Tucker Carlson debates a Nucleus biotech CEO on embryo screening, arguing that selecting for traits like IQ or height constitutes eugenics and risks creating a homogenized "private equity" society. While the CEO defends parental liberty and claims embryos lack souls due to natural attrition, Tucker warns against conflating instrumental value with moral worth, citing Dr. He Jiankui's CRISPR failures. They conclude that technology cannot encode virtue or divine connection, urging humility over Silicon Valley's techno-capitalist drive to optimize human evolution without spiritual grounding. [Automatically generated summary]
So, patients, there's one way of reproducing via IVF, right?
So, you can conceive naturally via sex, or maybe if you're infertile or if you have some sort of hereditary disease or for some other reason, you do IVF.
And so during this process of IVF, what you do is today, even if nucleus didn't exist, even if genetic optimization didn't exist, you make several embryos.
Uh, the amount of embryos you end up making, it varies, but you might have four or five.
You actually do genetic testing on these embryos to identify things like chromosome abnormalities, like Down syndrome, for example, right?
So that's very commonplace.
That's done in basically every IVF clinic.
In the United States, they will actually screen embryos, the genetics of the embryos to see if they have some sort of severe chromosomal abnormality.
What we do is we basically provide more information on embryos.
So we also read the DNA, but now we give information on things like other hereditary disease risk, um, also chronic diseases, things like cancers, Alzheimer's, diabetes, um, also traits like IQ or, or height or et cetera.
Um, so to be clear, we're not changing any DNA.
There's this process in IVF where you make embryos already.
Genetic testing is done in embryos.
What we do now is we provide you a little bit more information.
On your embryos.
So basically, that information can be used and implant which embryo the couple deems to be best.
So basically, give more information to couples to then choose which embryo they want to implant.
And so using twin studies, you can actually get measurements of things from diseases, right?
Like cancers and diabetes and Alzheimer's, as mentioned, to things like height or IQ or BMI, et cetera.
So twin studies show that IQ specifically is about 50% genetic.
But to be clear, IQ is just one of over 2,000 factors that we actually look at, right?
Principally, parents and patients, they come for disease.
They always come for disease.
And remember that when the embryos you're picking from, The most important determinant of the genetics of your embryos is, well, your partner, right?
So you're actually not changing DNA.
This is not gene editing.
You're not changing DNA.
You're not making, uh, like an embryo's DNA better.
You're basically reading the embryo's DNA that you have.
So when you pick your partner, you're basically picking the kind of genetic pool, and then you can basically pick which embryo you deem to be best based off of your preferences and values.
I think this is one of the most important conversations we can have.
And I agree.
You're much younger than I am.
So you weren't here for the debates that took place in the early 1990s about what traits are the product of genetics and which are the product of environment.
But up until pretty recently, the public conversation has settled on a consensus that everything is environment.
And that genetics aren't real.
And this was at the very center of our national debate about race and crime and educational achievement, income.
And it all grew out of or was crystallized by a book called The Bell Curve.
In, in society today, when people think about, uh, like height or cancers, I'm not, and to be clear, I'm not talking about, there's hereditary disease risk like PKU, Tay-Sax, cystic fibrosis, beta thalassemia.
These are conditions we also screen for, right?
To make sure that parents can, you know, reduce suffering each generation.
So that's also part of what we do.
Um, and those conditions are basically deterministic in nature, right?
So if you have two bad copies of like cystic fibrosis, you're going to get cystic fibrosis and it's debilitating.
And so there's like policies, uh, you know, that basically encourage, you know, Americans and people around the world to, to do screening.
to not pass down basically an invisible genetic burden to their child.
so no no no no those are methods by which you implement in eugenics but they're not the only ones eugenics simply means there's nothing inherently well you can disagree with the concept but the concept is corrosive or not the improvement of a species in this case the human species through selective breeding you Well, but there is no selective breeding.
In IVF clinics for the last couple of decades, there's been this process of basically taking these embryos, getting more information on the embryos, and then picking which embryo you want to implant, right?
Again, you're not changing DNA.
You're not controlling who can get married to who.
Just to be clear, if you go back, eugenics is a term it came up with in the late 19th century by a scientist named Francis Galton.
It was steering people, giving them options, telling them that, you know, if you married this kind of person, here's the outcome you're likely to get when you have children.
I'm just saying that, and I couldn't be more opposed to that than, in fact, to the whole program.
But I just want to note as a factual matter that forced sterilizations were an incredibly ugly evil.
Manifestation of an idea that was not limited to forced sterilization.
Yeah, because the idea is the same idea you're articulating, which is people should try to improve the human species by selective creation of children.
So, nucleus ultimately, and what we give patients, ultimately, what patients actually want, right?
Again, patients are choosing their partner.
They're choosing to do IVF.
They have basically options.
They have several embryos.
They get information.
There's actually no, um, Best embryo, right?
So, nucleus is a company and no patients can ever say, Oh, this is the best embryo because there's no, um, fundamental virtue rooted in biological characteristics.
So, like, the idea that, like, you could even have a best, for example, is misguided principally in my view because something like virtue, right?
There's natural virtue and then divine virtue, right?
It's fundamentally not biological.
It's not physical.
Genetics can only program for physical things.
And then people can basically make their choices within the partners that they choose and in doing IVF to then pick the embryo that sets The best set of biological characteristics to them, but there is no virtue, there's no morality in that decision.
But so do you think that it's equally virtuous to have a child, intentionally have a child, which we can now do with the genetic testing you're describing, who has Down syndrome, Tay Sachs, and CF?
Is that as virtuous as having a child who is none of those things?
Because I thought you just said that it's good to get rid of those things.
That term best is relative, context specific to the parent.
We have patients, for example, that might have Huntington's, which is a.
Severe neurogen disease.
Very, very severe.
It's autosomal dominant, which means it's passed down.
And by the way, this is actually interesting.
Something like Huntington's or schizophrenia, these are exactly the kind of conditions that in the 20th century they would say, hey, these people are unfit.
They should not be produced because they have some sort of neuropsychiatric or some sort of debilitating condition that runs in the family.
Like in my case, one of the reasons why I started the business is because one of my family members, she unfortunately went to sleep and she passed away in her sleep.
If somebody wants to have a child based off their set of what they deem to be best, based off their lived experience, that's their right and that's their choice.
So I'm not saying that it's better to have a child that is not deaf, for example.
I wonder though, because, but you described something that's absolutely real, which is, A system globally that is designed to minimize, to reduce the incidence of certain conditions.
Right.
So you said that.
That's the policy.
Like, you genetic test all the embryos at every IVF clinic because you want to make sure we have less Down syndrome, for example.
But no, but again, what's important here is there's not some sort of broad centralized body being like, oh, we need to all do this sort of testing embryos.
That decision rests in the parent's choice.
A parent could choose not to screen embryos for Down syndrome.
And on that point, you know, if you think about it, and also, by the way, of the 5 trillion, so 4 trillion, about 80% is chronic disease, about 500 billion is about rare diseases.
So these rare genetic conditions that I outlined, right?
So genetics has a strong impact on both hereditary disease, like cancer, as I outlined, like chronic diseases, as well as rare disease.
So genetics can help impact, you know, four, four and a half trillion dollars of healthcare expenditure.
But, and there is a but, remember those four and a half trillion dollars, somebody's making money for someone being sick.
So to be clear, in the United States, this has played out over the last 20 years.
Like people have been able to pick the sex of their child in IVF clinics, both in the United States and then again at some point internationally too, but eventually became outlawed for the reason you outlined, which is people generally pick slightly more boys.
I mean, it's illegal and it's much harder in these countries.
In the United States, though, if you actually played out people making their own choices, it ends up being about, again, 50 50.
So this is actually interesting because what do you think of it?
Was it valid for someone to come in and say, I mean, you said this is an ethically neutral question about whether or not to have a child with this or that genetic condition, but what about sex?
Is that ethically neutral?
Is it okay, in your view, for a couple to say, I don't want any girls?
In my view, that is the prerogative of the parents to pick which sex they want.
And if you play that out across many, many, many couples making their own independent choices, right, which is an embodiment of this kind of liberty and choice, you see it ends up being about 50 50, which I think actually undercuts this idea that everyone's going to pick, you know, a boy, for example, right?
Natural virtue can be intellectually derived wisdom, courage, justice, temperance.
It's kind of classic Aristotle.
And then there's things like grace and revelation, which come from God.
You can't necessarily, a human being's mind is limited, it's finite.
You can't necessarily grasp that.
So there has to, there's a, there's a, so you can, one, you can derive from like thinking, like what leads to basic eudaimonia, human flourishing, right?
That kind of virtue, natural virtue, right?
Coming from Aristotle.
And the other kind is, um, Thinking about divine virtue, which is what goes beyond the intellect, right?
Which Thomas Aquinas basically brought together and thought about okay, there's this idea of natural virtue that, you know, the Greeks came up with.
And then, of course, there's this idea of divine virtue coming from, you know, the Old and New Testament about union with God.
And, you know, all religions actually talk ultimately about surrendering.
Personally, I do believe in God, just so you know, if that's not clear.
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So I think from my experience meditating and from what I've seen, The again, human mind, the intellectual mind is limited and finite, and there's basically this vastness.
It's hard to describe, which is why often the Sufis would use poetry to actually describe God because it's it's it's this it's it's an allure to it, you can't describe it directly because it's too big.
Precisely, it's infinite, it's vast.
That's why, like, the ocean is an example.
Another way, like, to think about it is like if you're a raindrop, and it's easy for us, especially in modern society, to think the raindrop is the world, but eventually you return to the ocean and you realize it's much bigger.
In other words, Islam, and you can, I'm not Christian, you're Christian, so you can tell me more about the Christian view, but there's a concept of surrender in Christianity.
So in Islam, it means literally Islam, not just surrender.
I think there cannot be a second understanding of divine virtue.
We can get more into this, what I mean there, but let me just outline this quickly and then I think I'll bring it around.
So there's consequentialism, which is most people I think in contemporary society adopt.
There's deontology, right?
Which is, as you rooted, rooted in some sort of maybe there's some universal, this is good, this is bad.
Then there's virtue ethics, right?
Which basically, instead of saying, oh, the consequence, instead of saying, oh, this action is good because the consequence was good or this action is good because the action is inherently good or bad.
Or wrong because of some secular or non secular set of rules, you're saying, hey, the actual thing that you need to measure and need to think about is the moral character of the person doing the action.
And then if the moral character, if they possess these kind of cardinal virtues, things like temperance and justice, um, and, and wisdom, for example, um, then it so follows that the action they do would be virtuous, right?
So you try to cultivate the soul basically, and then in cultivating the soul and cultivating virtue confers basically virtue in the action, right?
So basically the first two, in my view, in my view, deontology and consequentialism is very much about the action, right?
It's saying, hey, is this outcome good based off some, uh, thing you're trying to max, maximize?
And then deontology, which is this concept of, hey, forget about the outcome is good or not.
Is this the right or wrong thing?
Then the concept of virtue ethics, which is instead of saying, you know, looking at the action, right?
Because ultimately human beings produce action.
Actions, you know, aren't just there.
Human beings produce action.
The quality of the action should be measured or that it's deemed virtuous if the, the person can strive and embody virtue.
And so personally, and I'm still, by the way, talking about natural virtue right now.
I'm not even talking about divine virtue.
I'm talking about in the intellectual plane.
Things that people can think about and reason, argue over, things of the mind, not things that go beyond the mind, right?
And so in the constant of virtue ethics, I think this is the try to moral philosophy we try to embody in saying, hey, and this comes back all the way to embryonic selection, which is, hey, there is no biological best.
There is none, right?
Again, the soul, the soul, which is non physical, ultimately does not rest.
It cannot be programmed in biology.
So people can have different preferences.
Somebody could say, you know, I want my son or daughter to be a lawyer.
Someone else could say, you know, athlete.
Someone else could say an entrepreneur.
Someone else could say an artist.
These are different outcomes that are based off people's local preferences, physical preferences, contextual preferences, but they're smaller, right?
So, this is actually a paradox that I struggle with too, because another thing that I think a lot about is something called panpsychism, which is this idea that basically each object has its consciousness, even like a rock, right?
So, this idea that a rock has a consciousness, it's a being, albeit not as sophisticated as human consciousness, but it's there.
And it provides this idea that.
Consciousness is this kind of spectrum all the way up to, let's say, humans.
And then each thing has this consciousness, and accordingly, it's kind of made in, it's endowed with something that goes beyond just kind of its weight or matter, basically.
It's basically very non-empiric, just non-materialist.
And it basically believes this idea that, again, God has given this consciousness to everything.
And to be clear, the stories of sci fi, right, like Frankenstein, for example, or even Jurassic Park, to some example, but Frankenstein, this idea that we can make life, right?
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So, again, let's think about the different moral values that someone could have here.
If someone has consequentialism, they could say, hey, look, we want to commit murder for this good, and maybe they have some good that they do not have.
But I just tell you that there's kind of, it's like very pluralistic.
And then somebody could say, murder's always bad, which is fine.
I respect that opinion, absolutely.
And then there's sort of this last bucket, which again, I keep coming back to this idea of virtue ethics, which is, can you have a cultivation of the spirit of the soul to think, hey, what is right in this situation?
Because society does not have a definitive answer to this question, right?
People will sometimes say, knee jerk, they'll say, oh, murder's always bad, but then they'll be pro the death penalty, right?
Now, I think we both understand it's hard not to want to exercise that right when you can or someone annoys you or there's a country you don't like or there's a okay.
Or so then what can we say about an embryo in a lab?
So going back to the panpsychic philosophy, right?
Which is this idea.
No, It's like Tucker.
No, no, Tucker.
I'll give you a proper answer, but these things are not simple.
I can't be like, oh, yes, it's let's just bear with me for a second.
There is a spectrum of consciousness, there's a spectrum from, uh, You know, rocks to a sentient being all the way to a more conscious, you know, being like a human, a more complicated, evolved, fully conscious being.
And the question is, where does an embryo sit in that?
That is the fundamental question.
You know, does an embryo have a soul, for example?
And so then the fundamental question, um, is that, okay, well, um, does an embryo have a soul?
Um, and then I think about it, I always like to think about things, uh, inductively.
So I don't, I just want, don't want to think about an embryo, but I think about, There's a huge diversity and range of life.
And I can, in my head at least, and again, this is the feelings of the intellect.
The intellects only do so much.
But when I think about it, I think, okay, I think about a rock, which I think has some kind of maybe proto consciousness, some very, very limited consciousness that we don't understand.
Maybe through some psychic or meditative work, you could try to become a rock and try to understand its more subjective experience if it exists, right?
All the way to an embryo, to a dog, to a human.
And so, because of this spectrum, it comes down to this question at what point, basically, do we have this, is there a soul in an embryo?
And I tend to think, and I don't know, obviously, but I tend to think that an embryo doesn't have a soul.
So, when you look at the way that actually people conceive naturally, what ends up happening is that you have these formations of kind of small formations of an embryo, okay, right, which is an egg meets the cell and then it travels down and tries to implant.
And then many times actually naturally, it doesn't implant successfully.
So, nature already has it such that, you figure out IVF, in natural conception, it is the case that basically you have these embryo formation and then ends up not forming.
And now, the way I see it is, I see that nature wouldn't make it such that, or God wouldn't make it such that an embryo would have a soul if in natural procreation it is the case that the embryos come and go.
Because I don't think God, in my personal belief, I don't think God would basically be getting rid of souls.
I just don't think so.
Now, do I think that there is a fundamental beauty, not just, I mean, absolutely to an embryo, in that, and this is really important for me to say because I don't know how else to say it.
I do think it is similar to like a wave.
That forms and then again returns to the ocean because everything returns to the ocean.
So I don't see it as something that's like, oh, the embryo is being discarded.
I see it as returning back to the source, even if I don't believe that it has an explicit soul.
In our culture, people will conflate greater performance with being morally better.
Which is, I think, a big problem.
So there's two kinds of value.
There's instrumental value and there's moral value.
Um, instrumental value is contingent.
And this is actually really important.
All of, um, biology, all of nature is contingent value.
For example, um, you know, you, would maybe want an entrepreneur potentially to be more risk seeking, but you wouldn't want your surgeon to be more risk seeking, right?
Um, in other words, the value of phenotypes actually changes depending on the environment, right?
And this is obvious to say, but it's actually, I think people miss this sometimes because they think there is a universal best.
They'll say, hey, if you optimize for X phenotype that I deem to be best, It will lead to a better person.
It doesn't lead to a better person.
It might lead to a more optimized outcome, but it doesn't lead to a better person.
The first part is, um, will people basically all choose in the same direction?
And, you know, interestingly, again, people actually want very different things.
And we see that every day with patients, right?
Which is like, there's this idea that like rich people will come in and be like, oh, every rich person is going to pick the same way.
As you mentioned, sex is actually a great proxy for this, right?
Sex selection in the United States is about 50 50.
And so, if you think about, um, you know, any possible phenotype, like even when you, somebody comes and says, I want to optimize for type 2 diabetes risk.
Someone else might want to do schizophrenia or Alzheimer's depending on their family history.
Somebody else might want to do height, for example, if they're both shorter parents, they might want to have a taller kid.
To be clear, the traits always come after diseases.
But nevertheless, so what I'm saying is that there's this notion, there's this idea of a universal best biologic characteristic.
So I think there's a couple ways that I think about this.
There's the kind of on the ground what I'm seeing, which I can tell you about what I'm seeing.
And then I can tell you about the more of, we can talk about like more broadly how this plays out to where the fact that people are pretty memetic in what they pick.
I see couples, again, a diverse range of couples, to be clear.
This technology is going to get cheaper and cheaper.
Whole genome sequencing specifically, this is actually interesting.
The cost of reading all of somebody's DNA, it used to be about a billion dollars, one billion, right?
So the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s, it cost a billion dollars.
When I started the business about six years ago in 2020, it was about $1,000, right?
So, billion dollars to $1,000.
That's the kind of wonder of making things cheaper and making things more accessible.
So, I do think there's a point where this technology.
Anyone can actually access that's like really important to stay to say, and that's one of my missions is to say, Hey, this shouldn't only belong for people who have means, it should belong to everybody, right?
Because ultimately, every parent should have the right to reduce the suffering in their future child.
I would never argue against the desire to reduce suffering, I guess, but then you have to ask yourself if the reduction of suffering is the most virtuous thing you could do, why are the societies on this planet with the least suffering?
And, and, and in fact, these are the very people who wouldn't want to have a child, who wouldn't want to, but now because of the advent of more advanced screening, they are more comfortable having a child.
In that way, it's actually anti eugenic because the very people that, like the Nazis, for example, would target, right, people who are sick and kill and kill and murder.
So, the point, I don't want to bring the Nazis in because it's so emotionally fraught and they had all kinds of other sins.
But the goal of the eugenicists was the same.
It was let's reduce human suffering, let's optimize human ability, let's make this better by being thoughtful about how we reproduce.
And let's bring whatever science we have, they had much less than we have, to bear on this question.
And they would make, they did make the argument.
That Lothrop Stoddard, who was a Harvard professor and a brilliant, legit, brilliant guy historian, a lot about him was absolutely virtuous, I would say.
But he was also a wild eyed eugenicist because he was smart and he saw all this human suffering.
He's like, let's get rid of it.
We don't, it's nothing against people with Down syndrome, but we don't want more of them.
That was his argument because it will reduce human suffering.
And that's, it's hard for people to like, what does he mean by that?
You know, well, I agree.
If just because, I mean, I believe in a religion with suffering at the heart of it.
We've all had loved ones that have passed away, God forbid, from some disease, right?
I mentioned my cousin.
My grandmother's both died of cancer as well.
My uncle died of a heart attack, right?
When he was playing soccer with my dad, he was 45.
He collapsed and he died from a heart attack, which, by the way, is the number one killer in this country.
Just because somebody had cancer, just because somebody has heart disease, just because somebody has a condition, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, these conditions, again, they impact 200 million Americans.
So, this is the problem of our time, okay?
Does not make them any less of a person.
And so, the fundamental moral failure, it was a moral failure of eugenics, which was misconstruing these things, which idea that it's better to reduce suffering.
Better, that plain term of better doesn't come from the physical plane, it comes from something beyond.
And I just want to be totally clear so I don't seem self righteous, which I never want to be.
If I had had the opportunity when my children were in utero or before to say no to schizophrenia, no to the things that I really fear, schizophrenia is at the top of the list.
I think it's the cruelest thing.
But also CF, which is in my family, all these things.
But, um, anyway, I would just say, like, like all expectant parents, if I'd had a chance to reduce or eliminate the risk that my children would have these horrible diseases or conditions, I would have taken it.
But to be clear, we can have more philosophy and then say, but most people will reject the idea that there's this idea of conflating reduced suffering.
And so in a society, if you look at like, you know, people who are really high in their craft, right, like Alyssa Liu figure skating versus like an Einstein.
Uh, versus like an Elon versus like, uh, I don't know, like an artist like Da Vinci.
These people have very different sets of characteristics.
And the way nature works is human beings cannot defy nature, it's a seesaw.
So let me give an example.
Every single time, people always say this to me.
They say, oh, people will pick for IQ.
Let me put aside my moral argument.
Let me put aside my people won't actually always pick for IQ.
Let's actually assume that's the case.
Let's assume that's the case.
Let's assume that's the case.
Everyone will pick for IQ.
One interesting thing about picking for IQ genetically is that when you pick for IQ, and this is interesting because when you tell patients this, you can see how they refactor the decisions.
When you pick for IQ, you're actually picking against conscientiousness and extroversion genetically.
It's a seesaw, right?
It's almost like if you're playing like a FIFA My Player or something and you make somebody stronger, They have less agility, right?
So what happens is, and also you're making them, uh, genetically speaking, more likely to be autistic.
So these things are genetic.
You can't, you can't, um, you can't defy these things, right?
So these things go in opposite directions.
So you start selecting for one, it actually takes these things away.
So it starts becoming more of a, a, a value judgment.
So let's assume that to your point, um, there's a, a fashion of the day, right?
People are, um, you know, we've seen this with fashion.
We see this in tech.
We see this, you know, VC investors, they all allocate toward AI, you know, People where they end up saying wearing the same thing in Soho and New York, you know, how is this possible?
Yeah, it can, it can, it can absolutely over generations.
But actually, it's not, I think what's interesting here is.
It's, this is just a kind of a factoid, but, um, males, uh, babies, they tend to actually have the higher risk of, uh, basically dying at infancy.
So it ends up happening.
Like, if you look at the general population, it's about 50-50, but actually biology has it that it slightly errs toward males.
Um, but let's take the sex example.
Let's say it plays out that, um, you know, over many generations, people, let's say it wasn't outlawed or people still practice it anyways, and people start picking, uh, across sex.
It's actually the same phenomena.
Whereas the number of males, for example, come down, the number of females come down because of frequency-based selection.
Let's say you're in a population, just very simply, there's 70 males, 30 females.
The value of female in that population is much higher.
And basically, you can model this and show that each successive generation, there are certain sets of genetics that confer a slightly higher probability than of having a female.
And so that will actually propagate such that the genes that confer higher females would keep proliferating through until the population comes back to actually equanimity.
I mean, if human choice on questions of life and death and procreation at this granular level is self correcting and it's just inherently good and there are no downsides, then why did the biggest country in the world ban it?
It's actually an interesting point you make on sex because if you look at sex, it's a way of kind of playing out what happens when people pick across traits, right?
Because sex is not a disease, it's a choice.
Depending on what you want, people make different choices, right?
So it's actually a good kind of heuristic of how people will choose.
And on that point, actually, interestingly, sometimes we receive criticism from, for example, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine for saying that traits are not reproductive medicine.
Ultimately, the traits that people have been picking for the last 20 years.
The ability to choose the traits of your children with this level of precision, to get a certain number of embryos and say, I want the ones that don't have these conditions, that do have these traits, that has never been tried in human history, period.
But never with this level of precision, never has there been a menu where you can say, where you can identify qualities that you can't identify by smell or sight.
You can't know so much of what you've just described except through brand new science.
So I'm not even attacking that.
I'm merely asking a question that has to be asked, which is what are the downsides?
Hey, let's create, let's, I don't know, let's strengthen this virus.
Oh gosh, it's out of the lab intentionally or not.
It doesn't matter.
You infect the world with COVID.
That just happened five years ago.
So it's like we don't need to look far to see the unintended consequences of emerging science.
I'm not blaming anyone for it.
I think people have a terrible track record of foreseeing the consequences of their actions.
We know that in our own sex lives, don't we?
So I think we can just say they're.
It's important with something this powerful and potentially transformative to admit that there will be unintended consequences because that's 100% true always and think through what those consequences might be.
The outcome could have actually occurred even if you didn't necessarily do it.
It could have just happened that way.
But also, I would say that remember that there's gene editing, which is much further out.
It's the idea that you can actually take an embryo and make it whatever you want, basically, theoretically.
We can talk about that, which is very, very different.
So I think the concept of IVF clinics using this technology to give patients more information when they're already getting information on their embryos, now we expand the information.
We can help deal with the chronic disease crisis in the United States, the rare disease crisis as well, right?
You're arguing that it's a material change because you're saying that we're going to have less chronic disease, lower healthcare costs, less suffering, and that's all good.
So, in China, the scientist who was known for using gene editing to engineer the first babies, actually, Dr. He, what he did was he engineered the CCR5 gene.
I believe that's what the gene was called.
And he used CRISPR.
CRISPR is a bacterial immune response system.
It stands for, you know, clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats.
Basically refers to the, Set of palindromic DNA sequences in a bacteria.
So basically, what he did was he knocked out the CCR5 gene.
And what his justification for knocking out this specific gene was that.
It would make the children basically resistant to HIV/AIDS.
That was what he said.
This is really interesting for a lot of reasons.
One is because you didn't need gene editing to do that.
You could have actually just done that with existing genetic technology that was much cheaper, much less expensive.
But even putting that aside, getting to the fundamental thing that you're articulating, which is the unintended consequences, when you actually optimize for knocking out that specific gene, you're also opening up the susceptibility of that baby.
To other infectious disease.
Because what CCR5 does is it encodes for a specific immune receptor that basically, when destroyed, it makes it easier for other pathogens and to basically infect you.
In other words, there's this, there's this, the dangerous side of this to your point is that balance, which is in trying to do something good, what he deemed to be virtuous, if you will, it actually potentially could have had very severe consequences on the children's health.
And so I think that's a very real, tangible example that we've seen of some of the dangers And, you know, the balancing act that is nature.
The point is that the union with God ultimately is that is what life is about.
So you're not actually removing like this idea that like you can, like if there was a world where somehow parents could perfectly predict the baby's going to be like this and this and this, you can't physically, you can't encode the soul, is what I'm saying.
People way overshoot the idea that, oh, technology is inevitable.
Technology is not inevitable.
This is driving me crazy.
People make choices that drive technology forward.
Technology does not just happen.
It's been, you know, 20 years of really, really 15 years probably since, you know, some of these more advanced screenings had existed, but they've never actually been adopted, right?
So the idea that technology naturally progresses is it's a narrative created by Silicon Valley to try to justify raising more money.
And by the way, taking away more responsibility.
No, people make choices that drive technology forward.
We are also products of the time in which we live and the systems in which we operate.
So those things are equally true.
Again, I don't want to be boring, but I agree with you.
Our choices are important.
But there's also, again, a lack of respect for what we don't know, which makes me very uncomfortable in science.
And one of the reasons that I think that we should put a lot of doctors and scientists in prison as soon as we can is because they've really hurt us over the last, say, six years by not acknowledging what they don't know, overstating their own foresight about things that no human being can know.
Like there's no respect for the limits of the human mind.
I think generally speaking, the kind of history, at least like the modern history of like Silicon Valley, has gone from.
I think it had some idea of kind of virtue ethics, right?
Like, you know, Google back in the day was don't be evil.
If you say that today, you'll kind of be laughed at.
That was like their corporate motto.
You had Paul Graham had his, you know, hackers and painters, this idea of that that was kind of this like kind of beautiful early Silicon Valley spirit.
There was another case of Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address.
He ended it by saying, Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Basically, humility, have humility, open yourself up to the world, not just the natural world, but the divine world.
I think a lot of the Silicon Valley ideology has moved from sort of hackers and painters to maybe capitalists and politicians or the like.
In other words, it's moved into kind of a techno capitalism, this idea that technology is inevitable, this idea that Capitalism is inherently good.
Like it's inherently good if something grows.
I completely, and you see that with AI companies all the time.
They'll celebrate, oh, we hit 100 million AR in two days or something.
And it fundamentally mistakes speed and the rate at which something grows with value, right?
Cancer grows very quickly.
It's horrible.
And so I think there's this fundamental idea that, you know, this kind of, oh, grow, grow, grow, grow, that, you know, inherently the consequences, like, you know, Be damned, just grow.
So, that's an inescapable fact, and I think it's important to just like wear the mantle, like this is what we're doing, we're changing the nature of people, we're going to try to make them better.
So we know this is going to happen if the technology exists and it's widely available.
And so that puts you, and not just you, of course, this is hardly an attack, but it puts you in a position of having power over the course of humanity, over the evolution of humanity.
We're watching humanity change at the individual level.
And, like, that's a big burden, man.
That's a burden that only God bore before, like, 20 years ago.
But with respect, I think having watched, I mean, I was out in Silicon Valley in the 90s covering this and I knew the people, I still know some of them.
They were totally fixated on the upside in a good way.
They were like, this gives the Encyclopedia Britannica, you probably didn't know what that is.
But it's a physical encyclopedia that's set on your shelf and costs like thousands of dollars.
That's replaced by this CD ROM, you know, this collection of ones and zeros.
And like, it's incredible the amount of information.
People will be so much better informed.
And now you look 30 years later and that's like definitely upsides to technology, but also downsides.
I'm just worried about these things and you're smart and you've again for the third time thought about them to a surprising degree for a guy who's also trying to like build a company.
Proceed, one hopes, with this kind of science in a way that creates rather than destroys, then we need to keep in mind, as you said 20 times, the spiritual dimension.
I think the key thing that we have to do as a business and the more line that people can hold us to.
Is the nucleus has not, is not, and will never say that one embryo is better than another embryo.
We just won't.
Because again, we cannot mistake instrumental value with moral value.
They're different things.
And I think in deeply recognizing that and deeply realizing, by the way, the indeterministic nature of genetics as well.
As I said, heart disease, you can have a bad diet, you cannot exercise, lung cancer, even for things like schizophrenia, as I mentioned, strong genetic components, but you can take, you know, Weed actually has made people more schizophrenic, for example.
So there's an environmental component as well.
And so I think you have to have the deep humility in saying there's no better.
Um, but as a company, can you say there's anything you won't do?
As a, on behalf of Nucleus, I think, well, when you say anything we won't do, meaning like, I don't know, you just said biology has no moral reference because everything has a spirit.
I'm just wondering, is there like a line where like, we're not doing that, period, because it's wrong.
And then there is a moral character of the person giving out to that drug.
And in the social media case, too, talking about moral philosophy, optimizing for clicks and dopamine, you end up falling in a consequentialist framework, right?
Because there's no virtue.
You end up falling in a consequentialist framework and justifies the means to the point that everybody's scrolling and liking and clicking.