually imprisoned Ho Jong Kui by retroactively applying a law that didn't really exist.
So not only that, they had a thing where they were funding, and still are, Funding scientists, especially scientists who were trained outside of China, to come back.
They're giving them grants to do revolutionary science in all kinds of areas.
There's a very strong cultural pressure, as I was mentioning before, to really push those limits.
That brings us back To our original conversation about the origins of COVID, because let's just say that the lab leak hypothesis is right.
And then let's say, well, how is the lab leak story connected to the CRISPR baby story?
And you could say, all right, well, so you have this kind of young power.
China is an ancient civilization, but a young power, and they basically destroyed their whole base in the Cultural Revolution.
They now have these incredibly powerful tools, and they have a lot of nationalists and other pressures to drive science and scientists to cut corners and leap to the head of the line, but they don't have the governance systems.
They don't have the culture of care.
So it could easily be the case that these scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Maybe in the lab of the famous Batwoman, Dr. Xi, but maybe in Chinese military that was doing or commissioning work in the same facility.
And we don't even know the full extent.
But I think it's extremely likely, even whatever the origins of the pandemic, that there was all kinds of really aggressive science that's happening there.
And I think that's happening across the board in AI and In genomics, in many, many different areas.
It seems extremely likely to me that somebody knew that he was doing it.
I mean, this is China.
The government, as we were talking about earlier, plays a really central role in everything.
So somebody knew about it.
And I think they thought, just as he, in his application...
He thought that he was going to win the Nobel Prize and his heroes were the British and American scientists who developed IVF, Steptoe and Roberts, and he was going to be like them and bring glory to China.
So I think that was something that was supported.
Among the small number of people who knew about it and then it went wrong and then I think China realized they had a PR problem and they had a legal problem so they wrote a stronger law and then they imprisoned this guy to make a point.
Wouldn't you think that would be really stifling to the scientific community in China if Hu Zhongkui is imprisoned for something that they most likely asked him to do?
It's really an interesting thing because China, there are two different messages.
One message is, to scientists and to entrepreneurs, Race forward as fast as you can.
The world is a highly competitive place.
China, the government, has set a goal of being the world's leading power by 2049. Science and technology are a big piece of how we're going to get there.
Race forward.
That if you do something that pisses us off, you're going to be punished.
And we're not going to tell you exactly what that is.
So you may think that you're the richest man in China.
You may think that you're Jack Ma.
But if we decide that we don't like something you're doing, you're going to disappear for a while, and then you're going to come back, and you're going to have to apologize.
You may think that you're the most famous actress in China.
But you're just going to disappear one day and then months later re-emerge and apologize and basically assert, oh, the government is in control of everything.
I don't know who the equivalent here, but just imagine some beautiful- Jennifer Aniston type person.
Jennifer Aniston.
So imagine Jennifer Aniston.
All of a sudden, vanishes.
Nobody knows where she is.
The media isn't allowed to say what's happening with Jennifer Aniston because people have a pretty good sense.
And then three months later, Jennifer Aniston reemerges and says, I've realized I was wrong in some little minor infraction, and I pledge my support to the Chinese government, essentially.
And so that's the system.
And it's confusing for people because when I went to North Korea, it's like this is an authoritarian system.
It's a totalitarian system.
Everywhere you look, everyone's got the pin.
It's clear.
China, it's not like the Soviet Union.
This is like a really scientifically advanced society.
It's a sophisticated place.
But there's this level of control that people have really internalized.
I talked earlier about the Chinese government setting and narrative.
When you go to Tiananmen Square, what do you see?
You see this big portrait of Mao.
If you didn't know anything about Chinese history, it's, oh, isn't that great?
Mao, it's like their George Washington.
But if you know anything about Chinese history, you know that through the purges after the Civil War and the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution, Mao is responsible for the deaths of about 47 million Chinese people.
That's more than Hitler and Stalin's And Stalin combined.
And yet the story has been recast as this is the father of the nation.
And the reason is because the Communist Party is still in charge.
And so if you get rid of Mao, what's the origin story of the communists?
But they've recast that whole story.
And so when you're in China, people do have private thoughts, but there's a narrative.
If you're on the side of the dominant narrative, You're in good shape.
If you're on the other side, you're in trouble.
And I'll just say personally, I have an acquaintance of mine who I knew very years.
He was kind of like the Lou Dobbs of China.
He had a CCTV, China Central Television, nightly business show.
And he was on.
Everybody in China knew this guy.
Every average nightly broadcast, let's say you have kind of the entire equivalent of the entire population of the United States watching this guy every night.
Suddenly disappears.
And the reason is he was said to have a connection to a former security chief who got on the wrong side of Xi.
And so this acquaintance of mine hasn't been seen in years.
It just vanishes.
And I think that's It's complicated because you look at the pictures of Shanghai, you see Beijing, and you see a really sophisticated place, and it is.
But if you're on the wrong side of the Chinese government, you're in trouble.
And that's why, as I said before, I am extremely confident there are many people in China right now who have highly relevant information about the origins of the pandemic, and they don't dare speak up.
It's terrifying that that can coexist with what we deal with today in America, which is, you know, we complain about small infringements upon our freedoms.
And we think that, you know, our rights are being stripped away, which, you know, there's arguments that we are and that we have had some, particularly during the pandemic when governors have grasped massive amounts of power, often without legislative control.
But they...
What we're doing is nothing in comparison to what's happening in China.
That's why the freedom of information and the freedom of expression are so important.
And free speech, it's so important.
It's not just speech that you agree with.
Because as soon as you decide that someone can dictate what someone can and can't say, just because you think it's right, you open up the door to censorship.
And censorship leads to what you're seeing right now in China.
And though there's another thing of how do we find a common sense of reality and truth?
Because it used to be—and you showed Walter Cronkite.
It used to be everybody in the United States, you watch Walter Cronkite or one of those other guys, and you have a story of the world.
Now it's not just that we live in different stories.
We live in a world with entirely different— Factual foundations.
I don't know the answer to this question.
How do you avoid the kind of total relativism that they have in China where the government can just create a whole fake reality and then more than a billion people are forced to live in that reality?
So how do you avoid that?
How do you have the kind of openness, but how can you have a center of gravity so that there can be a space where people can find common ground?
I think we have to really clearly establish the narrative of how dangerous tribalism is and how human beings are inherently tribal because this is how we evolved.
We evolved to find a tight-knit group of people that you can trust, and you stick with them in these small villages, and you fight against intruders.
And this tribalism now is extended to 350 million people, or whatever we have here.
And it's terrible.
It's terrible.
We're supposed to be a community.
And that's the best version of what the United States is, is a large continental community.
And that's what it should be.
That's what it really should be.
It's possible to do that.
We just have to establish in young people This narrative.
And we have to avoid the short-term success of silencing the opposition and silencing the people that you don't agree with.
There's a short-term success in that that leads to long-term imprisonment of our values.
I mean, it's all these different people who have...
I mean, it's the genius of America.
I think our ancestors come from Europe, Where it was like, yeah, we're on this hill.
We hate those guys on that hill.
And this was this place where, you know, I live in New York.
You show up in New York for five days and you're a New Yorker.
No one says, oh, where are you from?
It's just like, you're what New Yorkers look like.
And it's totally normal and healthy that we'll have our differences.
But if we don't have a space where we can interact with each other and share ideas and be convinced to do something even just a little bit differently, Then I think you're absolutely right.
This tribalism is going to harm us, and winning for your tribe, in most cases, is losing for yourself and for your community.
Yeah, I think we have to reject leaders who enforce tribalism, and I think the real hope of that is young people.
Young people recognize in this message that censorship is inherently dangerous, and that there's so much reward People are so often rewarded for tribalism online.
They're rewarded by the likes of the people that agree with you.
I think people need to reject that.
They need to reject that kind of communication, that polarizing communication.
They need to recognize that there's a lot of people that are legitimately mentally ill because of social media.
Legitimately mentally ill.
It's a bad way to communicate.
And people are addicted to it and it becomes impulsive.
It becomes this thing that they search and check all day long to see how their messages are being responded to and what arguments they're in with people.
Is there division in their clan or is everybody united in this front?
Even if the front is illogical and foolish as long as it's tribal and there's reinforcement from the other people in the tribe.
Like, whatever it is.
Whether it's the election was stolen or whether it's the virus came from a bat.
These narratives that people are so assured of that don't make any sense.
You should be able to talk about stuff.
And we should reward this kind of free discourse where people are being polite and people are being inquisitive and people are genuinely trying to find out what the actual facts are.
Without any bias and without any need to flavor things to fit the narrative that their tribe holds onto.
We've got to abandon all that shit because that's the only way we're going to get past this weird state we're in now where you've got a bunch of fucking morons storming Capitol Hill because they really think that, you know, you know what I'm saying?
And it's like we're all, if we're not careful, we enter into our own Self-referential realities.
I mentioned it earlier in the show, even with me, with our community calling for a full investigation, but by definition, we're all sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis.
But we're all kind of in a world with each other and you get more and more affirmation.
But you also mentioned something I think is really essential about the role of young people in getting us out of this.
And I, for one, I actually have a lot of hope in the earliest days of the pandemic I gave a talk about these kinds of problems and how the only way we're going to solve these problems is by recognizing that we have to come together to do it.
And all of these young people around the world rallied around that call.
And we've now come together and we've founded an organization called One Shared World.
It's about finding that common space, solving common problems.
It's oneshared.world, if anyone wants to Go to the website and learn about it.
But I think there is a lot of hope in these young people, but we all exist in this context.
And the superstructure is pushing us in a certain way.
And I think that while we have to focus on our individual behaviors, We don't look at the superstructure and say, well, what are all the incentives?
And how are these incentives pushing us toward a certain set of behaviors?
It's going to be really difficult to get out of them.
So there's a lot of hope, but we also have a lot of work to do.
Yeah, and so that's the thing is that I think there was a time, as I was talking about this with somebody earlier today, there was a time in the early days of the internet where I think a lot of us, we had this theology, oh, the open systems are going to win.
And so let's let the internet is going to bring freedom to the world.
And we've learned out, what we've learned is Is that no technology comes with its own built-in value system.
Every technology, you think, oh, a stirrup, that seems like a good idea.
Well, yeah, the Mongols used it and conquered the world and killed a lot of people.
The plow, every technology can be used for good or for bad, and these technologies are just the same, but they're so powerful that if we don't really try to establish frameworks for how they can be used ethically, we'll just be pushed into all these kinds of behaviors That are antithetical to who we would at least like to be.
I don't know if she said anything, but it was more that she...
I think.
There's a Chinese saying, which I can't remember, but it's something like, kill the chickens to scare the...
Something or other.
But I think that this was someone who was becoming very powerful, with a massive social media following, who was a high-profile person.
And the government was making a statement, no matter who you are.
It's the same Jack Ma statement.
You could be the richest man in China.
You could be the most famous actress in China.
You are...
I think that's why I think that message has been spread across China.
And that means that there are a lot of other people, like these scientists, possibly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere, Who know what the system is.
And I think it was a way of delivering a message that everybody in China would hear.
So this is the challenge, is that China is becoming more powerful.
COVID, even if COVID started with an accidental lab leak, as I believe it most likely did, has in many ways made China relatively more powerful because they got a handle on it.
They've seen the chaos here.
The United States antagonized until recently all of our friends and allies.
And so I think, frankly, it's going to take the rest of the world coming together to balance China and the rest of the world coming together in spite of our differences and saying, here is a vision of the world in which we would like to live.
It's a world where...
Human rights are respected.
We're able to investigate accidents with the kind of free and open access where there aren't shameful land grabs in the South China Sea or in the Himalayas.
It's where people are free to express their views of how they would like to live and how they'd like to be governed.
And if you, China, would like to be part of that world, we will welcome you, but here are the rules.
If you don't want to be part of that world, here are the consequences.
There's a cost to that because all of our supply chains run through China.
There's huge amounts of economic growth that happen in China.
Many big issues like climate change can't be solved without China.
But a world where we integrate with China with no standards of behavior, and not just for them, but also for ourselves, which is why what's happened here in these past years in the United States was such a heartbreak for many people, myself included, A world that's not based on standards of ethical behavior is a world that is going to decay.
And there's nothing that says that we will have the kind of security and stability in the next 76 years That we've had in the last 76 years since the end of the Second World War.
But when you see all these companies just sort of caving in at China because of the amount of money that China generates them, even the NBA caved into China.
It's spooky because they have so much money to be made.
And China, the Chinese government does a great job Of using that kind of pressure, but there's no way that any individual company can stand up to China on its own.
I have an acquaintance of mine who years ago was on the board for GE. And you think, oh, GE, that's a big company.
And so somebody in China, this was years ago, went to their representative in China and said, look, you have two big businesses in China.
One is wind turbines, and the other is medical equipment.
We're going to steal your wind turbine business.
We're going to steal all the technology.
We're going to copy it.
We don't want you to complain.
If you don't complain, you get to keep your medical equipment business.
If you do complain, we'll also steal your medical equipment business.
And so there's no way that GE on its own could stand up to China.
And so when it's an individual company, including Apple, our most powerful companies, or the NBA, and it's them versus the Chinese government, this company is going to lose.
And that's why we need to the United States, Europe.
Japan, Australia, others, we need to come together and have a united front and to establish standards.
And that's why we're going to have to compromise with each other in order to make that kind of balancing possible.
But if we're all competing with each other for access to China, then they're going to play both sides against the middle.
Well, the only reason that they'll adjust is if they face an environment where the benefit of adjusting outweighs the harm of doing what they're doing.
And I think that we have to try, whether it's possible or not, maybe it's too late, we have to try to make that happen.
You can be under house arrest, under constant surveillance.
You can be put in prison, as some people are.
But you certainly know that if you speak up, You're going to be in trouble.
As a matter of fact, I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with somebody I know who's a professor at, I won't mention the school, but who's an expert in how this whole system works and in touch with all of the Chinese dissidents from the old days from Tiananmen Square.
And I was asking him, let's just say That there's somebody in China who has some really important information about the origins of the pandemic.
How could they get that information out?
And he thought about it for a while.
And certainly, maybe they could send an encrypted email, but they think it would be a super high risk.
And the only thing he could come up with was maybe they could get in touch with somebody from the U.S. Embassy.
And try to sneak in the door and then be able to speak freely once they got there.
I mean, this was like the world's expert in how people in China who had really highly sensitive information could get that information out in a way that they would not think that they and their family were at risk.
But he had this special role for many years as this high profile.
He was basically the face of Chinese business.
And he could speak openly and honestly.
And he was this great Chinese success story.
And I think they wanted him to be the face of the new Chinese entrepreneur.
And he had this great story of how he was just this little local guy and he heard about the Internet and he had this kind of folksy wisdom that made him really popular.
And then they grew and they started these different – Alibaba started these different financial firms like Ant Financial and they grew.
And all of a sudden there was an institution that had power that was really relevant.
And the government said, hey, wait a second, we don't want that.
And unlike in another country where they could say, well, how can we think about regulation?
The whole point was, we want to deliver a message that even the wealthiest person in China is not free from control.
And the other point, and this is...
It's a broader point connected to what we were talking about, about international competition, and that is when we think of a company here in the United States, whoever they are, Apple, we don't really think of them as a state actor.
When Apple is going and doing deals somewhere else, But in China, if you're a big company, you don't have the ability to buck the Chinese government.
I mean, the Chinese government mandates that there be a Communist Party sell in all of these big companies.
And that doesn't mean that every day you have the local political boss telling you, do this, do that.
But you know that if you do something that is not to the liking of the government, Or if the government says you must do this particular thing, whether it's Huawei making their computer code accessible or anybody else, the companies aren't in a position on important things to say no to the government.
And that's why when we interact with Chinese companies, especially Huawei, The big ones, we need to recognize they aren't companies like the way our companies are companies, like the way most European companies.
It's just terrifying that a company or that a country, rather, as big as China with over a billion people can operate like that with such an iron fist in this information age in 2021, that they have their internet locked down, that they have their population completely under control, and that they could even expand that to Hong Kong.
And the scary thing is that they're actually really good at it.
North Korea, they have their population completely under control and they're just bad at it.
There's no good outcome.
China, their economy is growing even in spite of the pandemic.
The country is getting stronger.
They're eradicating poverty.
I mean, they're doing a lot of things and there's a trade-off Between the government and the people.
And the people don't have a choice, so they have to accept it.
And it's scary that it's happening, but it's also scary that they're really good at it.
And that's the challenge to us.
I mean, in retrospect, the Soviet Union was kind of doomed from the start.
How could that system have worked?
And you see the old movies, and there's like the fat guy with the sweaty hair and the bad suit making decisions.
They go, that was never going to work.
These guys, I mean, they have developed a highly competitive system, and they're competing with us, and they have the goal of being the world's leading country by 2049. I'm afraid of living in that world, a world that is defined by China's norms.
And so that's why, for me, The lesson for us is we better make us the best version of ourselves that we possibly can be.
And that means, like you were mentioning, to think about how do we want to build our culture and our society?
How do we make sure that our businesses are as competitive as possible?
How do we build alliances with our partners around the world because we need them?
And I think this is the real lesson.
We can't act like nothing matters.
And I feel like one of the tragedies of these Trump years is that we've acted like nothing matters.
Like we have such a head start Over the rest of the world, that we don't need to focus every day about how do we strengthen ourselves?
How do we improve our society?
How do we deepen the connections between us and our friends and partners around the world?
And now I think we're getting back to that, but that's what we have to do.
It was through agricultural policy, which wasn't all perfect, but they had a series of policies, especially to improve the livelihoods of rural people through greater access.
They basically opened up a highly restrictive agricultural sector.
And this is something they had industrial policies.
They were very smart of thinking, how do they develop through the different stages of development?
So they started with this high labor manufacturing.
So when I compare a country like China, where they had kind of no manufacturing, and then all of a sudden, all this low-quality crap was suddenly made in China.
And because of that, though, they brought all of these really poor people into the lower middle class.
And then on top of that, they started to build more of a market economy and they could lever up.
India, another country that's roughly the same size population, They didn't do that.
And so India, in a way, has missed that level of high employment manufacturing, and that's why India is stuck with these hundreds of millions of people who are still in abject poverty.
And then industrial policy.
I mean, we used to have industrial policy in the United States in the war years and post-war years, and we thought, well, it's government and academia and business need to work together.
Then we went all the way to the other end of the spectrum.
We think, well, government needs to stay out of the way.
It's just a bunch of kids in their garage, and they're going to...
Do everything.
And now, I think in response to the China threat, even people like Marco Rubio are starting to say, well, what's the right relationship between government, business, and academia?
And I think that if we just said everything that we do is the best, And no one else can compete.
I think that is going to be a losing hand for us.
But we also need to say, what are the stuff that we're great at and how can we be better?
Yeah, there's a real danger, and that's why so many people are looking to the history of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, where there were these things.
You have this big civilization, and it grows, and it's strong, and then it starts to fall apart, and then people are trying to fix it, and then it falls apart.
But as I was saying before, I have been so inspired by these young people who I've worked very closely with over the last year through our community of OneShared.World.
And now we have a partnership that we're doing with Model United Nations, called MUN Impact.
It's kind of this crazy thing that we're doing.
At the end of March, we're having 10 different debates all around the world in English, French, Spanish, and Russian.
The goal of every one of these debates is to negotiate a Model United Nations resolution Guaranteeing clean water, basic sanitation and hygiene, and essential pandemic protection for everyone on Earth by 2030. Then we have a small team of experts that are going to take these resolutions negotiated by these kids and turn it into a resolution that looks every bit as professional as a resolution passed by the United Nations.
Then we're going to have a global advocacy campaign saying, all right, a bunch of kids can negotiate an answer to help not just protect the most vulnerable people on earth, but to recognize that if the poorest people on earth don't have water and sanitation, guess what?
The virus is going to mutate there and our vaccines won't make a difference.
And then we're going to call on world leaders to actually pass a real resolution and try to actually solve this problem.
So there's hope, but we need to be creative in how to harness this hope and turn it into something real.
But but the reason why programs like this have so much impact is that that I do think there's a lot of hope.
I do think young people, you know, a year and a half ago were sitting at home posting pictures of lasagna on Instagram and thinking that was life.
And I do think that a lot of young generation people have realized that the world that our generation has left them is broken in so many ways, and that if they don't rally to fix it, the future is going to look like this.
So there's a huge amount of danger, but I also feel hope.
I think the polarization, though, is stronger now than ever before.
And I think the problems that people are focusing on in terms of like, in comparison to the threat that we're experiencing, we discussed for the last couple hours about China is relatively trivial, and that we need to stop all that shit and work together.
And even then, we're behind the curve, because China's government has massive influencing control over their people and complete control over their business.
Well, for sure, one of the most important things is our ability to communicate openly and freely so that we understand these problems and we realize that our differences are far smaller than the things that we have in common.
Our differences, we tend to highlight our differences and which is part of the problem with today's social media algorithms is it enhances those differences.
It makes those differences seem like they're the only thing that matters.
And that's really the first time ever in my life that it seems like that, that people are concentrating more on our differences than on what we have in common.
And that's why it's been a heartbreak that we've kind of fought over these things.
But I still think that there's an opportunity To come together, but to do it, we have to do it.
And it seems so big and abstract for people to say, oh, come together.
It's like, yeah, sure, kumbaya.
But maybe if we kind of break it down and everybody can, like maybe if everyone who's listening to this podcast can have like one nice tweet right now about some issue.
If you go out in the rest of the world, in most of the world at least, well, the problem is in a lot of cities, the world has become like Twitter.
That's the problem in terms of like the pandemic has exacerbated a lot of the financial struggle and crime has risen radically, particularly violent crime.
And it's become like, I don't have a lot of hope for like Los Angeles.
When I go back to Los Angeles and I see where I used to live, I'm like, this is not going to get better.
It was certainly one of the challenges that he has is like Chicago has a strong mayor system where the mayor has the responsibility and the power.
Los Angeles has a weak mayor system where there's the nominal responsibility but not all of the power.
But I certainly think that in our society more generally, Unless we recognize that we're all in this together, that if we want to address the problems of the poorest people, I mean, there's certain things, I mean, certainly housing, health care, mental health, sanitation, I mean, some of the zoning things, like you mentioned.
There are a lot of things that could be done, but we need to really solve these problems systemically.
I mean, the new Biden stimulus bill has some things certainly which are welcome to help poorer people, but it has to happen at the federal government, at the state, at the city, and also at the personal level.
I mean, I think people need to be empowered to solve their own problems.
And I think that These are holistic things.
And like I said, I'm not the world's genius on how to solve all of Los Angeles' problems, but I do know that we're the society that we put people on the moon, we've done all of these things.
If we decided that it was a national priority to massively reduce extreme poverty, for sure, I think it would be achievable.
It would be wonderful if we put an effort into that, but there's also a massive resistance to doing anything like that because people consider it a form of socialism.
And the thing is, I mean, again, that's what this virus is showing, is we're all connected, and the economics are just the same.
I mean, it's...
Or even connecting this to genetics.
I mean, when I was in that horrible...
Shantytown in Los Angeles or when I was in refugee camps all around the world, I always think, well, let's just imagine if we could do a genome sequencing of every single person there, and we have a little more knowledge of how to understand genome sequencing.
Could we, 20 years from now, say, you see this kid here who's born in this totally crappy place with no access to quality education?
That person has the ability to be a Mozart, the potential to be a Mozart, to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
We kind of see other people in our own society and we don't see potential.
It's not just a crime.
It's anti-competitive, coming back to this China point.
If we want to compete with China, let's empower, let's educate everybody in America so that everybody can be part of this engine of making our society better and stronger.
Well, I've always said that the one way, if you want to make America great again, is to have less losers.
Like, how do you have less losers?
Well, you've got to take all these areas that have historically been impoverished, like, you know, places like South Side of Chicago that for decades have been riddled in crime and gangs, and do something about it.
And if we put the kind of effort that...
Remember the economic stimulus that they first did when the pandemic first hit?
I mean, $2 trillion now, we're up at almost $5 trillion.
Imagine someone said, all right, here's $5 trillion.
We're just going to take $1 trillion, and we're going to try to solve this problem, not just by spending money, but by having a systemic approach.
And then the other thing that we could do that I've always said that we should do is we should tell...
Every embassy in the world, every US embassy in the world, we've got a new job for you.
We're going to give you, and just pick a number, let's say 500 green cards a year, 1,000 green cards a year.
And your mission is to search this country for the smartest, most creative, most ambitious people you can find.
Give them a green card and say, we want you to move to the United States to help build our country.
We could just, I mean, this is such a great country.
We could just have all these people.
Instead, what we're doing is keeping those people out or some of those people are coming here, they're getting educated here, and then we kick them out after they graduate.
So I think that if we're If we really want to grow our economy, our competitiveness, we should do it.
In one of my novels, I have a thing called the Department of National Competitiveness, and it was in the story.
You know, it does, but here's the basic premise, is that the two parties can't agree with each other, and so finally there's a breakthrough, and they create this Department of National Competitive that comes out and says, all right, if the United States wants to be the most competitive country in the world, here are the things that we're going to do, and then everybody has to vote on it, kind of like with the old base closings, in an up or down vote.
But I do think it doesn't have to be the government.
Like, we should say, well, what do we have to do to make America the most vibrant, most competitive country in the world as we've been for the better part of a century?
And I think we need to come together around building that.
It's not unhealthy for people to prioritize their thing.
I mean, you want people to say, well, I'm going to build a great business and that's going to help a country.
But it can't be all or nothing.
I think we need to say, well, my mission in life is to do X or whatever it is.
But some piece of that has to be connected to a sense of the commons.
I don't think...
That that hope has expired.
I mean, like I said before, I'm from Kansas City.
And in places like Kansas City, there are people who have a really strong sense of community, but somehow community has stopped being the whole country.
It's been a little piece of the country.
And I don't know how we get that back.
I mean, but again, this is a country that has civil war.
But my worry is that by the time we recognize what's happening, it's going to be too late.
China already has the biggest navy.
They had a massive show of force the other day where they showed over the last, I forget how many years, they've built their navy to be the largest force in the ocean in the world.
And there's some progress and hope, and certainly we just came through a hard-fought election.
And there are little seeds being planted.
Will they grow?
I don't know.
But I definitely think, I mean, I don't talk about this stuff about China just to scare people.
What I really want people to hear is...
There's a competition in the world, and that competition is to define what are the norms under which we all live.
One of the reasons why it was great that America, with our allies, won the Second World War is we set the rules.
For a big part of the world, and then more of the world, and all of our lives have played out in the context of those rules.
And now people don't like globalization, but the ideas of international law and all those things that allow us, have allowed us to live as we have, were in many ways created by the United States.
We thought we had a peer competitor in the Soviet Union, and then it turned out that they were less of a peer than we thought.
China really is a peer competitor.
They have a very different vision of the world than what we have.
If we don't want to live in a world that is defined by China's rules, now is the time to start strengthening our society, building our relationships, doubling down on our best values, whether it's democracy, inclusion, Human rights, because it won't be that we just don't do enough.
We languish.
We don't take our democracy seriously.
We don't think about how we'd like the world to be organized.
And then 10 years from now, 20 years from now, or two years from now, there's some moment and we also, oh, now it's too late.
Everybody solves the last problem, and then you get the new problem.
So there's a stability that comes...
Yeah, well, there's a stability that comes with the two-party system that was a reaction in some ways against the multi-party parliamentary systems that other countries have.
I see it a lot in Afghanistan, where they have an era where it was the political party system.
And so all the parties were fighting each other.
And then they said, all right, we don't want political parties.
So it's Any one of these systems can work, but a lot of these systems pick up bad habits over time and pathologies over time.
And if we don't have some kind of process of rejuvenation and renewal, we become kind of caricaturish versions of ourselves and our systems change.
Become so dysfunctional.
And that was one of the reasons why we had such a hard time under President Trump is that previous presidents had said, well, all right, the system is breaking down.
Let's put more power into the presidency so the president can rule by executive order, essentially by decree.
And then when we had presidents from both parties who seem like a reasonable person and they're making executive orders to fix problems that Congress couldn't solve, it's like, all right, that's okay.
Then all of a sudden, we have somebody else who's making executive orders that maybe some of us didn't agree with.
And so it seems like the right answer is to think, well, how can we build a system that works better?
And that's the challenge that we're facing now as I see it.